My friend Terry Trovato, Natchez gentleman, raconteur, Dunleith tour guide par excellence, and president of of the English Motoring Club of Mississippi, startled me yesterday by emailing to say that he was selling his red, concourse-condition, 1967 Sunbeam Alpine, and offering me first right of refusal. This hurt. First because, when I was a small boy growing up in Wales, my father's daily driver was a 1967, red Sunbeam Alpine, that he has never forgiven himself for selling prior to our family's emigration to Australia in 1974. The Alpine had a removeable hardtop—one of those roof-side-and rear-window combinations that you could unlatch and leave behind on the lawn on the rare, Welsh summer day when there was no chance of rain. Pretty much my earliest memory is of being five years old, curled up beneath that hardtop on the lawn, watching the Welsh summer rain beating on the side windows on one of the days when my dad had trusted the weather report and gone out for a Sunday spin without taking his roof with him. But there's also the fact that, this being the season of life in which young children and long commutes have the upper hand, a forty-seven-year-old, two-seater, English sports car has no more place in my life now, than it probably had in my Dad's when I was five. Which is probably why he didn't take it to Australia in the first place. But there's another early memory: that of sitting scrunched into the tiny luggage shelf behind the two front seats, flying through a bright summer's day, with the wind ripping at my hair and young versions of my Mum and Dad shouting cheerfully at one another as we sailed through the countryside on the way to this pub or that grandparent's house or wherever we were going. It's a memory painted in the bright colors of sheer, childish delight, and I've never forgotten the combination of chortling engine noise and wind roar and sweet engine oil stink that were hallmarks of it. So I'm wistful that the prosaic realities of middle life as a twenty-first century parent prevent me from taking Terry up on his kind offer with a proper disregard for commonsense. And I only hope that someone else reading this does better, remembering that life's fondest memories are not always formed as a result of the most sensible decisions. If you'd like to speak with Terry about his beautiful car, he can be contacted at merter@bellsouth.net.
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