In order to understand the really disparate men in my life, I try to size them up by using their individual relationships with their cars.

My father has now retired, but was a professional geologist. He has ever been really outdoorsy. He’s best-known for chipping a rock here, gather a fossil over there. He is definitely a man’s man, but has never been very loving of any kind of machinery. Gears and engines have a way of revealing his inner savage even though he is a real gentleman. I can think of times when I was very young, seeing my dad with his head under the hood of a car and hearing him swearing at the Industrial Age.

My father would always switch the tires on our Volkswagen van when they needed it, but you would never see him drool over aftermarket center caps or custom chrome grille work on a car. You might see him checking the H2O level in the radiator or putting some Rustoleum on patches that had rusted on the van, but you would never see him using a toothbrush to scrub headlamps or using Q-tips to clean the knobs on the dash. These things just didn’t take place in our garage.

My father-in-law, on the other hand, is a car man all the way. He knows make, model and year of everything that’s in all likelihood ever travelled the Pennsylvania turnpike. Scrubbing whitewalls or squaring a 1962 Chevy at the Antique Car Club show is his idea of a well-spent Afternoon.

Growing up in rural northern Pennsylvania, he speedily graduated from teething ring to pliers and pitchfork. Farm boys acquired the ABCs of mechanics along with animal farming at an early age. The affinity with motors and wheels and all the associated gizmos stuck, although fondness for animals did not. He left the farm to go to college and never looked back.

My husband is also a teacher; just like both of our dads, but that is the only thing they share. He doesn’t like to go camping, carefully washing his cars, or collecting rocks. He loves to spend his Saturday grading papers as he sips fancy coffee drinks at Starbucks.

He puts gas in the car, but would be more likely to employ his American Racing center caps as paperweights on his desk, than as a trendy way to floss his ride. Not that he has anything against someone who toils over their center caps. He vacuums his vehicle bi-annually, but is satisfied to motor about town with “Wash me!” scribbled above his rusted bumper for a year at a time.

Our daughter’s boyfriend is just like my father in law, but a bit more juiced. He got a high performance exhaust kit as a gift last month and has been thrilled ever since beyond his exhaust growls deeply. You can tell that our daughter is in the throes of love when you listen to her talk about how you can hear him coming from a mile away.

Yes, men and their relationships with cars are complex. Sometimes their relationships reflect an expression of a man’s masculinity, while others treat cars as a foe – a needed nuisance to conquer or at least endure.

Many name their cars, and others blaspheme them. Some treat their vehicles with TLC, while others declare bragging rights because their car or truck is beat up or has the most mileage. Car stories are exchanged over beers, like war stories used to be shared around a campfire.

Why else is the auto industry able to sell billions of dollars of chrome, mag wheels, seat covers, backup detectors, window tinting, fancy headlights, dash accoutrements and aftermarket center caps, exhausts, hoods, automobile alarms and decals?

Whether the wheels in the driveway are fodder for cursing or cooing, I believe there’s some inescapable mechanical mojo going on – Kind of like to “If you build it, he will come.”