An Awesome Time Machine to the Past
For my seventy-fifth birthday, I bought myself something special, a sleek yellow 1949 Buick Roadmaster. It was my favorite vintage car and it was delivered to my home in Mill Valley, California on May 22, 2021, the morning of my birthday. Of course, it wasn’t a real Buick Roadmaster. It was a 1/24th scale model manufactured by the Franklin Mint Company in Ohio. It cost me $200 and back in 1949, that would have been enough to cover a deposit on the real car. Looking it over, I marveled at the model’s extraordinary detail and exquisite workmanship. I was able to open any of the four doors to reveal the red seats, pop the trunk to see the black spare tire with its treads and lift the hood to check out the different engine parts. And how about those cool whitewall tires!
I loved to look at vintage cars. These relics from the past were like dinosaurs from an innocent age, frozen in time and now reappearing as elegant art-deco shapes having four wheels and an engine. I placed the model at the back of my big brown wooden desk so that I could see it and touch it while I was working. In the days that followed, I imagined myself taking it for a spin and going off for a ride into the distant past.
One day, I decided to do exactly that. I opened the car’s front door on the driver’s side, hopped in and started up the engine. Its eight cylinders roared to life and I drove down a narrow area at the rear of my desk. I came to the edge and then entered a long dark tunnel that eventually opened onto a sunny landscape with houses. There were cars in front of me and cars behind me and they all looked to be from the 1940’s. Somehow, magically, I had been transported back to 1949, the year of my car.