She’s just a car, and of course, she’s not just a car. She’s the key to freedom and exhilaration, good times and good company on the wide open road. Who needs a home when you’ve got a jaunty red convertible?
The first car I bought was a cheap and jaunty red CitiGolf. Zero frills, but plenty of thrills. It had nothing as lavish as power steering nor as necessary as ABS or airbags. Air-con was achieved by manually lowering the driver’s window. I named her Sheila.
Sheila brought me freedom and movement and new friendships. Sheila meant I could leave home. Suddenly my horizons were endless. I could go to faraway places, beyond the claustrophobic, dull and boring Pretoria suburbs of my youth. I could unearth a world I could not reach in my student days on a bicycle. I met new people and saw new things.
It was a beautiful change. A step up from nesting at home and relying on my parents to get anywhere, to being able to explore – and quite often get lost – all on my own.
That was 19 years ago. How things have changed.
Several cars later, I drive a jaunty red convertible, called Spanky Miranda. I spend a lot of time in my car, quite aside from the daily work commute, which is an even 100km round trip.
Each weekend I drop the roof and get on the open road. Up Clarence Drive to Rooiels and through to Pringle Bay, the black tar twists through tight curves with the deep blue ocean on one side, and the craggy cliffs on the other. I cruise through to Pearly Beach and get such a thrill as I open up the gas and thunder down the freeway that I often catch myself smiling in the rear view mirror, like a lovesick fool.
That’s a pretty apt description of how I feel, because I know from here, there’s a return journey through sweeping golden fields punctuated with the idly spinning sentinels of Caledon’s wind farms. It’s ridiculously pretty. There are few things I love more than cruising in Spanky Miranda and taking in this landscape as it whizzes by.
I feel more at ease and more at home in my car than I do in my actual home. I would rather spend eight hours on the road in my car than sitting at home. You could argue that I only sleep at home, and that really I live in my car.
I come alive and feel all the best warm and fuzzy feelings that the life has to offer: love, joy, exhilaration, happiness, contentedness, and when I am not dealing with the morning traffic, sometimes even serenity. My soul feels at peace. Does that not sound like home to you? Like heaven?
Wait. There’s more. The only thing that could possibly make being in my car feel even more like home is when I share the ride. I am the master of spontaneous road trips, and few Saturday mornings go by where I don’t drop an early-morning Whatsapp to Maru, Dot, Sarah, Grethe or Natalie and say simply “Road trip.”
We take long drives along the coast out to Scarborough, Langebaan or Hermanus with the wind cooling our sun-warmed skin, talking about life, work, love, family, food, music, politics, pets, children, projects, intimate moments, relationships, and who said what in the latest social media scandal. We connect. We share. We explore. We love. Is that not the very definition of home?
Conversely, I don’t think I have had a visitor at my little flat in the last three years. Not one. It’s just not a thing I ever feel like doing. When I am at the flat, I am sedentary. Silent. Like I am in stasis, waiting for life to happen. It’s not home. Not by a long shot. It’s merely where I put my head down and do my laundry.
Real life means getting behind the wheel, putting the roof down and with a rising sense of wonder and excitement in my heart, turning to a friend and asking, “Right. Where shall we go today?”
That’s reality. That’s home, right there.
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