By Jim Hagarty
2006
Whoever said, “I may not have had a great childhood but it sure has been a long one,” would have smiled with self-satisfaction to see me roaring around a go-kart track Saturday night. I’ve seen the recent picture of an 81-year-old Paul Newman grinning at the cameras from behind the wheel of his super-duper race car. I’m pretty sure I looked nothing like that in my tiny machine with the lawnmower engine in back. More precisely, I looked like a chunky old fellow riding a lawnmower.
No one insisted I join the two 10-year-old boys I’d brought with me to the track but after seeing the excited looks on their faces as they spun around the circuit their second or third time, I impulsively plopped down some cash and climbed into a kart of my own. I use the term “climbed” loosely, as something along the lines of “squeezed” might have better described things. Go-kart makers across America, it appears, discriminate against those for whom cookies, pop and chips are dietary staples.
No, my motivation for strapping on a helmet had nothing to do with the need to be seen, or to please the boys or to satisfy some macho yearning. Instead, it was some voice from the past that called to me to grab the opportunity to recapture a simple joy which I hadn’t felt in more than 40 years. Why should the boys have all the fun? And man were they having fun.
But a lot changes over the four decades since you last go-karted. First comes a driver’s licence, then Dad’s car, then a long list of your own vehicles, speedy and slow as they might have been. You drive trucks, vans and tractors, even a small sports car. An (original) Volkswagen Beetle. You drive a lot of stick-shift (four-speed and five-speed) manual transmissions. You even drive tiny cars on the wrong side of the roads across the British Isles. You even speed along on raceways such as the Autobahn in Germany, the world’s first four-lane expressway. You drive through the Rockies in a Pontiac Acadian (with questionable brakes) and across a large suspension bridge out east.
So, sadly, a hundred feet down the go-kart track it occurs to you that the thrill is gone. The object, from then on, is to finish the five laps without embarrassing yourself and to walk away unbruised. The latter goal is harder to achieve than the first as the track, in places, is bumpy and the kart is so low-slung that various anatomical features appear to be practically dragging along the asphalt. You mentally calculate, as your blubber meets the road, that it’s a good thing your family roster has been completed and no more lineup additions are contemplated as you consider the body parts that might be missing when this jostling journey ends.
The embarrassment factor is also not an easy thing to avoid as two lightweight 10-year-olds make it their business to pass the old guy who’s creeping around the hairpin curves with all the dash and flash of a long-ago farmer on an old flywheel-started John Deere tractor. The first time the boys fly by you, you shake your fist at them and are determined to return the favour. But for some reason they were given vehicles with twice the horsepower of yours and the indignity is yours to enjoy more than once.
The young man at the finish line could have waved you in after one lap and you’d have been glad to return to the spectators’ area but with five more circuits to go (he threw in an extra one, somehow thinking you were having a joyous experience) you are forced to endure another 15 minutes of having all the molecules in your body noisily and seemingly permanently rearranged.
Nostalgia, I am somehow still here to testify, just isn’t what it used to be.
