It’s a car buff’s dream, to locate and restore an old car back to its youth and beauty, and maybe capture some of our own youth in the process. When Enid Kagan got her first car in the early 1960s, she was just 20 years old. Now, more than 40 years later, she plans to be driving that same car again.

Enid first saw the car in a television advertisement while she was living in Providence. The new 1964 Pontiac LeMans was luxe.

“I can remember that commercial still,” she says, “there was a wild cat and it kept circling on and around the car.” Enid set her mind to it and bought herself a two-door cherry-red convertible from Steingold Pontiac in Pawtucket. The car had a “hydra-matic” transmission instead of manual, and boasted a modern push-button radio. At $3,000, full sticker price, she had to finance it, but she had a good federal job, so she took on the payments and drove the car off the lot. “I didn’t know enough to haggle over price at the time,” she recalls.

Enid drove the car for eight years. In 1967, at age 23, she left Rhode Island for Los Angeles, and remembers what a great car it was to have at the time, being young in the sun in a red convertible in Tinsel Town. It’s no surprise she recalls it fondly. She also took it cross-country twice, taking old Route 66 on the way out to L.A. and a northern route on a different trip.

Kagan eventually sold the car in L.A. to a co-worker. David Turner paid her $250 in 1972 when she was about to move to Scandinavia. Turner kept the car on the road as his main form of transportation for many years; he put in a second engine, changed it over to disk brakes, even painted it blue. When Turner at last moved on to another car, he parked the Pontiac in his driveway taking it out for a spin only on occasion. The car sat for a long time.

Kagan lived in Scandinavia for almost a decade but kept in touch with her American friends. When she returned to Rhode Island in 1981, her friend David still had the car in his possession.

“He had plans to restore it,” says Kagan. “I got to go visit the car when I visited L.A.,” she says. “I got to ride around in it, drive it. It still looked good.”

Kagan hasn’t been back to L.A. in seven or eight years. She and Turner call each other on their birthdays. In March 2007, Turner called Kagan to wish her a happy birthday; he casually mentioned he might list the Pontiac on EBay Motors. They talked some more, said good-bye. But when Kagan returned the phone to its cradle, it dawned on her, maybe this was fate. Maybe the car had sat and waited for her. She called Turner back. “The car can’t go to anyone else.”

Two years of haggling passed before the two struck a deal. Kagan figures maybe Turner’s heart wasn’t really ready to sell. “He wouldn’t name a price, I had to look it up in a price guide.” Kagan did her research too. She got another friend to take photos, and had Turner list everything that was wrong. She needed to know exactly what she was getting into.

The car wasn’t so hot anymore; the parchment colored leatherette seats were split open, the dashboard cracked in multiple places, the body badly rusted with dents, it had no glove box. Eventually the two agreed on $3,500, quite a bit of appreciation when you consider the age and condition of the vehicle.

Kagan lost no time in making arrangements. She had the car shipped in a covered transport truck. The trip took nearly two weeks and cost $1,700 but it ensured the Pontiac’s safe return to Rhode Island. Though Turner backed the car onto the transport truck himself, no one was able to drive it off the truck and over to Kagan’s home— the brake fluid had leaked out during the journey, and the vehicle no longer had any brakes. Not one to get her feathers ruffled, Kagan had the car towed to her house.

When asked what she thought of the car upon its arrival, she says she was a bit shocked.

“I saw the photos, but the car was in rough shape.” She called Turner to ask where the passenger seat was. “It’s in the trunk.”

Kagan had made arrangements for a local mechanic, who also happened to be a friend of the family, to help her restore the car. Last February, he showed up at her home with a flatbed truck and hauled the car away to be worked on. He got it up on a lift and told her it wasn’t all that bad. Though she’s put quite a bit of money into restorations, the car is once again cherry-red, and all the bodywork has been completed. This month, the long arduous task of completing the interior renovation has at last begun. Kagan thinks it will be at least another three months before the car is completed, possibly much longer.

Having previously worked at the Registry of Motor Vehicles back in the ’60s, Kagan had been able to snag herself the perfect plates, “EK-20”. She says she’s seen those plates since, so there is no way to get them back, but she has registered the car.

Since 1964 Enid has owned a Saab, another Pontiac and now drives a Subaru.

And when her first love is ready for the road, Enid promises to only take it out on nice days and a photo of her behind the wheel. That’s when they both will relive their youth.