If you are in the same sub-genre of nerd as I am, then you are likely to be unduly interested in word origins. Nearly every day, I find myself dwelling upon some word or other, and soon my rumination turns into an urgent need to know: where did it all start? In English, you know, every word has an entire history behind it, having made a journey through time and space. I am, in fact, a logophile (a term that derives from Ancient Greek, by the way), a lover of words and word origins.

Recently I was edified (and yes, that term is related to “edifice”) to learn that “garage” comes from the Old French verb garir, meaning “to shelter, take care of, protect…” That helps to explain why American English quickly absorbed the term around 1902, with the first blush of our ongoing love affair with the automobile. You see, a garage is not simply a place to store a car. Oh, no. It is a haven, a gathering place and a place to be alone, a place where dreams are made, nut by nut, bolt by bolt, where tools and oil and polish are handed from one generation to another, and where stories become legend.

Okay, maybe I am over-romanticizing. Still, I can say for certain that, for the most part, the word “garage” does not elicit quite the same associations among people in other countries around the world.

Let’s say, for instance, you are driving around in Spain. You have managed to locate your airbnb, and now you wish to park your shiny rental car indoors for safety’s sake. However, if you ask the proprietor for the whereabouts of the garage, he or she will no doubt direct you to the nearest mechanic’s shop. After all, a car is merely a machine designed to get you from one place to another. Why take up valuable real estate by giving it its own room?

Although, as the Atlantic reports, many European countries now boast higher percentages of car ownership among their populations than in America, garages still seem to be far less common there. In my own travel experiences, I have observed a distinct absence of the cavernous garages which have become a prominent feature of newer American homes. Drivers seem much more content with street parking and underground lots. And in Britain, about sixty percent of homeowners with garages say they do not actually park their cars in them. Instead, they use them for storage. That’s a lot of mutton.

By contrast, in the US, the mere idea of a garage has taken on its own unique cultural significance over time. It has become an essential part of the American household. Walk down any street in any suburban neighborhood comprised of houses constructed in the last fifty years or so, and you will see rows and rows of blank overhead doors staring silently back at you; they dwarf the meager front entrances through which the people pass. The children may come and go, the beloved dogs and cats - sadly - will move on to Pet Heaven…but the car, nowadays, is built to last, and if properly cared for, it will be still be sitting there ready to roll when the EMTs have pried the TV remote out of the homeowner’s cold, dead hand.

I know very little about cars and their innards, frankly, but there have been a few I have really liked. My mother earned her driver’s license a bit late - I think I was eight years old or so - and her first car was a 1965 cherry-red Ford Mustang with a white leather interior. God, if only I had that beauty today. A high-school buddy of mine owned a ’72 Chevy Nova, dark green, with a roaring engine that made the girls walking along the strip at Atlantic Beach gaze over at us in a way that made me feel all tingly inside. And in college, I owned a small Datsun pickup with a camper top, not because it was any good at all as an automobile but because it became a party to my youthful ramblings as I drove it to hell and back again. I think it died beside a county road somewhere in South Carolina.

Around that same time, I was studying in the creative writing program at the University of Florida, where I got to know the novelist and raconteur Harry Crews. He was animated in his hatred of cars. I once heard him call the automobile “the great tit on which we are all made to suck.” I could see his point even then - yes, a car can be a lot of trouble, it can drain your checking account, it can fail you at the most inconvenient moments, and when you are behind the wheel, you must always remember that there are any number of people just as dumb as you are who are also out there careening around in flying hunks of metal. But Harry was unusual (in so many ways, but all of that is fodder for another blog, another time) in that he grew up in an area of rural Georgia where whatever roads existed were made of red clay and likely to be rutted by wagon wheels rather than tire treads. He was born in 1935, but he might just as well have come straight out of the 19th century, really, and thus he was not afflicted with that most American of addictions - an acute fascination with motorcars.

Most of us are or have been, though, and that is why I cannot believe that self-driving cars will ever become popular here. Here we LOVE to drive, to feel that throbbing under us and the wheel in our hands and to know that we are the captains of our own destinies and directions. We do the driving, not the car itself. And mass transit? Trains? Busses? NO! Let the French ride their fancy high-speed trains with their wine and cheese in the club cars, but here in America, no one is going to tell us exactly when to leave and when to return and how to get there. We will not stand there peering up at a monitor to find out what platform we must go to and mill about on sheepishly, waiting for the appointed conveyance at the proper time. No, we are far too independent for that, and the automobile is inexorably wrapped up in that spirit.

Ergo, I understand the compulsion of the wealthy and the famous to buy fleets of Porsches and Ferraris and Lamborghinis, one for each day of the month, at least, and stow them in high-tech, pristine garages with more square footage than the houses where most of us live. Jerry Seinfeld owns over 150 cars, for example, and Jay Leno has 181. Why? Because they can, I suppose. Obviously, expensive cars are status symbols in America, but there is something more deeply rooted than that: a longing for the objects of our collective past, perhaps, when great care was taken in the making of them; a childlike collector’s mentality, with which some fortunate souls graduated from arrowheads and buffalo nickels to vintage Jaguars; and a refined appreciation of speed and power and thundering engines. The rich man’s sprawling garage is in reality an aggrandized version of the boy’s shelf where once stood his Revell plastic models, painted painstakingly using those little glass bottles of Testor’s enamel model paint.

But most American garages are not like that. They may double as storage areas for gardening tools and hand tools, workshops for hobbyists, a place for an extra refrigerator or a meat freezer, or perhaps most oddly and charmingly, as social gathering spots. My neighbor in Yarmouth, Maine, where I lived for seventeen years, had converted his garage into a sports pub, with a couch and a picnic table and a perpetually beer-stocked fridge and, of course, a television. How many pleasant Saturday and Sunday afternoons we spent there watching “the game,” which was actually any game at all, no matter how inconsequential - baseball, football, ice hockey, basketball, golf, cornhole, and so on, languishing in our brief escape from the tribulations of work and domestic routine.

My brother-in-law, who lives in the deep, swampy woods of central Florida, has outfitted his garage with a full kitchen, along with a table and chairs and a stock of whiskey that rivals that of many a bar, and there the stereo resurrects the original Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers, Marshall Tucker, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - essentially all of your favorite dead rock stars. And there, it is always happy hour.

For that matter, simply drive around in any average suburban neighborhood on a warm summer’s early evening, and you will see them seated in lawn chairs in their driveways, just at the entrance to their garages - mothers and fathers with their cocktails, perhaps with the grill close at hand, pink steaks set to sizzle, and the kids, maybe on their bikes or shooting baskets, or if they are small, splashing about in the kiddie pool on the emerald grass. And there behind them, in that well-lit cave also filled with tools waiting to be used and trash waiting to be thrown out and half-full paint cans and half-deflated basketballs and footballs and old Christmas presents that nobody wanted, the car - or more likely, cars - wait to be beckoned into service once more tomorrow morning when, like the sun, the dream will live again.

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