The large white Siamese walked up to me, purring softly. I wanted to reach out, stroke it's soft, thick fur, but...
...Karla would have thought it was weird, like, "Why are you petting my car?"
Karla was a year behind me in high school but one of my first crushes- tall, athletic, strong, and muscular, with long curly dark brown hair. Something about strong, muscular, hot girls always did it for me. She was a year behind me but yet, she thought I was too young for her, preferring seniors and college guys to dudes who were "only a year older." Story of my life, sadly.
But this isn't really about that.
It's about her car. She had one of those early 80's Mercedes models that looked like big cats. If you were around back then, you would probably recognize one if you saw one. If you weren't around then, you'd probably laugh at it. Those cars always made me smile; whenever you saw one on the road, it was like watching this big furry stuffed animal running down the road toward you. They not only looked like cats, but they even sounded like them; they had this turbo-diesel motor that gave off a distinctive purring noise at idle that was as unmistakable as the "Garrr-rarrr-rarrr-rarr" of a Dodge Ram or the "SputtSputtSputtSputtSputt" of a Volkswagen boxer-four. Mercedes built them from roughly the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, but they were so well built and durable that, even like 15 years after they stopped making them, there were still millions of these large, furry critters running around the streets, roads and highways. There was a two-door version and even a station wagon version, and they were built under various model numbers, I guess depending on level of trim and engine size or something. (She had the basic 300-series four door model.) They weren't particularly cheap; a new one cost like $24,000 back in 1983, which would be equivalent to roughly $65-70K today. Nor did they have particularly cat-like reflexes; the turbo-diesel engine had marginally adequate performance for the time, but they certainly were no "Cat Rods."
So Karla's car, like many others like it I'm sure, became the butt of many cat jokes. As pranks, we would leave bowls full of cat food in front of it sometimes. Uh, maybe if we hadn't been such juvenile shits and made fun of her car, she would have gone out with me? Don't think it would have worked that way.
Nowadays the Mercedes "Cats" are becoming more and more scarce on the streets. There just aren't that many left. I mean, it's been almost 40 years since they stopped making them. But just this evening, I saw one while riding my bike around town and it made me smile. In fact, every time I see one of these oversized stuffed animals on the road it just makes me feel, well, warm and fuzzy. It's weird, I guess, to derive such simple joy in such a dumb thing, but that's how it is. Maybe in another 20 years, people will feel the same way about the ubiquitous Nissan "Frog" (Juke) or the Fiat "Mouse." If Karla's car were still around- and I haven't seen either her or her car in many long years, I'd like to think it would chase the Fiat mice and Nissan frogs around for sport.
It would be cool if Mercedes started building them again, like some retro-model, the way Volkswagen did with the Beetle. Maybe we should launch a letter-writing campaign to ressurrect this iconic model. Like, "Bring back the Cat!" It would probably end up being some kind of lame generic tall-wagon/crossover mini-SUV type thing though. None of the current Mercedes models have much soul anymore. They just have that huge circle-star thing on the grille that looks like it's trying to scream "MERCEDES!!" at you.
So like I said earlier, I like to write blog posts about stuff nobody else ever writes blog posts about. Hopefully I succeeded with this one. And that's about all I got.