Uncle Joe, The Buick Grand National And The Ugly: What It Is To Be A Disabled Gearhead...

I was born in February of 1984, so that will make me 32 in 2016. There are only certain car stories that I ever tell, but my angle is that I've been physically-challenged my whole life. So if you Google "Arthrogryposis," it is a muscular condition, and it is from birth. And what it essentially does, is cause one's elbows, knees, fingers and other bodily joints/tendons to be fixed in-place. I will not bore you with a prognosis, but this is what it is; Google-search it on your own!

My point is this: I grew-up in the G-Body era, just as my dad had grown during an age of GM A-Bodies. Anyone who knows their platforms knows that the two derive from each other. My dad raised me on Chevelles and A-Bodies, and when it came to anything Chevelle/Malibu-related, dad was always my go-to guy.

I gotta give mom's side of the family props on this one, however. Because growing-up, I couldn't drive, at all. Our network of family/friends were always good about getting me involved in motoring. But I have to take a time, as I write this blog, to pay spotlight to a family member who I rarely do: Uncle Joe.

My mom's side of the family is strange, but that was okay, because I was born with a disability, that even kept me from climbing the monkey bars at school; how much stranger was I?!

But around the time that my parents had a Monte Carlo SS, mom's Uncle Joe and Aunt Dolly, who reside in Canoga Park to this very day, had that one car that always meant "G-Body giggy," in my mind, Buick's all-black, turbo Grand National. If Rush's "Temples of Syrinx" ever did become a reality, then the Buick Grand National was the last car standing; it was the "Red Barchetta" of midsize muscle.

What I remember from growing-up: I knew what a Monte SS was, I knew what a Grand National was...and I knew that there was a difference. I knew, as a kid, that there was something odd about that car. Because it clearly looked like a Monte Carlo, back then. But where did the light-up boost bar come from? Where did those weird, "Turbo-6" logos come from?! Clearly, when you are a car kid you are born that way. And in the early '90s, if you would've shown me, as a kid, a Buick patrol car parked on our schoolyard, I would've said, "Wow, that looks like mom's car!" But because you had "car" in your blood, you know that there's something to the car, if not underneath!

The bottom line is that Uncle Joe and Aunt Dolly's very first, '87 Grand National may have been their mid-life investment. But as I would call my mom and dad the first "man-and-woman" in my life, so would I say about Buick's Grand National: it was "my first muscle car," when I wasn't even able to drive.

Uncle Joe was the first to let me experience her inner walls, but that time wouldn't be the last! I have arthrogryposis, it's real and it keeps me from driving...but it never kept me from my favorite muscle.

If it didn't happen then, then it would've anyway, God willing. But whether with Uncle Joe, as a little kid in the late '80s, or in 2012 as a journalist in Woodland Hills, the car that was the Grand National made me know what I want, in life. And because it's a car and a running dynamic that I've experienced first-hand, I can honestly say that the very idea behind the Grand National has helped me to overcome two things: arthrogryposis, from 1984 to the present, and the diagnosis that, for me, was even worse...glaucoma. That surfaced, in both eyes, while I was in college in 2006. But if you know a turbo V-6, then you can learn your own body; the automotive language, as a whole, has helped me to relieve a lot of my symptoms!

So it is important to me, and if I'm the only one who's standing-up, then that's not a good thing. More people, since Uncle Joe, have helped me to get a taste of what they already have. But for me, what do I have that I can pay forward?!