All the Cars I loved Before?

Dear Blog Reader

I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine. It was enjoyable to turn the keyboard over to the lovely Miss Beverly for the blog entry yesterday. She is such a good writer.

It is a great day for Ground Hogs day; the Super Bowl, a Sunday, blog writing day, and the tender affections of the lovely Miss Beverly. I don’t know if the metaphysics can be worked out again but sign me up for the Bill Murray role. I can even handle another 3 inches of snow. Speaking of which, I hope the ground hog got frostbite this morning. They are just big field rats; big field rats that eat soybeans from farm fields and dig out the foundation of your barns.

The cold continues to suck mice into our house. As the old clique mentions, we have decided to make this lemon tree provide fresh squeezed lemonade. We have hit on a surprisingly popular buffet concept. We call it Snappy’s Peanut Butter Buffet. We are committed to serving the mouse

community all of the organic peanut butter they can eat. We have been doing steady business. It appears that we need to get a healthier clientele. So far, all eight patrons have eaten themselves to death. It is sad. However, it hasn’t slowed business yet.

I appreciate the kind words about last week’s story. It is still an exciting story to tell. I was amazed when I found that all of the verbs were in the present tense. It was like my fingers were translating mental images in 2014 and not in 1979. I found myself having to edit the present back into the past. It was a unique writing experience.

Last week’s blog was intended to be a recounting of all the cars in my life. You could say that it was sidetracked by the freight train of that singular story. The only problem is that it leaves the stories of all of the other cars left untold. They were fine cars and fine stories. Like Doug Pitt, Brad’s older brother, he as a perfectly captivating story to tell but let’s face it he’s Doug and not Brad.

At the time of standing by the railroad crossing contemplating the what might have beens, I was within a year of being granted the privilege of driving. Living on the farm vehicles to drive from here to there were plentiful. These had a social hierarchy that revolved around the age of the vehicle and the general state of repair. Being the newest driver, my lot fell to an Opal Kadet. It was a sub-compact red wagon. It’s overall mechanical fitness was best exemplified by the fact that you could rock the transmission back and forth in it’s mount with the handle. This amount of play was also transmitted to the handle based on the amount of torque the little 4 cylinder engine produced. The moving gearshift handle made for an interesting shift when you would reach over and it may or may not be where you left it.

That was a fun car that taught me everything that I needed to know about defensive driving. You see the brakes did not work very well. The emergency brake was well named in that car. You never knew if when you pushed on the brakes if they would have any stopping power. You may well be coming up to a stop sign and push the pedal all of the way to the floor and not slow down. In fact because of the panic reflex, you could likely also depress the accelerator and speed up. So a careful driver would soon learn to have your hand hovering over the emergency brake ready to pull on it like a parachute ripcord as you came up to a changing light.

Luckily, I drove that Kadet for two years without incident. I was able to put myself in a 1976 Camero. It was the color of green M&M’s. This was quite unfortunate because green M&M’s were reported to make you horny. This is also the car in which I used to court the lovely Miss Beverly. Sister’s being what they are, the car being the color that it was, me being in the state that I was in (no not Indiana), that Camero was dubbed the “Horny Mobile.” I know how Oscar felt when people hurtfully named his car the “Weiner Mobile.” I can feel his pain. Well because of or in spite of the name, it worked out and Bev and I drove off into the sunset towards Lafayette on the evening of June 8^th with the just married sign taped to the back window.

The horny mobile got me through college. Yes, you guessed it. It was the too small car featured in “A Pressing Memory”, written last November. The horny mobile ran great on into my first paying job. The lovely Miss Beverly had spent a summer working the night shift at Frito Lay (no relation to the horny mobile.) She had worked a lot of overtime so we had a nest egg built. In the fall, Bev lost the car keys.

I don’t know if it is nature or nurture, but the lovely Miss Beverly under appreciated car keys in the early days of our marriage. Growing up on a farm, it was easy to do. One did not carry keys with them. No one was around to steal the car; just leave the keys in it. That way you never had to remember where you left them. The keys were rarely locked in the car because we never locked our cars on the farm. Well Dorothy, we weren’t in Kansas any more and you couldn’t leave the keys in the car. They would be taken out of the car, set down, and forgotten. Thankfully, there was a positive way to reinforce the care of car keys. We established key appreciation day early in our marriage. Every other Thursday, the lovely Miss Beverly and I would appreciate the keys. We would make it a point to know where they were at all times during that day. The habits learned during key appreciation day were soon carried over to everyday and we would go months without the keys being lost.

However, on one October night, distracted by a huge genetics test, Bev lost the keys while on campus. She came home to tell me, and I went out and bought a brand spanking new Subaru Hatchback. It seems a bit impulsive. The horny mobile was old. We had the money, or knew of a bank that had the money, and had yet to experience the joy of being upside down on a car loan. That blue car took me back to my manual transmission days with the Kadet. Fortunately, the brakes worked perfectly. In fact, it was the perfect car until our backs gave out with putting Ben into the car seat with a two door car. That lead to the dessert years of minivans; the brown, the blue, the blue, the red minivans of our child raising years; years and minivans that brought the lovely Miss Beverly and I to our great farming adventure. Minivans not only hauled soccer teams and skateboard crews, they also doubled as Farmer’s Market vehicles. Pull out the back seats, lay down a tarp; and Old MacDonald was off to Farmer’s Market on Saturday morning.

Those dog days of automobile ownership are past. Bev and I have gravitated to the machines that we like best. She has another Subaru. I am fond of used Lexus’. Two weeks ago, I was cleaning the $6.67 out of the console of my 2000 Lexus with 272,000 miles on it, getting ready to put 200,000 miles on a younger sibling, thinking about all of the other cars that I had driven, thankful for getting from point A to point B.

Take care,

Roger