Alice Mack with her Saab 900S. The Enquirer/ERNEST COLEMAN First car: A light blue, 1972 BMW 2002. Her father bought it for himself when she was in college, regretted it and then gave it to her. Dream car: A 1969 Mercedes 280SL or a 2002 Saab convertible. Tell us what you are driving Tempo/What Are You Driving? The Cincinnati Enquirer 312 Elm St. Cincinnati 45202 Fax: 768-8495 E-mail mfuqua@enquirer.com

For most of her adult life, Alice Mack didn't own a car. She and her husband, John, didn't need one when they lived in New York City. Then, in 1990, when John's job with Wall Street brokerage firm Bear Stearns took them to Paris, they decided to buy a small French car.

Alice never liked that car, although it fit well in small parking spaces. So Alice, who says she inherited a love of cars from her father and a love of Saabs from her brother, eventually bought a green, 1997 Saab 900S (She really wanted a convertible, but decided it wouldn't be practical with a young child and long, dreary French winters).

By that point, the Macks had already gone through the ordeal of taking mandatory classes at French driving school, Alice says.

"It was horrific," says Alice, 51, who now lives in Indian Hill. "We were treated as though we had never driven before."

Not only was the school expensive, but the instructors played tricks on the students, she says. Hers, for example, told her to turn the wrong way onto a one-way street. Both she and her husband failed the first time around.

Once she had her French license and learned how to maneuver around the metropolis, however, Alice says, driving was easy - especially in the Saab, which boasted heated seats and an instrument panel that told her, in French, when it needed service.

Aside from a couple of family road trips, Alice says, she primarily drove the Saab from their apartment near the Arc de Triomphe to the Meudon forest, where she played tennis. Sometimes she'd drive around the Arc four times a day.

"I swear to you, traffic here is worse than there," she says. "Getting on and off the highway here - people don't know how to do that."

When the Macks moved from Paris to Cincinnati, John's hometown, in 1998, they brought the Saab with them. It had 8,000 miles on the odometer then, and Alice drove it for about 52,000 more miles with the same set of tires before realizing that service technicians were rotating the tires every time she asked them to "check" them. (She thought the technicians understood she was asking them to check the pressure.)

The Saab now has 91,000 miles on it, and the "time for service" message is now in English instead of French (the technicians' doing, Alice says). It was with sadness that she took off the French license plates to make way for Ohio ones. But she still loves the car, even though her husband thinks the cup holders are "antiquated."

"I just feel that my car is a remnant from my past life," she says. "I really feel attached to it."

Lauren Bishop