in Search Of Flying Cars

By JAMES L. DAVIS

Wait a second, it’s 2002. We have started on the second year of a brand new millennium and I only have one question: just where the heck are the flying cars? I was promised flying cars.
OK, so maybe I wasn’t actually promised flying cars, but it was pretty close to a promise, because my mom was the one who told me that there would definitely be flying cars and we all know that when your mom says something is going to happen there’s a pretty good chance it is going to happen. I remember her saying so because the thought of flying cars was (and still is) a pretty exciting thought. I think I was about 6 when I was driving with my mom in our old station wagon and I told her I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to drive. When I said that she smiled and said “When you’re old enough to drive all of the cars will fly.”
Well, I’ve been driving for more than 20 years now and the only time any of my cars ever flew was when my buddies and I played Dukes of Hazard on the way to work and took turns seeing how fast we could hit the hill by the railroad tracks. We flew all right, but not for long and the landings were hard on the suspension (mine, theirs and especially our trucks). But other than those experiences I have never flown in my car, which is too bad because I still remember dreaming about that. For years after my mom told me that cars would fly I would dump all of my Matchboxes and Hot Wheels out on the living room carpet and play cars, but the cars never drove down the lime-green shag carpet interstate of my living room. No, they soared from one couch to the other, landed on the bookshelf and hovered over the fish tank. The tires were just something to land on, you didn’t actually drive on them.
I’m beginning to realize that cars aren’t going to be flying any time soon, and that makes me kinda sad. Because when I was a kid and the grown-ups told me what the world was going to be like when I was a grown up sure did seem more exciting than what I see when I peek out the window in the morning. Cars would fly, space travel would be no different than air travel. We would live on other planets, all of us would be healthy, wealthy and wise. There would be no pollution, wars, corruption, disease, hunger or hatred. Even when I heard the dark side of the predicted future it sounded, well, it sounded kind of exciting to my young mind: no government, anarchy in the streets, mutants running wild in a bombed out dying world (this version of the world sounded exciting to me because I never imagined myself one of the mutants). But in reality I find myself faced with…reality. Most of the things predicted in the science fiction novels I read as a kid haven’t come true yet, while a great many things never dreamed of have. I guess that’s just the way of the future, you think it’s going to go this way and it’s probably going to go that way.
Not that I ever believed all of what I was told was going to happen in the future, be it the future of hope or the future of despair. Except for the cars. I sure was looking forward to those flying cars.