Restoration as a Love Language

I’ve been writing Automotive industry blog content for car dealerships lately— locally owned inventory lots here in Albany, NY, to luxury showrooms in the southern California desert to help these businesses rank better on Google.

In case you’re not familiar, SEO—or Search Engine Optimization—is how websites show up when you search for something online. Blog content plays a big role in that.

It’s been a crash course in the auto industry for me. And oddly enough—it’s made me think a lot about my dad.

My 73-years young ‘girl dad’ George and is pictured to the right, standing tall between a showcase of gleaming vehicles, a representation of his greater fleet, left hand lovingly resting on the crown of a curved windshield, grinning at the camera.

I took this photo standing in front of the newly built two-story garage, shadowing the edge of his century home’s property line, nestled between rural farmland and rolling foothills in the Eastern lowland valley connecting the Catskill Range to the Berkshire Mountains.

My dad is someone pulled by quiet compulsions to tinker, to restore, to thread new life into old machines. Bluetooth light switches with 18 dimmer toggles are commanded through an app on his iPhone 15 to softly illuminate mid-century lamps on low-profile end tables in the living room. He custom-wired a home soundbar to sync with a retrofitted stereo console—a walnut cabinet he’s owned since 1984, now pulsing with sound under the portrait-frame TV it cradles. It’s a delicate circus of amps, speaker terminals, and careful calibration.

He’s someone who genuinely loves machinery for how it works, and how it feels to make it all work together.

Specifically Alfa Romeos.

If you don’t know Alfa Romeo, let me set the scene: hand-stitched Italian lineage, born on the F1 track but sharply designed to carve high-altitude passes through the Alps, with an editorial Milan-fashion week-esque profile. Alfa’s golden years—mid-’60s through the ’70s—gave us icons of the craft like the Giulia Sprint GT, the Spider Veloce, the Montreal. Beautiful, rebellious machines—not just because of their speed, but because they refused to behave.

Alfa’s notorious reputation of stubborn clutches, combative second gears, and entitled engines demanded finesse over brute force. They’d stall if you shifted too soon, sulk if the oil wasn’t warm, and roar back to life the moment you got it right. The obstinate growl-in-its-chest personality dressed tightly in sharp lines of steel leaves no doubt about its intent. Power with posture. I hypothesize that my dad thrives on this give-and-take relationship with Alfa Romeos— it's a partnership, an honest conversation, like an exchange between man and machine. It’s the kind of satisfaction that only comes from patiently learning to dance with a beast that doesn’t bend to your will.

My dad first learned to love an Alfa Romeo in 1988. Growing up with a collector-restorer, I became familiar with the sound of an engine turning over in the driveway, the ticking of wrenches against bolts, the occasional discharge of a yelp when the forehead of a 6’3” artisan met another low doorframe. There was usually a proud red Alfa 164 parked like royalty at the base of the driveway, flanked by a loose circle of likeminded peers in various states of ‘mostly road-ready.’ The latest recruit is a new Alfa Giulia in a sultry blue. It’s still catching its breath from the drive off the lot, still being sized up by the older models. A little too quiet, a little too clean. Puppy love, not yet proven. But promising.

One of the fleet’s mainstays is a dusky grey GTV6, now retired to its forever home. We met it in Italy, where my dad had it waiting for us for a road trip through the countryside. Then, together— my dad, me, and the car— we boarded an overnight train to Amsterdam and put it on a ship bound for Boston. A month later, he picked it up at the harbor and drove it home.

These days, that same GTV6 takes us to Celadon, our favorite Thai place, for the $15 lunch special. The seats creak a little more. The heat doesn’t always cooperate. But it still roars when it wants to.

In the garage, two topdown Alfa Romeo Spiders nap through various stages of assembly, a black GTV6 sleeps near the tree line, and a revolving cast of others appeared now and then, coaxed from seasonal hibernation and brought back to life for glory rides on hot pavement before returning for slumber. Dad’s big car part orders shipped mostly from Italy—because “that’s where the good parts come from.” A faint smell of fuel and metal faintly loomed from the garage. Most weekends, he could be found halfway under a chassis, grease on his knuckles. A necessary outlet to captivate his senses, and almost the complete opposite of his work life. That’s a lawyer for you.

I’ve logged plenty of time in the passenger seats of those temperamental beauties, co-piloting on out-and-back runs to Lenox, Massachusetts, where Jeff Greenfield— my dad’s trusted Alfa whisperer and logntime friend— keeps his own Bauhaus temple to Italian engineering. Those trips weren’t quick. Two hours, minimum. But if an Alfa finally worked, if the timing was just right or the clutch finally sang instead of snarled, it was reason enough to make the drive twice in a week.

There’s a kindred reverence between my dad and Jeff. A shared language of specs and intuition, of knowing when to push and when to wait. They understand what it means to care for a car that doesn't always care back. Tuning an Alfa isn’t just about performance; it’s emotional upkeep. You drive it to serve your purpose, sure—but you also respond to its moods, its quirks, the way it protests with demands for a gentle request to engage its third gear.

And when everything aligns—when the air is dry, the road is empty, and the revs land just right—those drives to Lenox become something else entirely. The Alfa bites into the curves across ridgelines of two-lane county roads. In those moments, it’s about flight.

To my dad, an Alfa Romeo isn’t just a car—it’s a flawed genius. Stubborn. Beautiful. Built with enough imperfection to entice your full attention and effort. And somehow, that’s the whole point.

Writing automotive blogs for work meant immersing myself in performance specs, hybrid drivetrains, and design philosophies dressed in futuristic polish. One in particular stood out- the Mercedes-Benz Vision One-Eleven concept car. It looked like a Denis Villaneuve creation, engineered for a Brutalist cinematic dreamscape of monolithic architecture, almost carved from shadow and sand where structures feel unearthed, not built. Gullwing doors, bright orange bodywork, a stripped-down cockpit. Retro-futurism at full throttle.

And somehow, in the middle of writing about that car, I was back in my dad’s car garage.

With a new understanding of how design teams obsess over airflow, battery placement, the precise curvature of a hood, I think of my dad crouched beside a V6, coaxing it back to life. There was no wind tunnel or digital sketchpad. Just oily rags, engine manuals, and hours of tinkering. He didn’t rush it. He listened to what the car needed. Solved one riddle at a time.

These concept cars, sculpted to reimagine what’s next, are asking the same questions my dad was, just with shinier tools. What’s still good here? What’s worth saving? How do we bring it forward?

Restoring an Alfa is a kind of quiet innovation. It’s about memory and imagination working in tandem.

So yeah, my dad was always cool.