It was a verdant day. Even the air was green. Pollen. It powdered the atmosphere. It covered everything. I lowered the top on the Jaguar XK8 convertible anyway.
Coughing and sneezing followed. There was misery, but it was worth the pain. It’s hard to say no to a topless Jaguar.
Besides, I’d already shown restraint. I left the carnival-red XK8 in my driveway for two days in favor spending time with a more practical car, the Volvo S40 sedan. But once the S40 was gone, I could resist no longer. Even under a thickening film of pollen, the XK8 looked sexy.
So I dusted its body with a soft cloth. I keyed its ignition, pressed a black button on its center console and lowered its power convertible roof.
There was joy in taking down the roof. There was ballet — the way a small electric motor opened a latch, freeing the roof from the windshield’s frame; the way the roof lifted back, folded at mid-rise and sank gracefully into its storage area behind the rear seats; the way the car’s four side windows lowered themselves in concert with all of this.
I sat for a moment listening to the thrummm, thrummm of the XK8’s 290-horsepower V-8 engine. Thrummm, thrummm. A Jaguar is a cat that doesn’t purr.
It was a wasteful thing to do, sitting there in idle in the midst of rising gas prices listening to an engine burn premium unleaded fuel. But profligacy in celebration of beauty has its virtue. Listening to that engine turn over was like listening to jazz. The venue was different — a fume-filled driveway vs. a smoke-filled room.
I backed out of the driveway into the street. This was done carefully. We were a heavy package, the XK8 and I. Our combined weights exceeded 4,000 pounds, and the XK8’s bottom cleared the ground by 5 1/2 inches, barely enough to avoid banging its undercarriage at the end of the steeply banked driveway.
But the car’s four-wheel independent suspension system, with front and rear stabilizer bars, handled the load admirably. I didn’t scrape bottom. I steered the XK8 toward westbound Interstate 66 and headed for glory.
The thrummm of the car’s engine became a hummm, and there was epiphany in the transition. The XK8 had a price tag of $74,000; when people would ask the price and I would tell them, they’d look stunned and ask me “Why?”
Well, here was the answer in motion and sculpted beauty, arguably the most beautifully sculpted car on the road anywhere. You don’t just drive an XK8. You do more than go for a ride. You become part of a performance, a kinetic piece of art — part dance, part jazz, part sculpture.
You pay for the joy and beauty of it, in much the same way that you’d pay for a Picasso or for season tickets to the Birmingham Royal Ballet.
Otherwise, it would make no sense, because there is nothing practically sensible about owning an XK8.
Its rear seats are useless. Its cargo capa city of 10.8 cubic feet is a joke. Diogenes might have gone about ancient Greece vainly searching for an honest man, but had he parked an XK8 overnight on a city street, he would’ve had no trouble finding a thief. High-end garaging is needed. I paid some pretty stiff parking fees for this one.
But I thought about none of those shortcomings while driving. The car moved so gracefully through space and time, it turned traffic jams into theater.
In the end, I didn’t mind inhaling the pollen during several hours of open-air motoring. I didn’t mind paying parking ransoms in the city. It was worth the pain — for a little while, anyway.
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