for sale: small car, used condition

There's a story that was apparently written by Hemingway, on a napkin. It's got six words.

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

I think this is quite wonderful. I don't much mind whether Hemingway wrote it or not. People always say a picture paints a thousand words. I'm going to say that for me a few words, and the object they describe, reveal a thousand pictures. That's cute isn't it.

My parents sold my car. A little kia rio, watermelon red, with a ding on the back bumper and a grey plastic dash, my car. Well, technically it's their car. But since I was eighteen I've taken care of him and paid the expenses. I think of it like a temporary adoption. I called him Timothy.

When I left Australia, something like nine months ago, I knew this sale might be on the cards. It didn't bother me in the slightest. It's just a car. It's just a thing, stuff, metal and plastic and malfunctioning gears. But then he was officially sold. Too late I realised I didn't want him to go. Cue Joni Mitchell. Suddenly, all the pictures came beating down on me like hot rain in summer and I didn't want my first car ever to be gone.

I am unlikely to see Timothy again. I hope I don't. Watching him cruise wide Brissy streets without his green P plates would be self-punishment. What I will see -- what I've been seeing in reels this week as I've thought about it -- are the stories that the object tells. Memories of the grains of sand in the worn carpet and the loose leaves in the boot. The tattered jumper leads, so frequently used. So frequently.

This is not an eulogy. Timothy lives on. This is self-indulgent nostalgia.
Ode to Timothy, my first car.

And oh, firsts are given great meaning. The first anything always has a bit of magic, the kind where suddenly you come to understand more than you did before. You know what I'm talking about. If it's the first-and-only, the first-of-many, or the just-kidding-it's-not-actually-my-first kind of first, it's still allowed to have the golden glow. It's supposed to stand out in your memory, that first time.

When I think about that beaten machine what occurs to me is a quality of sunlight that I've only found in the Australian summer. It's cloudy like fresh apple juice. The feeling of being able to move about in that smooth light until I decide to stop. To go fast. I think of driving four hours up the Bruce highway every weekend to see a boy, stopping at the Matilda outside Gympie for petrol and juice. The five-lane dash to the Gold Coast. Straddie camping by the water. Picnics in the boot. Back and forth across the rolling green country to Byron Bay. Lying backwards in the boot with my legs up over the seat and seeing the stars through the back windscreen. Loud, bad music. Learning Brisbane city slowly, lost in the early hours of the morning.

Alright maybe I'm over-sentimentalising it because I'm a tiny bit homesick. And sick for the sun. I've omitted a lot of stuck-in-traffic and stalling-for-no-reason and the steering wheel shaking when I hit one hundred ks from that dappled montage. But hell, maybe it deserves the sentimentality. The object has gone. Hemingway's baby shoes sold, which is a bit morbid really. But I don't need the car. I don't need the car. I don't need the car stop saying I do.

But actually, actually, I don't need the car. You've waded through the nostalgia, and here comes the revelation. If I've learnt anything in the last year it's that actually stuff accumulates at an absurd rate so there's no need to worry when you don't have any. And there's only so much stuff you can plausibly have anyway. Sure I will need another car, but I don't need to keep my old one in the back yard and watch it decay in an attempt to preserve the memories. Ah.

Actually, people who know about this memories thing, you know, like brain science people, say that although the capacity of our memories is theoretically limited, it's impossible to actually use up all the space. You simply can't accumulate enough memories in your lifetime to fill your hard drive. Well. Ain't that somethin'?

So even without my car, especially without my car, I'm disgustingly nostalgic for the good times it represents. My first car and the golden glow. In light of that, let me just sit and consider some more of these endless sappy memories of sunny-faced Australians and drive-ins and long, long, straight country highways.