Ray Sterbens is cleaning his Malaga Red 2002 tii when I arrive at his house in Huntington Beach.
As we hang around his three-car garage—which also contains an M635CSi—he tells me the story about how his wife borrowed the tii for a trip to college while they were still dating.
“You let her borrow your tii?” I ask incredulously, noticing how gently the man caresses his car with a soft cloth.
“Let me tell the story,” he says, continuing with the tale and the caressing.
He lent her the car, and after three days and one of those intense rainstorms that sometimes hit Southern California, his future wife brought it back.
No worries, she told him, I covered it with the tarp like you told me to. Relax, not a drop of rain got on your car.
“The car is all shiny,” Ray says, “and then I open the trunk and there’s the tarp, all sopping wet and crumpled up.”
He swallows hard at the memory.
“I mean, she just put the dripping wet thing into my trunk and left it there for days!”
Knowing Ray, the wet tarp incident must have put a tremendous strain on the budding relationship. It’s a sign of true love that he overcame the shock and ended up happily married (with two kids, mind you) to the tarp-wielding wife.
All that happened a few decades ago, and the maroon-colored 2002 tii hasn’t needed the slightest cosmetic surgery in the thirty-seven—count ’em, 37!—years since.
