I'm one of those now.

I bought a car a few weeks ago. It’s not a new car, but it’s much newer than the car I traded in for it. And it’s much nicer too. I bought a 2011 BMW 328, which is classified as an “entry-level luxury” vehicle, whatever the hell that means. I guess it means that I’ve entered something somehow. I’m in the world of luxury vehicles and I can never leave.

But that’s okay I guess. Part of me feels a little sheepish- I’m not and have never been a car person. I mean I am in that I own cars and drive them, but they’ve never been anything I really cared about beyond their ability to take me from place to place. I’d been driving a 2007 Toyota Camry for nearly 8 years and had loved it. But one of my kids cracked it up and a few years later the windshield seal failed causing a leak that left the car with a permanent musty smell. It was old and beat and I was tired of it.

But a BMW? I only know one thing about people who drive BMWs and that is that they’re assholes. They zip around in their sportily little luxury car and make veryone else crazy. I hate them. And now I’m one of them.

And why wouldn’t I stick with the kind of car I’ve always bought? I guess I decided that at this point I deserved something a little nicer. I focused on finding a low-mileage used car at a reputable dealer. I had a list of several cars that I was going to try and looked at the BMW first because the dealer is 3 blocks from my house. And as soon as I started driving the car I knew that was it. There was no need to look any further. It’s 3 years old and has 16,000 miles on it, so it fit that part of the checklist. But what made it easy was the driving part.

I’ve mostly driven mid-level Japanese cars- Hondas and Toyotas. Very reliable and not unpleasant. They felt like they were designed from the point of view of creating a reliable, safe machine for transportation. The BMW feels like it was designed from a driver’s perspective, where the driving experience leads to the engineering, rather than the other way around. But really I’m not sure. What I do know is that the car feels completely intuitive to drive. I feel connected to it instead of just sitting in it.

That probably sounds weird. It feels weird to write. But it’s very much like how it felt when I got my bicycle last summer. As soon as I sat down and started pedaling I knew it was right, and I knew this was right too.

That said, it still feels weird to think it’s my car. It feels too grown up for me, though I’m nearly 60. And now I’m one of those people who drives a BMW. But as my daughter told me, my wife got a puppy and I got a BMW, so we must be officially empty nesters now. So I guess I’m one of those too.