With time and perspective, you often realize one of two things about various episodes in your past. The first is that you were far better looking, far more likely to succeed, at far less risk than you believed at the time. The second is that you were riding the thin edge of disaster and didn't realize it at all, or chose to ignore it.
The incandescent months I spent as a Jaguar XJ6 Series III owner certainly fall into the latter category, something reinforced to me by a trip my son and I took yesterday.
It was the spring of 1996 and I was working a genuinely crummy job in the check-cashing industry, making something like twenty-two grand a year. My wife wasn't doing any better as a glorified babysitter at a suburban preschool. As part of a rudimentary financial discipline, I entered every single dollar I spent into my Franklin Planner. A review of my planner pages is both banal and hugely depressing; there are a lot of $3.75 dinners in there.
Around that time, my step-great-grandmother broke her hip in her Cherry Hill, NJ apartment and had to come live near us in Ohio. I did a lot of physical labor to get her moved and helped out a bit once she was here. In acknowledgement of that, and in light of the coldly depressing fact that assisted living would bankrupt her in any circumstances, she gave me a few thousand bucks to spend as I liked. Did the same for my mother, too.
Mom bought herself a Yamaha Clavinova, but I had different ideas. The fellow with whom we shared a duplex had a Series II Jag XJ6 in claret red. Gorgeous car. Wanted to sell it to me. Four grand would take it. Some Jag friends on USENET suggested that I call Bill Welsh, who owned the country's best-known Jaguar parts wholesaler. I'll quote an old article of mine briefly here:
As Welsh and I walked through the labyrinthine old brick buildings which comprised his loosely assembled enterprise, we kept coming upon Series III XJ6es, parked nose-first against a wall under a stack of boxes or peeking out from beneath rotting old car covers... Although I was smitten by a grey base XJ6 with red leather interior, my favorite of Welsh’s cat herd was an ’85 Vanden Plas in champagne with cream interior. It was $3995... . In my ownership, it was dead reliable, running like a top and fabulous on the freeway at eighty miles per hour. Even the tape deck worked. Hell, the air conditioning blew cool. Ish... The dual fuel tanks were a joy to fill through their top-mounted, real chrome-and-metal caps. On the fly, a rectangular button changed tanks and caused the fuel gauge to swing to the appropriate reading for the selected tanks. It was positively Supermarine, old boy... . I lost everything I owned in the world through a series of personal reversals. The Jag was sold, at a loss, for cash by my wife while I was far away from home. She was able to keep just one thing from the deal. Our Vanden Plas had come with a spare wheel. No tire was mounted. When the car sold, the buyer didn’t care about it. That wheel sits in my garage now, next to my green Audi S5, as a reminder: Nothing is permanent, not joy, not sorrow.
When I wrote that original piece, my son wasn't even a toddler and he still bore all the signs of extremely premature birth. It seems like a long time ago. He is more than five feet tall, way over a hundred pounds now, growing all the time. Friday night he asked me if there was a way he could ride his bike somewhere and we could visit a museum or two, all within a day's drive. It was an odd request but I had the answer: we'd go to Pittsburgh, ride The Wheel Mill, and see a few of the Carnegie museums.
The drive was three and a half easy hours out via Accord, his bike in the trunk and mine at home where it will stay until my broken thumb resolves completely. We did the Wheel Mill first, because it's always safer to ride when you're feeling fresh. They have a "skinny", which is a four-inch-wide board that runs about twelve feet across a foam pit. Personally, I think this is immensely stupid. Most MTB parks have low skinnys where coming off the board means you "fall" six inches to the ground, and some have "high skinnys" where falling off could result in genuine injury.
The Wheel Mill's skinny is ostensibly safer because you fall into foam, but it's very easy to get hurt by the sides of the foam pit, particularly the end wall. I suppose the point is to feel like you're high off the ground without having all of the risk. John and I watched a couple of adult riders come off it in less-than-graceful fashion. One of them got pretty banged up by his own bike during the fall. Regardless, he wanted to try it.
It took five falls, each one of which caused me no shortage of anguish, before he got it down. The fifth time he did what I'd been worried about, running his front wheel into the end of the box and going head-over-heels onto the wooden platform past it, but he popped right up and was no worse for wear. After that it was trivial for him to accomplish. His balance is truly extraordinary, particularly when you consider his parents.
So he started riding it faster, and faster still. A minor crowd started to gather, mostly teenagers. They'd attempt to follow him and fall off in the process. A lot of good-natured ribbing, and some less-than-good-natured ribbing, ensued. Finally one of the truly outstanding locals showed up, a twentysomething whom I'd seen backflip a box jump earlier that day. He cut in front of John, made it across the skinny, and bunnyhopped two feet into the air to finish, launching off the end of the narrow board onto the platform.
There was some general consternation afterwards. It takes a bit of talent, more than a bit really, to pull a big hop with no wavering in the process. The rider then gave my son a smirk and a nod of the head -- okay, kid, you can ride a bit, but you have a long way to go. There was a bit of conversation among the observers. John's face scrunched up, like he might cry, and he rode away into the next room. When he came back, he was pedaling flat out. Much faster than the adult rider, fast enough to freeze me in my tracks. As he approached the skinny I double-clicked my phone to bring the camera up, because I had an idea what would happen next. I didn't move quite fast enough, but:
And he skidded to a halt in front of the adult. Took his helmet off. And stared this grown man down until the fellow surrendered a single long peal of laughter. "You know what," John said to me, "I'm ready to leave now." And in his eyes I saw the closest thing I have ever witnessed to a mirror in another human being.
