I bought an old car, even older than the 1977 911 Targa.  It’s a 1969 912 Targa.  The engine is a naturally aspirated four cylinder beast that could be used to power a large lawn mower.  It has power nothing.  Even the windows have cranks. And, oh yeah, it’s got little windwings you can push open for ventilation.  The car came with two keys.  Not a key and a spare key, but a key for the door locks and a separate key for the ignition.  I’ve had it for a week, and still cannot find the air conditioner, which apparently never got put into the car.  There is no power assist with the steering or the brakes.  I actually have to think about turning and stopping before I turn or stop.  And I feel the road through my hands and feet as I drive.  Not the artificial electronically intelligent feelings I get in todays cars, but real, linear, tactile feelings.

The steering wheel is huge by today’s sports car standards, and I must really turn it to make a tight right turn.  There is no traction control or antilock braking.  There is a four speed manual transmission.  The car has carburetors, pre-millennial devices that squirt fuel and air into the engine cylinders, that apparently need to be adjusted frequently and give off the distinct odor of gasoline, an odor that has been eradicated for the most part by technological advances in gas pumps and fuel injection systems.

The Targa top comes off by hand.  There is no button to push on the dash to make it happen.  The gauges are somewhat imprecise devices, designed to have no significant digits and be generally correct, not absolutely right.  They also take up a lot of space because there is no multi-function display to save real estate on the dash.  The aftermarket radio which was installed about 20 years ago is the only digital device in an otherwise analog car.  It is so  far away it is almost out of my reach.  And forget about reading what the buttons say.  The only navigational aid is the small map that may be in the glove box or the Thomas Guide that may be under the seat.  This car will never be part of the Internet of Things.  The car does not have a single computer chip, as the car, despite its state of the art engineering in 1969, was built before computer chips were invented.

It was very disconcerting when I sat in it to drive it the first time.  I felt the 50 mile drive home would be daunting on many levels.  I had to take the freeway.  I was uncertain about the car’s mechanical reliability.  I had nothing to occupy my mind while I was driving.  I had no cell phone to dial or speak on.  I had no text to read.  I had no radio telling me which artist was singing which song.

The first part of the drive was stressful.  I left the gas station intending to putter around the neighborhood for a few miles before I got on the freeway.  I felt that way for a quarter mile.  Then I said the hell with it  and entered the freeway onramp.  It was a little nerve wracking but I did it anyway.  Interestingly enough, by about halfway home I was feeling better.  The car was able to attain freeway speeds, though I knew better than to try to do quick lane changes or fight for position in the line of cars.  I lost the urge to dial the cell phone.  I lost the need to know who was singing while the song was playing.  Hell, I even lost the urge to change the radio station, which was playing some form of modern rock that was out of place in my head.  Of course, I had no idea how to change the station anyway.  Just adjusting the volumne took work.  I liked the way I listened to the wind and focused on the various aspects of driving the car.  When to shift.  When to brake.  How to avoid having to come to a complete stop.  By the time I got home, I was hooked on driving, I mean really driving, this car.  It was fun.  I felt alive.  I felt I added to the experience more than the car did.  I felt connected to it in a way I have never felt connected to a more modern car.  Even though I was still leery about its mechanical reliability, driving it was …..  relaxing and fun.

Speaking of mechanical reliability, I was pretty pleased with the car during my ride home.  Everything but the clock seemed to work pretty well.  Of course, reality hit about 15 minutes after I parked the car in the driveway.  That’s when I noticed the oil leak.

5/20/16

Forgive me Ferdinand, Ferry and all other Porsche Aficionados……………

I was hurting.  And it took quite some tome to get back to the place best described in a Robert Earl Keen lyric:  Feels So Good Feelin’ Good Again.…

Losing the 1977 Targa was the cause of my pain.  I began calling it Porsche Pain (I love alliterations as much as I love puns)  to myself, even though that did not connote the depth of my feelings of loss. So after the fire I went about trying to restore myself from my current glass is cracked outlook on life to my normal glass is half empty outlook on life.  I tried all my usual stuff when I needed to reset my equilibrium.  Nothing worked.

I tried talking to friends and family.  First I talked to Pam.  She was wonderful and sympathetic for about the first 50 times we talked about it.  She was there for me, but could not quite understand what was taking me so long to get over it.  I mean, she has gone thru childbirth twice and understands real, deep and meaningful pain.  So this event did not move the needle on her Richter scale.

