Sam

Everyone remembers their first love. Mine was Sam. He was eight years older than I was, big and a little clumsy and slow. Recent experience had left him empty inside, but he still had a lot to give.

Sam was a 1973 Volkswagen van, painted yellow and white. My dad bought him with a stripped out interior - no seats, not even any carpet - intending to convert him into a camper. I was 15 years old. Dad already owned a pickup truck, and Mom owned a sedan, so when I started driving, I ended up driving the van instead of taking a car that my parents were using.

I was totally prepared to hate the van, and I drove it only under protest. I'd been in love with Volkswagen Beetles since I was a kid, having first loved Herbie the Love Bug, and later, my adored big sister's car. I wanted a white Bug with a blue and green interior; I'd been fantasizing about it for years. I had all of $200 in the bank, and no job, though, so that wasn't happening any time soon.

I resented driving the van. It wasn't cute, it wasn't popular - it was kind of embarrassing. I'd tell everyone, "This is my dad's car."

Then, slowly, the van started to grow on me. Dad got a carpet remnant from somewhere, and we put it over the formerly bare floor. I found a $20 wicker loveseat, a yellow beanbag, and a chair made from an old barrel for seating. This was years before mandatory seat belt laws, so my decor was legal.

It turns out that being able to jam a dozen or so of your teenage friends into the back of a van is handy and fun, when you're a teenager.

My friends found names for the van; the Beatles fans called it The Yellow Submarine. The Who fans called it The Magic Bus. Still, I thought that he - I was sure the van was male - needed a proper, given name.

Every once in a while - about once a year - our drama guild organized a Kidnap Breakfast. We'd designate a few drivers, then phone everyone else's parents to ask that they leave their doors unlocked, or wake up at 3 a.m., so that we could drag their kids out of bed and take them to breakfast in their pajamas.

The van was great for this task, since we could stack people like cord wood. One early morning, my friend Guy and I set out on our assigned route of kidnap victims. Rather, we tried to set out; the van hated cold weather, and it was plenty cold in the small, dark hours of the morning.

After repeated attempts at starting the engine, I decided that we'd have to just sit there until it warmed up a degree or two. Making conversation, I turned to Guy and said, "The van needs a name. What should I call him?"

We were working on the play Wait Until Dark at school, and Guy's character was named Sam. "How about Sam?" he said.

Sam! I knew immediately that we'd found the right name. He was Sam from then on.

I was soon deeply in love with Sam. He was slow, and unwieldy, and he hated cold and the wind - not only did even small gusts blow him sideways on the road, but you could hear the thin sheet metal ripple in high winds. He held up to 15 of my friends at a time. He was perfect for me.

The fastest we ever got him up to was 65 MPH, downhill, with my friend Rich driving. (I have never been a speed demon.) We loved taking him up to Tahoe, but on the steep, mountain roads, he'd slow to a 35 MPH crawl; I'd turn on the hazard lights and wave people past. He did not corner well; the only time anyone ever tipped him up on two wheels, my sister was taking him through a sharp(ish) corner. I no longer found any of his flaws uncool. I loved everything about him.

We once took him backwards through a McDonald's drive through window. We took him to Pyramid Lake, and frequently loaded him up for movie nights. We once drove next to my friends Mike and Scott while they jogged and the rest of us hummed the theme from Rocky through the open sliding door.

Sometimes, my mom would refer to him in feminine pronouns - "Could you park her around back?"

"Mom! He's a Samuel, not a Samantha," I'd say. Mom, though, was sure (as is my husband) that all automobiles are female. Nonsensically, I'd argue, "They can't all be girls!"

For my 18th birthday, my brother in law acid etched comedy/tragedy masks onto his windows, in the bottom left corner of Sam's windshield and both side windows. They were gorgeous.

I further decorated the interior, with a bean bag checkerboard-topped table, an old-time photo taken of a dozen of us at the state fair, a teddy bear rug and cartoons that said things like, "It's a little more than carpooling. We call it van stuffing."

When I started dating my husband, we took Sam to the drive in movie, and watched from the wicker couch, through the open slider. (We froze.) I was pregnant with my second child when my husband and I sold Sam. We needed to - we couldn't afford to install real seats in back, and we couldn't buckle infant car seats into the wicker. Still, I missed him terribly.

I've been thinking a lot about Sam this week. Volkswagen has announced that it will no longer manufacture the VW van after this year's limited edition. I can't believe how blue this makes me. I can't believe that they're only available in Brazil. I can't believe that I can't afford one.

Looking through the auto sales supplement to the paper recently, we found a 1973 yellow and white VW van. "Is it Sam? Can you tell from the photos?" If I had a spare $3000, I would totally buy this impractical used car, whether it's Sam or not.

My son sighed. "Mom, you are such a hippie."

He's not the first person to accuse me of this. In fact, it's such a common occurrence that I developed a stock answer years ago: "If there are sober, monogamous hippies, then you bet I am."

A girl and her van: it's a beautiful thing.