All my life, or at least since I started middle school just a bit more than two years younger than every other boy in the classroom, I have been driven by an unconquerable desire to confront force with force, anger with anger, violence with violence. I won't accept intimidation, bullying, or confrontation. The problem for me is that sometimes I respond to a situation as if I were still a twelve-year-old in high school surrounded by fourteen-year-old Ohio football players, and in my current physical iteration it can come across as exceptionally unpleasant, even frightening to some. (I don't know about that, really; as Drake once said about Pusha T, I'm an approachable dude, not Richard Marcinko or Larry Holmes. But I've heard it from others.)
In my son's mind, that adult rider wasn't someone trying to join the party and inspire him; he was a challenger, attempting to humiliate him. A conversation we had after the fact confirmed that. I had to chuckle. Imagine being a pre-pubescent child and considering a highly skilled grownup to be fair game. But John has Ahab's willingness to punch up, so to speak:
He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other.
"Can I have a KitKat bar, though? 'Cause I'm hungry."
"After hopping the skinny, you can have twenty of them," I replied. "Be a fat boy on a skinny board, why dontcha." And we laughed.
The Carnegie Science Museum, our first stop, was a waste of time. It was filled with screaming children tugging and pulling at "experiential interactions". John and I each challenged an industrial robot to a free throw contest. We each sank our single shots, but the robot went 1 for 2, so after I swooshed the hoop I jokingly flipped it off and yelled at it to get you-know-what-ed, causing some parental consternation in our immediate vicinity.
"I don't see how anybody could learn anything here," John noted. The most popular exhibit was on the fifth floor; two children could sit down on cushions as hard as they could to make flatuence noises, under a giant sign that said "WHY DO WE FART?" The line for that was fifty kids long. We decamped for the Natural History Museum, a place I haven't seen since I was fifteen years old.
Thankfully, it was almost empty and filled with thoughtful displays. "When I was a kid," I noted, "they posed the T-Rex with his tail on the ground and his head twenty feet in the air."
"That sounds stupid."
"It was, but we didn't know it at the time." My son was mildly amused by my very good recollection of dinosaur facts and figures, as well as my ability to identify every skeleton at a distance. "We didn't have downhill mountain biking when I was a kid. There was nothing to do but program in Atari Basic and learn dinosaur trivia." I did mis-identify an Edaphosaurus as a Dimetrodon; we really do decline as we age.
Looking at routes to drive home, I elected to skip the freeways and drive through Steubenville, home of Welsh Enterprises and the adjacent restaurant once owned by Welsh and known as "Jaggin' Around". Welsh is still in business, operated by Dave Welsh, the son of the fellow who sold me that Vanden Plas in 1996, but the restaurant is now Froelich's Classic Corner. A Jaguar XK-120 etched into the lobby glass is the last of what used to be many Jaguar-themed decorations.
"Text your mother a picture of the restaurant, without any car pictures in view," I told John, "and see if she recognizes it." To my astonishment, she immediately responded in the affirmative, and when she did I felt something close to sorrow. Twenty-six years ago, we thought nothing of spending every dime we had on a used Jaguar. It never let us down, which was good because we rarely had three figures in our bank account with which to fix it. We were brave, back then. Our marriage, too, seemed invulnerable. Hadn't we made it through school together? And weren't we satisfied with our "childfree", low-wage life afterwards, taking sweetness and joy where we could find it in the homeopathic doses permitted by poverty?
We didn't know it then, but we were at least rich in time. We had time to make mistakes, to start over again, to change the people and things that mattered most to us. And we took that time. Used it, to become who we each are today. It's always possible to overreach a bit; in the long run, I couldn't afford that Vanden Plas and Welsh Enterprises couldn't afford to run a Jaguar-themed restaurant. We're all older, sadder, and wiser now. But I have the privilege of stewarding a son who considers it his job to confront the whole world on equal terms.
One of my commenters on Hagerty this week went off on some Boomer-ish rant about:
Why do so many people feel like they owe their children anything other than love, a roof over their heads, food on the table, and guidance?!?! No young kid needs an expensive car, shoes, clothes, vacations, etc, etc, etc…I took better care of my things, because I worked hard for them, and earned them myself, and that hard work/great work ethic, and being taught to save and live below my means, enabled my wife and I to help our kid go to college (helped, not fully paid), and retire and move south at 45. Teach your children to fish, instead of giving them a fish…
There were so many things I wanted to say in response, most of them along the lines of: Gosh, gee, I'm so proud of you for living in an era where people paid fifty grand for homes in California, had every opportunity known to man from 'becoming a Honda dealer at basically zero cost' to 'join Intel when they were handing out stock'. Oh, and I think it was so cool that you sold this country wholesale to eighty million 'new Americans' to keep your investments escalating while your grandchildren had to beg for work at Starbucks. You really pulled yourself up by your bootstraps! Oh, and you retired at 45! That's great!. But I figured it was best to leave the anti-Woodstock-generation rants to Vox Day, who does them better.
Still, I couldn't help but be a bit flummoxed by the commenter's mentality. Imagine being so wealthy you can retire at 45, and wanting to ration the amount of help and support you give your children. What kind of raw narcissism does that take? What kind of person enjoys the extraordinary opportunities that make such a thing possible and then decides that they need to keep most of it to themselves? It's one thing to see that kind of navel-gazing self-admiration in Millennial autowriters; even the fattest and dumbest of them will probably grow out of it eventually. But to see it in seventy-year-olds? Come on -- quit jaggin' around!
* * *
For Hagerty, I wrote about selling my 993. Readers of Riverside Green with a genuine interest in the car should contact me; I'll sell it to you for perhaps twenty grand less than what it will fetch at auction.
For the Washington Examiner, I reviewed the new book from The Last Psychiatrist.
I remember this piece. The boomer in question spits in the face of both God and Darwin. I'd rather be cleaning toilets in my dotage than let my children have to do it.