Franklyn

            The day I turned sixteen I expected a fun new car out in the drive way with a giant bow on it. I got no such wonderful surprise when I woke up on that March morning. Unfortunately.  Very Unfortunately. I drove my sisters car around that day. This was the car that we had both learned on, but she put it through a lot more than I ever did. See my sister had a habit of parking this car. Into stationary objects. She and her friends put a lot of wear and tear on that old Toyota Rav 4.

            Now you see a Rav 4 is a perfectly respectable car. It gets good gas mileage, is a nice size, and would suit most people’s needs very well. I, however, am not most people. I am a car person for one. I love cars. I enjoy looking at cars, reading about cars and driving fun cars. I also have very specific options on the different automotives that people drive, and like a stubborn Texan, I am set in my opinions.

            I drove all through my sophomore and junior years of high school in that green mediocre car. Because that is exactly all that it was: mediocre. Driving around town with my mother was, I’m sure, torture for her. Every car that I would even consider driving I would point out to her, and let her know that I really liked it. This mostly consisted of trucks and sports cars. Unfortunately, my mom reverted to her Yankee upbringing and refused to buy me a truck. She also said that if I get a sports car, I would kill myself. I really had no argument on that second one. I did point out one car that she didn’t have much of a problem with. It was not a practical car, but it was a very safe car which was important to her. It was nice and big, and practical. It would have very low maintenance when it got older as I graduated college and started paying for more things on my own. I had picked out an electric blue FJ Cruiser.

            One morning the summer before my senior year, my mom told me that we could go LOOK at cars. She emphasized over and over that we were only going to look. There was no way that we were going to buy a car today. We had several other dealerships to visit. WE WERE NOT BUYING A CAR TODAY! “Okay, okay, we aren’t buying a car. I got it mom.” We walked on to the lot, and of course were ignored. We looked at a lot of the FJs and none of them have what I was looking for. They were new cars, but had thousands of miles on them already. None of them were blue, and all of them were automatic. After looking around the whole lot, we finally spotted one blue one over in the used car lot and decide to meander over and take a gander.

            There it was. That was my car. Sitting in the middle of the used car lot, it was the last of the cars that they had bought from another dealer. The odometer read a whopping 22 miles on it.  It was only left because most of America is too lazy to buy a car with a standard transmission. It had every single thing I wanted, from the racks to the wheels. This was my car. And it was a third of the price of all of the new cars we had looked at.

            Well my mom went back on her word, and we traded in my sisters green mediocre car for Frank. His name is Frank the Tank. In family settings he is Franklyn.