Coffee Cups

One of our summer interns drives a late-model, wine-red Ford Mustang. It's not the coolest-looking car I've ever seen, but it's not bad looking as cars go.

I have fond memories of Mustangs dating back to first grade, when Dad came home one day in a brand-new, lime-gold '67. It was succeeded in sixth grade by a dark-green '72 Mustang Grande' with the 351-cubic-inch V-8. I learned to drive in that car, and I drove it through high school. Lots of my classmates had faster cars, like Olds Cutlasses with the 442 V-8, or more fashionable cars, like Camaros and Trans Ams. But no one had a Mustang like this one, and for a high-schooler who wasn't that much into conformity anyway, that just made driving it all the sweeter.

I did much of my driving on a road near my high school that is now a multi-lane suburban thoroughfare but was then a two-lane country road that changed shape, form and direction after every hard rain. Particularly at the beginning of a long straightaway on that road, I used to floor the Mustang from a dead stop. The three-gear automatic transmission topped out at about 45 mph in first gear and a little over 90 in second. And when it shifted from second to high, the acceleration was like being shot out of a cannon. I have driven faster cars, and I have driven cars that got from zero to 60 more quickly, but nothing has ever flattened my seat or rocked my world like that explosive final upshift.

Almost 30 years later I still recall almost every detail: the roar of the engine, the smell of the freshly turned earth on both sides of the highway, the warm spring wind whipping through the open windows, the cold beer (yes, frequently) between my knees on the seat, the album-rock radio welling from the back deck, the taillights of other cars fading in my rear-view mirror like memories of high school from the vantage point of middle age.