The Detroit auto show is going on this week, and I gotta tell you, my automotive pants are going crazy. I love cars. Always have.

When I was little, cars were a magical extension of my dad. Dad was a big guy with fuzzy forearms and an inexhaustible will to work on our cars himself. A brown-eyed boy of 6 thought it was damn near superhuman that a man could work on something that big and make a difference.

Many Saturdays, I would watch as half of Dad's torso was tucked under one of our finicky domestics while staticky music from the workbench radio echoed through the garage.

I was always a little nervous and lonely out on the side of the car. I had heard the horror stories of cars collapsing on men. A wrench drop on the concrete would give me a start. A tool request from under the car would send me scurrying and praying I got the right one. I loved that he would let me help in this small way, until I was big enough to get crushed myself.

To my knowledge, I am the only one in my group of friends who changed his own oil through college, before finally giving in to convenience and a lesser manhood.

Our favorite cars, though not the best, were probably the 1970 Volkswagen Squareback, the 1974 Buick and the 1979 Oldsmobile 98 that left us stranded outside of St. Louis. The Olds possessed one of those horrible first-generation diesel engines, but damn, that thing was American luxury to a working man and a 6-year-old tool-fetcher.

Although my father worked on cars well, he did not work on cars frequently. Therefore, our cars were never working properly. There was the 1984 Chrysler Fifth Avenue that somehow shot gasoline up on the windshield when you accelerated or used the washer feature. There was the Buick Skyhawk that required you to roll down the window to open the door from the outside.

So now, as I look at the 2010 Ford Taurus at the Detroit auto show and imagine what it would be like to own it, I can't help but think that five years from now, it would have a cardboard box for a back window and be fitted with one motorcycle wheel somewhere.

We Keiths like to improvise.

Hear Gordon on "The Ticket" KTCK-AM (1310) weekdays from 5:30 to 10 a.m. Catch him on TV on The Gordon Keith Show, Thursday nights at 12:35 a.m. on Channel 8. E-mail him at gordon@ gordonkeith.com.

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