There’s nothing better than an old Cadillac
At least that’s what my daddy always said
When I see her sitting out in back
All the memories come back to my head
Everything it took for me to get here
All the episodes that I went through
The laughter, the love, the pain, and the tears
The sweat and all the hard work too
She’s everything to me
She’s all I really need
She’s all mine, my car named Freedom
She’s my liberty and independence
She’s my first line of defense
My free spirit in a car named Freedom
I bought her in a third-hand lot out on Highway 35
And fixed her engine up real good
I feel that power when I take her for a drive
She’s got a lioness there under the hood
Blasting down the interstates and the state roads
With the music cranked up real loud
No one can compete with her she’s unopposed
She’s the work of my hands and I’m proud
Forty days and nights in the garage
In desperate need of shower and massage
When I finished it was time to celebrate Freedom
I popped a bottle of champagne
And I gave her her name
It says it right there on the license plates: Freedom
I spent my teens and early twenties
In a land far away feeling sore
Three of those years in the army
Always on alert, always scared of war
I was hurting ‘cause the promise of a good life
Was snatched away before my eyes
The pain was so sharp it cut like a knife
And few people heard my cries
I was stuck to the place I was sitting in
The power to move had a limit
Defending the country I was living in
It was my job and my heart wasn’t in it
But there were two things I always kept in mind
The things I’d have once I came back
One was the girl I loved so fine
The other was the Cadillac
I waited for so long
And it was the dream that kept me strong
The dream that I’d drive a car named Freedom
She carries my dream on wheels
She makes everything real
There she is, my car named Freedom
©2023 The Hesh Inc.
This dates back to sometime in the middle of my army service in Israel in the mid-1980s, when I felt about as far away as I could get (through no fault of my own) from my friends and the life I had known in the USA. I was missing all of them, and it, rather terribly, and I was looking for and grabbing on to any touchstones I could find that could reassure me that they would all be waiting for me when I finally got out. On one of the many times I returned to my base after a weekend back in the real world, the bus I was on was on its way out of Jerusalem when I spied an early-1960s–vintage Cadillac Sedan de Ville, gathering dust in a parking lot behind an apartment house. Cadillacs, while not unknown, are rather uncommon in Israel, and I took this as a sort of sign through the ether that I have something to hold on to and a reason to keep pushing ahead till I finally made it to the end. I daydreamt on that trip back to base, what it would be like to refurbish that Caddy and hit the road in it ... or, transposing myself across the ocean, finding one like it in a used-car lot and doing the same. Eventually, I finished my three years of service, and returned to the US not long afterward ... I never did buy or own a Cadillac, but I did drive one a few times. And, like my father really told me once upon a time, there's nothing better than an old Caddy.
As for the music ... I was very much under the influence of Bryan Adams' album Reckless at the time of this episode (for all I know it was playing on my Walkman as I daydreamt). Never recorded or performed ... just one of those that I wrote to get me through a difficult time.