Back when a Cuisinart cost as much as a good beater car, my mother’s well appointed kitchen and my parents refusal of my request for a car necessary to get to work and college let me know how I ranked. So I swapped my chattel status strands of pearls, a thin disguise meant to signify the goodness of my family, for a 1962 Cadillac de Ville. I could get into it without taking off my Stetson. Find it in the parking lot by looking down the row for those fins sticking out way beyond the bobbed homogenous rears of modern cars. Start it up late at night, tired from another shift at a crap job, scrappy desperation to get educated and get out of Oklahoma, but wait first, for the smell of dust burning off the tubes as the radio heats up. Drive slowly, am radio scratching out from the Mexican border, fog from the Arkansas River bottom creeping over the wheel wells. A gentle strong thrum from the V8, and we are a long white ghost rolling homeward.