It was a warm afternoon in late spring when I pulled up to the music store in downtown Ada.
I was 16 and a junior in high school and I was going to see if they had any 8-track tapes I needed.
I don’t specifically recall, but I am sure it would have been Johnny Cash, Creedence Clearwater or bluegrass.
Back then, music tastes were quite a bit different from today. Even people who normally didn’t care for country music listened to Johnny Cash and people who normally didn’t care for rock listened to Creedence. And I always listened to bluegrass.
The reason for buying the tapes was that I was cruising around in a 1968 Mustang, yellow with black interior and a smooth-ginning 289 under the hood.
It was going to be a short-term thing, and I wanted to maximize the coolness, as best coolness could be defined by a 16-year-old from Fitzhugh.
My dad ran a body shop in Ada and usually kept a project car on hand. They were muscle cars, usually, and he would work on them whenever things were slow.
When they were done, he’d put a For Sale sign in the window and let me drive them around town until he got an offer, at which point I would once again be back to driving my 1961 Chevy Impala.
The ‘61 wasn’t a bad car, at all, but during a short period in high school, I got to drive a ‘67 Cougar, the ‘68 Mustang and the baddest of the bad, a ‘68 GTO, which was the scariest car I ever drove.
If you were doing, say, 85 in the GTO, you could stomp it and it still would pin your shoulders to the seat for several seconds.
After the likes of those cars, the venerable ‘61 seemed tame.
On this particular day, I walked out the music store, slid behind the seat of the yellow Mustang and turned the key.
Nothing. The engine didn’t turn over.
It was then that I noticed some oddities, like the bottle of women’s perfume in the passenger seat. It wasn’t there when I went into the store.
It was then that I looked two parking spots over and saw the ‘68 Mustang I’d been driving.
Man. I got out of the wrong Mustang a lot quicker than I’d gotten in, realizing that my coolness points were evaporating by the second, and fired up the right Mustang as quickly as I could.
As far as I know, no one saw me, but it didn’t really matter.
Dad got an offer on the Mustang a few days later and I was soon back behind the wheel of the Chevy.
But hey. At least I was cool for a little while.