Your First Car

What do you remember about your first car?

What do I remember about my first car?

I can still smell its musty black interior.

My big sister, Betsy, passed it down to me a few weeks after my high school graduation. It wasn't a gift exactly, but at $100, it was...a gift. The year was 1978. My Chevy Impala was twelve years old. Family sedans of the 1960s were large enough to host a volleyball game if the seats were removed. The long bench seat in the front could seat four, no kidding. If it had had a V8 in it, I probably would have gotten into more trouble than I did. A small straight-six was more than I needed. It was gifted to me as I was moving from the small town of Bally, PA, down to live with Betsy and my brother-in-law, John. They had only been married for about two years and had settled in John's hometown of Horsham, PA. His father was a plasterer who was in need of a mud man.

The summer of '78 was about mixing and hauling buckets of scratch coat, which "Pappy" would apply as the first coat before the actual plaster was applied and worked to a fine sheen. I had no interest in college. I recall saying to my father that I was fine with laboring. "Okay, go labor!" was his response.

The summer of '78 was also about the late afternoon drives from Horsham to Pottstown to visit my sister, Laurie. In late June of that summer Laurie was in an accident that would eventually result in her passing in early September. She fell asleep at the wheel and hit a tree about a mile and a half from our home. That June I would drive to see her after work before she slipped into a coma. With each visit, I witnessed that slipping. Those trips in the heat of the late afternoon stick in my memory. I think they remain because of the experience of dreading the decline that I was seeing with each visit. She was only twenty.

—R. R. Watt