That They Should Wear Our Colors There
I was a sophomore in high school. That winter a neighborhood acquaintance, James House, who was perhaps a year older than I, turned up driving a new 1965 2+2 mustang. The car was a fastback, dark blue with a broad double white racing strip from bumper to 
bumper. The motor was a 289 cubic inch v8, four-barrel carburetor, mated to a four speed transmission. Even now I can see that car in my mind. How I envied that guy. A fastback mustang was a dream car to a younger version of myself, less expensive 
than a Pontiac GTO and plenty fast.
I recall that within a short while of receiving the car James wrecked the vehicle, taking it out on a snowy day. Schadenfreude. I did not know the meaning of the word at that point in my life.
Here are some photos of a similar vintage mustang, a custom build by the Roadster Shop in Mundelein. Of course this one is a far cry from the original that rolled off of the Ford Assembly line in Dearborn, Michigan. The lines of the body have been preserved. The form is iconic, reminiscent of a time that has passed away.
I am tempted to ask myself, was that paradise? In my mind, by comparison to this time, sometimes I 
think so. But that is a trick of the mind, the minds massaging of memory, adding a patina of past glory. The old muscle cars are gone and the world of EVs and driverless cars will have no place for the overpowered, gas hungry machines; a machine requiring background knowledge of the internal combustion engine, and all five senses to operate properly. Of course something will be lost. There always is. The only place for horses is on a horse farm.
Finally I offer a stanza from a Wallace Stevens poem entitled Sunday Morning.
VI
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit ever fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
and pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