My Porsche friends were not a lot better at helping me.  Sure, they were sympathetic and concerned….of course, their concern was mainly for the Porsche.  That is only a slight exaggeration.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, Pam and I went to a BBQ with Porsche friends the night of the fire.  We had a great time and told lots of stories.  Most of the ones they told related to natural disasters, like hurricanes, floods and fires, especially fires.  I guess they were trying to help by helping me by applying the Misery Loves Company idiom.  That didn’t work either.

I tried talking to friends and coworkers.  Though they were all sympathetic, those conversations did not do the trick.  I did notice, though, that lot’s of people laughed when we talked about the fire.  They were not trying to be mean, but…..The best laugh I got was from my dentist.  I was in the chair when he walked in and said, “Hi Harry.”  Then he doubled over in a fit of lughter.  He could not stop laughing for several minutes.  He was not being mean and was really apologetic.  I went to high school with my dentist and have known him for quite some time and Pam had been in his office the week before so he knew the whole story.  Oh well.

Then I turned to music, my usual mood lifter.  That did not work either, because I found myself listening to an assortment of Country Music songs that expressed pain.  Here is a small sample of what I was drawn to:

• Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s Just a Wave, Not the Water where one lyric goes like this:  I Would Have Killed Myself But It Made No Sense Committing Suicide In Self Defense
• Chris Kristofferson’s Me & Bobby McGee, where one lyric goes like this:  Well I’d Trade All My Tomorrows For A Single Yesterday
• Robert Earl Keen’s Travelin’ Light, where one lyric goes like this:  …Feeling Blue Travelin’ Light With A Hole In Your Soul Where The Wind Blows Through

Music was efinitely not working.  Porsche Pain, as poor a label as it was, still existed.  If I could just get over it………

Yesterday, out of the blue one of my coworkers walks up and practically busts a gut laughing.  I just looked at him as if to say WTF?  I was not offended by his outburst.  I am not a sensitive guy, so there was no reason to take it personally, even though I knew his outburst was related to me.  I just had to wait it out and hear what was making him laugh.  I did brace myself, though, as he is as much of a loose canon as I am.  When he stopped laughing, he spoke three words:  Porsche Partum Depression.

It was all I needed to hear.  Three words that were right on so many levels.  They had Ps.  They had alliteration.  They formed a pun.  They were insensitive.  Better yet, they were politically incorrect.  They conveyed my pain entirely.  Not superficially, like Porsche Pain.  As far as I was concerned they were just perfect.  I laughed out loud.  Really laughed at my experience for the first time.  That was all I needed to move on.

So as I sit here and write this I am feeling so good at feeling good again.

5/14/16

It’s been six weeks since the fire.  I have been mourning the loss of the 1977 Targa for the entire time.  In addition, I have been half heartedly looking for a replacement car.  Well that is not exactly true.  My heart has been fully committed to looking for a replacement, but Pam’s hasn’t.  Pam has a couple of reasons for her reticence.  First, I did fail miserably on the first one, even though it could have happened to anyone.  Second, she says we need a place to put it, like a garage……and we do not have a functional one at the moment.

Before the firemen left on the day the 1977 Targa burned, I asked the firemen if they thought the garage was damaged enough to need to be rebuilt.  They said they didn’t think so.  I was happy to hear that.  The next day John and Kris drove back from Mammoth and came over.  Ostensibly to see the burned car, but I think he just wanted to show us the ridiculously large bruise on his arm as a result of his broken arm/shoulder from his skiing accident.  In either case, Kris said we should report the fire to our insurance company.  I told her that I didn’t think I needed to, and then we changed the subject back to John’s arm.

The next week Pam asked me to check if the electricity worked in the garage.  I thought it would, but I was not sure.  The light fixture had been destroyed in the fire nd the wiring was just dangling from the ceiling.  But I thought the circuit could still work.  Well, it didn’t.  This posed a problem.  The contractor who remodeled our house about 15 years ago put in a new electical panel, but never identified which breakers were attached to which circuits, so I had no idea which one related to the garage.  That didn’t matter, as none of them looked thrown anyway.  This did get me thinking, though.  If I needed an electician, maybe, just maybe, I should report this to the insurance company.  So I did.  Let me restate that and thank Kris at the same time.  Thankfully, I did.  The adjuster came out and said I need to do a lot of work on the garage.  All the beams I thought had a little bit of charring needed replacing, he said.  Then he went on to say that given the age of the garage, it was built in the 1930’s, that once they started redoing the beams there would be a lot of code upgrades required.  So now we are restoring the garage, which is why it is not functional now, and will not be for three to four months.

