As winter draws to a close, I find myself wishing that I still had my midlife crisis car, the speedy little Fiat Spyder convertible that you see in the above photograph. As the ground dries and the summer nears, tooling down beautiful Highway 89, a federally designated Scenic Byway, with the top down and the music turned up, would bring back fond memories. This baby even had a tiny back seat, perfect for my two daughters, who were about 8 and 10 at the time.
What my spouse worries about is that late life crisis may strike and I’ll come roaring home one day on a black Harley. We went on our honeymoon, back in June of 1968, on my Triumph cycle, touring the state of Florida, cruising up the beautiful beach road A1A along the east coast, spitting flying bugs from our teeth and stopping whenever the mood struck to plunge into the Atlantic Ocean. I sold that bike in ’71 and haven’t ridden since, but the urge grips me every now and then.
I should have kept that Fiat longer. It was a lot of fun to drive, shifting through traffic and zooming past stolid, slow sedans driven by frowning people. But I got nervous about the Fiat brand which, the joke went, stood for Fix It Again Tony. I had been through my British sports car phase years before, as a free man, when I had first a Triumph Spitfire and then an MGB. They were notoriously fussy mechanically.
I doubt I’ll give in to the Harley urge. Neither my reflexes nor my upper body strength are what they used to be. The motorcycle traffic along Highway 89 picks up every summer, and every summer someone on a cycle dies here, taking a curve too fast or staring at the scenery when they should be watching where they’re going. Still, whenever I have occasion to be driving behind a throbbing Harley, I can feel myself straddling the beast, my arms out straight holding the handlebars, my heart hammering in my chest, my eyes glazed over in oil-stained rapture.