When love drove a '73 Maverick

It was always about the car.

For suburban and rural teenagers, the high school focus was always on the car. Who had a car, who could get a car, what kind of car. While there are area codes where a new Something would show up in a driveway on a 16th birthday slathered in a big red bow, that was not the area I grew up in.

No, we drove, if at all, the beat-up station wagons, fishbowl Pacers, the rusty Pintos, the Darts and Dusters, and Parisiennes as big as boats. Back seats big enough for five kids, unless you were squished around monstrous home speakers wired to the 8-track – and you often were. You knew if a kid had the car that day – he'd slouch down the hall jingling the keys, and the lucky friends of the driver knew they would be spared fries with gravy dished up by a cafeteria lady in a hairnet.

There were only a handful of teens with their own cars. And yes, the girls were as shallow as we're often made out to be. A car meant freedom, and after years of walking everywhere in a transit-challenged town, the thought of being borne to a movie or a mall on a date, in a car, was enough to overlook a thousand small details, like if you actually liked the guy or had anything in common with him.

Of course, it was a two-way street: a lad with his own ride could consistently punch above his dating weight. I'm guessing that fact went a fair way to mitigating the social nastiness of teenagers. Those of us with say, braces and glasses, would be stuck watching our equally dorky – but driving – male counterpart sail by with the prom queen in the front seat. Life strives for balance in its own way.

Hottest car in my school back in the late '70s? A red 1965 Mustang. Hands down. Its owner was a mystery to us. Dan was in a couple of my classes over the years, but he never spoke. I discovered much later he worked at a supermarket upwards of 30 hours a week to support that car. He spent the rest of his time in the auto shop, and maybe he spoke in there, but nobody I knew ever knew him. He would drive into the parking lot in the morning, and be gone after class in a cloud of throaty Mustang goodness. The girls would try – lord how they'd try – to get to that boy, but the car was his love and she took everything he had.

Valentine's Day in high school always brought its own special horror. I don't know if they still do it but back in the day, they would institute a cruel punishment of having roses delivered to people (usually girls) in their homerooms. The roses were sent by others – you went to a table manned by two very popular girls who would take your dollar, let you write a note, and have it delivered to the Dearly Beloved on the appropriate day. This social culling was usually camouflaged as a fund raiser, but we all knew what it really was: a reinforcement of the pecking order.

You had options. You could pretend you didn't care. But when the knock came on the door, every girl held her breath like Susan Lucci at an awards show until the last rose was distributed. You could send one to yourself, but the popular girls in charge of the roses would know. Ditto if you had your friend send you one. Or, you could do what most of us did: wait every year to see if someone like Dan, he with no apparent girlfriend and the best car in the world, would somehow, for some reason, decide to make his only statement of the year by sending you a rose. It was so Hollywood it couldn't possibly happen, and it never did.

As my high school years drew to a close, I was actually dating a guy when Valentine's Day rolled around. While that should have raised me above the fray of tensing during the Homeroom Rose Distribution, Allan lived a couple of towns away, and I knew I still wouldn't be squealing in delight or feigning surprise as my name was called. He drove a rusty old van, and it was busted (for good this time) and while my lips said "of course it doesn't matter," my heart was aching just once, only once, for this stupid validation of romantic acceptance in front of my peers. High school is not for the meek.

Leaving school as another Valentine's Day mercifully drew to a close, my friend started giggling. I looked up. Allan was standing in the cold in front of his mother's car, clutching a dozen roses.

We used to make fun of his mother's car. It was a 1973 Ford Maverick, a two-door car that was marketed as cheap 'n' cheerful, in direct contrast to its testosterone-laden older brother, the Mustang. It was a Mom Car, and the ghastly avocado green colour (also popular with kitchen appliances that year) didn't endear it too much to any Mom's offspring.

I'm sure Dan probably drove by without looking up, and very few people saw me get my roses. And none of it mattered, except that a lovely boy had gone out of his way to get there, and his understanding mother, a teacher, was somehow getting home another way that day.

Maybe it wasn't about the car after all.

Lorraine Sommerfeld appears Thursdays on Wheels.ca. www.lorraineonline.ca