Friday, 01 March 2002 | Beetle

At the end of the driveway, whoever was driving would stop the car and let me and my brother climb out. We'd each claim a side and plant our feet on the grooved rubber-covered runners just below the doors, hook our small fingers on the metal gutters on the edge of the roof, and we'd ride up the driveway, happy to have the wind hitting our faces and to be watching the dangerous pavement race by beneath us. I don't remember much else about that car, except the punctured off-white material that lined the inside of the doors, and the time I accidentally discovered my birthday present in the spacious cavity underneath the hood (while bragging to my friend Stephen about how, in VW Beetles, the trunk was the hood and the hood was the trunk). By the time I was 9, my parents had sold the car and moved on to something '80s and boxy.

Well today my parents announced that over the course of this weekend they're going to be test-driving a 1998 Beetle, a shiny white new creature that drinks diesel fuel and has a permanent flower vase to the right of the steering column, a slender plastic cylinder that my dad admitted to already getting his finger stuck in. I'm anxious to hear the end-of-weekend verdict, but, from the way it sounds over the phone, my dad has already fallen in love.

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Make your own digital Lite-Brite creation. This is what I came up with.