The first time a friend of mine bought a new car, I have to admit, I was a little bit happy–it’s an exciting event for a young person, almost a rite of passage–but I was pretty irritated as well. This was a big step. We had only recently graduated from college. He, at least, of the two of us, had managed to parlay his English degree into gainful, full-time employment with a mortgage company. He had a long-term (and long-distance) girlfriend.

The first time a friend of mine bought a new car, I have to admit, I was a little bit happy–it’s an exciting event for a young person, almost a rite of passage–but I was pretty irritated as well. This was a big step. We had only recently graduated from college. He, at least, of the two of us, had managed to parlay his English degree into gainful, full-time employment with a mortgage company. He had a long-term (and long-distance) girlfriend. Now that he was making a little money, the last piece of the equation, it seemed to him, was a new car.

The only problem was he had moved back home after school, so he still lived with his parents. “Carson,” I pleaded with him–the name has been changed to protect my buddy, I don’t know why–”wouldn’t you rather get your own apartment and not have to live at home?” He was adamant about it; there wasn’t an argument that could sway him. Rather than live with his girlfriend, rather than take advantage of his rent-free situation and invest some of his earnings, rather than pay off his college loans, he was determined to buy a new car. His 1996 Jetta, while still in working order, was slowly coming apart, he said. I typically try not to tell my friends how to live their lives; he was in theory a grown man, so I told him to go ahead, buy a new car, as long as he knew I wasn’t going to the dealership with him.

Carson and I went to college together. He’s a great guy, just a little bit off. Never a great student, he pretty much always got the big picture while missing the details: Moby Dick was about men and whales and God, heaven and earth and harpooneers, and that was all he needed to know. I guess that makes him a big-picture kind of guy, whatever that is. As far as the car’s role in his life was concerned, the big picture looked like this: if he financed the car while he had this job and lived at home, he could still save a little bit of money each month; he often drove three hours to Nashville, where his girlfriend at the time lived and worked as a paralegal, so he would need reliable transportation; and in about a year or so, he was going to get a better job, earning “around forty thousand,” as he put it, and then he was going to move to Nashville, move in with his girlfriend, and everything would be peachy.

It actually sounded like an alright plan, and it seemed like, aside from the magical well-paying job, he had thought it out pretty thoroughly. Yet Carson, despite the hours of literature class we sat through, never remembered the Robert Burns line about “the best laid schemes o’ mice and men.” Fair enough: there’s always a little chance involved. He went in for a 2005 Hyundai Sonata, in black, and got a pretty good deal for it. Our friends made fun of him a little for buying a Hyundai, based on the outdated laughing-stock image that the company has long since left behind. But he seemed happy in it, and riding in the car showed that it had some pep (even the smaller, 2.4 liter in-line four with the five-speed manual transmission). We indulged his pride in the new purchase, standing around with the hood up, oohing and ahhing at the mechanical guts that were so much cleaner than our own cars’. This was how it went: you grew up, you got jobs, you bought cars.

Of course life never occurs easily: within a few months, Carson and his girlfriend broke up, which put an end to the moving-to-Nashville part of his plans; due to corporate downsizing, the entry-level paper-shuffling job disappeared; and the better-paying endeavor never materialized. Soon, my friend found himself with dwindling savings, but the car payments kept coming. He took a job at a coffee shop to pay the bills, which was cool but not exactly the reason he had sought out higher education. Moving out of the folks’ house looked further and further away. Hey, but he still had his car.

Is there a moral in there? Maybe, maybe not. If you’re a young person trying to figure out how to grow up, or if you’re a slightly less young person trying to figure out what your kids are doing with their lives, maybe it makes some sense of things though. In the American life, sometimes it’s hard not to try to fit your story to the typical plot line. What my friend did makes total sense; in fact, it’s what he was supposed to do, and what thousands of people do successfully every day. It’s just that it doesn’t always work out. That said, there’s something special about that first new car, if you’ve earned it: getting behind the wheel for the first time, turning the key, letting the new car smell rush over you, feeling like, yeah, that’s right, there is a road to travel, and finally I’m on it.