One of my defining moments as a budding car enthusiast came the first
time I got to see a Lamborghini up close. I was out in Los Angeles
visiting a relative with my mother and sister, and I took the change of
scenery as an opportunity to look for more exotic cars than my
middle-class Midwestern upbringing would usually encounter. We were on a
walk, when off in the distance I saw – and heard – something
extraordinary: An early '80s Lamborghini Countach, black with those
bronze five-hole wheels, pulling into a parking spot. My mom still takes
great joy in periodically retelling the events of that day, and as the
story goes, I joyfully took off without warning, chasing the car down
the street shouting "Lamborghini!" "Lamborghini!!" in my best
eight-year-old Italian accent.
I must've still been adorable, because the owner not only let me sit in his car, scissor door open and ridiculous grin on my face, he left me playing around in its interior, nonchalantly telling me to shut the door when I was done. Just like that, he left, disappearing into a shop across the street. I can't tell you how long I sat in the car, or how many photos I demanded my mother take of me with my borrowed Bell and Howell, but I can remember being astounded at how low it was – I could crouch as if sitting on the bumper and still see over it! That was around 30 years ago, and I still have a couple of those dog-eared pictures.
Funnily enough, my memorable Lamborghini encounter is pretty similar to that of the young boy featured in this video. At age seven, however, Jacob is clearly ahead of the curve. As the story goes, his father left a message on Lamborghini Los Angeles North's Facebook page, asking if someone with "a kind heart" would help him help make his Lamborghini-fanatic child's birthday wish come true. And "come true" it did, with the dealership helping organize not just a ride-along in an Aventador, but also a small cavalcade of other Lambos, all of which all showed up unannounced at his house on Jacob's birthday. The resulting unalloyed joy, as you'll see in the footage below, is priceless.
As car enthusiasts, most of us have been lucky enough to have memorable defining car experiences, those fleeting moments in our personal back catalogs that have come to mean so much more than they first appeared to be. Thanks in part to the kindness of Lamborghini-driving stranger several decades ago, I still make a point of inviting onlookers of all ages in for a closer look whenever I am fortunate enough to have the keys to something nice.
I suspect after his grand, Lamborghini-filled birthday, young Jacob will grow to do the same when he's an adult... because that's how new enthusiasts are born.
I must've still been adorable, because the owner not only let me sit in his car, scissor door open and ridiculous grin on my face, he left me playing around in its interior, nonchalantly telling me to shut the door when I was done. Just like that, he left, disappearing into a shop across the street. I can't tell you how long I sat in the car, or how many photos I demanded my mother take of me with my borrowed Bell and Howell, but I can remember being astounded at how low it was – I could crouch as if sitting on the bumper and still see over it! That was around 30 years ago, and I still have a couple of those dog-eared pictures.
Funnily enough, my memorable Lamborghini encounter is pretty similar to that of the young boy featured in this video. At age seven, however, Jacob is clearly ahead of the curve. As the story goes, his father left a message on Lamborghini Los Angeles North's Facebook page, asking if someone with "a kind heart" would help him help make his Lamborghini-fanatic child's birthday wish come true. And "come true" it did, with the dealership helping organize not just a ride-along in an Aventador, but also a small cavalcade of other Lambos, all of which all showed up unannounced at his house on Jacob's birthday. The resulting unalloyed joy, as you'll see in the footage below, is priceless.
As car enthusiasts, most of us have been lucky enough to have memorable defining car experiences, those fleeting moments in our personal back catalogs that have come to mean so much more than they first appeared to be. Thanks in part to the kindness of Lamborghini-driving stranger several decades ago, I still make a point of inviting onlookers of all ages in for a closer look whenever I am fortunate enough to have the keys to something nice.
I suspect after his grand, Lamborghini-filled birthday, young Jacob will grow to do the same when he's an adult... because that's how new enthusiasts are born.
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