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Dear So

Cars were obviously important to your dear old dad and I want them to be important to you. As you know, I had the wrencher gene as a kid, but it was never nurtured. Your grandfather was useless when it came to cars and your grandmother drove a VW Squareback with the engine in the rear under a piece of plywood. Cars were not nearly as important to them as ignoring each other.

Yes, I grew up without something I clearly loved, cars, and have admittedly overcompensated. When it comes to cars, I am like the guy who never gets laid in high school and then when he loses the zits and the Peter Brady voice crack he bangs everything with a pulse. When you’re deprived of a passion, you get a hankering for it and, if you can, you’ll overcompensate like someone who just got out of prison and walked right into the buffet at the Bellagio.

So I have filled a warehouse with rare and vintage cars, and guess what, you’re not getting any of them! I want you to have that hunger, too. I want you to want cars. More important, I don’t want you to think that you can get something for nothing. I took you guys to a warehouse full of cars once, and I did not like what I saw, not one bit.

The day after Thanksgiving 2014, I brought you to the garage of my old friend Jay Leno. Do you remember walking around his hangar full of more than one hundred and thirty cars? We had to take a golf cart to get around that place it was so big. When we got there, Jay was out in one of his steam-powered cars. He was doing exactly what you’d expect him to be doing, wearing all denim, tooling around in a car from over a century ago that only a millionaire with no kids can afford or have the time to enjoy. He was living up to every stereotypical image you’ve ever seen of him in tabloids. It was like going to a fat guy’s house and finding him on the toilet eating a giant turkey leg. I recall that you kids were pretty bored at first but, eventually, you, Natalia, looked at a car and said, “That’s my car, that’s what I want to drive to school.” It was a Dodge Viper. Among all of Jay’s cars this was your first pick. This is a pretty garish and nutty car and at the time it came out, it had the biggest engine you could get in a sports car. The only reason someone would buy this car is to do donuts on their ex’s lawn while high on prescription pills. It’s all engine and clutch and no backseat. But you had made your taste known.

That’s not the part that concerned me; it was what happened next. As we started walking back to the front passing forty acres of cars, you stopped and decided you wanted a different car. You changed your mind. It was like when someone is at the diner, orders the club sandwich but then looks at the table next to them and sees a Reuben, and calls the waitress back to change their order, a

This will run you about 300K. But then, another 180 yards down, you changed your mind again. You sent the Reuben back and ordered the surf and turf. You pointed at a McLaren P1.