My first task was to pick a contractor.  I talked to one recommended by the insurance company, but, as luck (?) would have it, one of my neighbors was rebuilding a garage after an electical fire, so i met with his contactor and decided to use his contractor because he was dealing with the vagaries of building something in Beverly Hills, which is not for the faint of heart.  At he moment, the time to restore the garage just keeps lengthening, as we get more information about the garage and more and more issues appear.  It started with an engineer identifying all the ode upgrades required.   I have to thank Kris again and again.  If I had not dealt with this properly and tried to sell my house without doing so, I can only imaging how much of a haircut on price I would have had to take.

So Pam is 100% right.  I have no place to put another car.

4/2/16 Part 2

…. As I walked to the garage, I realized something was very wrong.  The Targa was on fire!  I freaked out, essentially not believing what I was seeing.  I knew enough not to put water on the fire, so I ran inside and called 911.  One day I would like to hear a tape of that call, as I am sure I sounded pretty stressed.  While I was waiting, I ran inside and got Pam’s keys and put her car back on the street.  When that was done, I looked back up the driveway.  The flames and smoke were clearly visible from the street.  At that point, I knew the car was gone, and I began to fear the garage would go too.  So after waiting at least 2 minutes from my first 911 call, I called again.

About a minute later the fire engines could be seen up the block.

They parked and quickly set up operations.  My neighbors all came out to see what was causing the commotion.  I have never experienced anything like it.  On one hand I was exstatic that the firemen were saving my garage, that no other structures were envolved (like my house) and no one was hurt.  On the other hand I felt an incredible sense of loss.

Soon Pam came walking up the street with Jake, our golden retriever.  She could not believe the commotion on the street, and could not believe what had happened.  I had a hard time believing it, too.  One minute I had a great project car, the next I had a project too far.

Once the fire was out, the reality of the situation began to sink in.  I was pretty devastated.  Of course I blamed myself and began second guessing just about everything.  I called Mark and expressed my feelings, and he reminded me that new cars and completely restored cars burn.  To drive his point home, he sent me a video taken two days earlier of a 911 Turbo bursting into flames at the New York Auto Show.  Of course, there were many people with fire extinguishers on hand to put that one out.

A little later I called my friend John, who was with his wife Kristin in Mammoth for the weekend.  I actually face timed him and was busy showing him pictures of the car, the garage, the mess.  Of course the phone was pointed at the computer screen so he could see the carnage (no pun intended).  After he expressed the appropriate level of concern and amazement, he told me to turn the phone around and take a look at him and his surroundings.  I did.  Oops.  There I was going on about the car not even realizing he was waiting for an x-ray at the Mammoth Hospital after suffering a shoulder injury while skiing.  I was so consumed by the car fire, I had not even looked at him before showing him the pictures.  Then I felt even worse.

That night Pam and I had plans to have a BBQ with several friends who are avid Porsche owners and collectors.  Pam, who was not pleased with anything about this, quipped, “Do we have to go?  I don’t want to go to another Porsche BBQ today!”  That did not make me feel any better, either.

4/2/16 Part 1

The day started out pleasantly enough.  I went to the market, as I always do early Saturday morning because no one else is there at that time.  I saw one or two regular shoppers and was checked out by my favorite checker, Jeanette, who actually shares the day and month of my birthday.  After unpacking, I went to Pilates for a workout and then went home and ate.  At that point, I spoke with Mark and he suggested I drive the 1977 Targa to his house.  I did.

The ride there was pretty uneventful.  I put putted my way into the valley, being routinely passed by every Prius in the city.  At Mark’s, we just looked over the car.  He showed me some aspects of the car, focusing on how to lay the trunk carpet back in the right order.  After some time there, I drove back to the city.

Going home I was passed by the rest of the Prii in the city, or at least that is how it felt.  I was just taking it easy, enjoying the day.  I stopped in front of my house and called Pam to see if she would move her car.  She didn’t answer so I got out of the car and went inside.  As her car was in the driveway, I got her keys and put her car on the street.  I then walked up the driveway and opened the gate and the garage door.  Then I put the 1977 Targa into the garage.  I went back to the street and put Pam’s car back in the driveway, and then I went inside.  While inside, I realized I still had my sunglasses on, and I couldn’t remember where I left my regular glasses.  I thought I might have left them in the 1977 Targa, so I walked back out to the garage…….