The Final Disposition of the '57 Chevy Sedan Delivery

 In another post (the one right below this one) I talked about once owning a 1957 Chevrolet Sedan Delivery. It was a rare model, as I said, and as far as I know, mine was one of only two in the entire Kansas City area. Granted, that's not a huge area, but whatever. That's rare. 

I drove it around Independence, where I lived, for several months after I first arrived from the SF Bay Area, and it served me well. Then one day I was driving along a four-lane road and crossed a bridge that was short and quite high--I mean there was little visibility--and ran into another car that was proceeding from left to right from a parking lot on the north side of the street to another parking lot (a Hudson gas station, actually) on the south side. There was no warning and I'm not sure what that guy thought he was doing. My car pretty much crumpled from the front doors forward, ruined the grill, the hood, the radiator, and damaged the water pump, and bent the frame also, as it turned out. 

I was thrown forward (no seat belts) and my right hand slid into the glove box, which had popped open, and I cut my hand on the locking mechanism of the glove box door. No, none of this stuff was made of plastic. 

The police came and the other guy was issued a ticket. I was sitting in the back seat of the police car, having been invited to do so--I was not in trouble, as remarkable as that may sound--and the other guy's parents arrived. The other guy, I note, was probably in his thirties. The mother talked briefly to the officer in the front of the car I was sitting in, and was crying. When she moved away, the cop turned in his seat and said to me, "She'll cry when she sees this ticket I'm giving her son."  I felt pretty vindicated, or at least "in-the-right." I was in an accident and it was clearly established that it was NOT MY FAULT. You remember stuff like that. 

The father came up and said something to the cop, then asked me if I had insurance. (I learned later he was a lawyer.) I did not. He said, "Yeah, that's tough when NO ONE has insurance." (Emphasis mine.) Anyway, I was eighteen and I had no idea how this stuff works. All I knew was that my car was totaled. 

By the way, at that time, which was the late Sixties, I'm pretty sure all I would have gotten for my car would be the Blue Book value, which was probably a couple hundred bucks. The rarity of that model would not have entered into the calculation. I was just out of luck, and on foot. 

The story doesn't deserve too much real estate here. Eventually I sold the car to someone who apparently had access to a frame straightening shop or something. It was winter, and I had parked the car beside a gas station I worked at. The buyer asked if I could deliver the car to his house. I figured I could--since it was winter--if I disconnected all the broken stuff from the engine, which was the generator and the water pump and drove it the two or three miles. I charged up the battery so all I needed to do was make sure the engine didn't get too hot in the short drive. It was about 25 degrees out that day, so that was actually no problem. 

The big surprise was just how damn good that engine ran without the water pump and generator hooked up to it. I had no idea that those two accessories "robbed" so much horsepower. So it was kind of fun ferrying the car across town, but it made me wish real hard that I could figure out a way to keep it and resurrect it somehow. Oh well, as they say. 

That's almost the end of that story. I was always kind of peeved that I lost a car, got no recompense, and the guy that caused the wreck maybe got a ticket. If I had insurance, it would have been a little different, but not by much, as I said. The real end of the story was when I visited the house of a new girlfriend. I was sitting on the living room couch waiting to take Ellen out when one of her uncles came by for something. I was introduced and he kept saying my last name over and over again, as if trying to jog his memory. "Do I know you?" he asked. 

I shook my head, but he was the father of the guy who drove his car in front of me that fateful day and claimed he had no insurance. But I really didn't care, by that time. 

Memory (two) Lane

I sometimes think about how I left California when I got out of high school and wound up in Missouri. I seriously thought you were supposed to leave town once you graduated. Why would you not? I still kind of think that, but I realize now that a good argument could be made to the contrary. 

It took me all summer to get my car in a good enough state of repair that I would trust it for a road trip like that. Well, I didn’t worry about it too much.  A little maybe—as much as I could worry about anything back then—but I must point out that my casual attitude was due not so much to lack of angst as it was to lack of information. I know a lot more now, and I could worry retroactively if I thought there was any point.  Kind of like watching Titanic.  At any rate, I eventually came around to this idea: Kansas City was a couple thousand miles from the Bay Area (San Francisco Bay,) it was about a three-day drive, thus, all I was asking of my car was that it last three more days. That’s like leaving work on a Friday before a three-day weekend and saying to your co-workers, see ya’ Tuesday! It would never occur to you to check with a couple people to see if they might be available to give you a ride to work. Three days. What could go wrong?

Probably only because I didn’t know any better, I made it. There was the incident with the new retread being out-of-round. I don’t know how that happens. I stopped and bought a used tire at a gas station in Kingman, Arizona, in the middle of the night. The best one they had seemed to have most of its remaining tread in the center, so I overinflated it a bit and went on. 

And the car ran and served me well for a long time after I got to Missouri.  Not a real long time, but a long time. That’s another story. That was a great car, though. It was a 1957 Chevrolet Sedan Delivery. As such, it was a two-door station wagon with no side windows behind the doors, just metal panels.  It had no back seat, and the rear tailgate was a single piece that hinged from the top, unlike the tradition station wagons. For a kid in the late Sixties, it was gold. A very rare, very cool looking machine. Mine was yellow, and there was only one other ’57 Sedan Delivery in the entire area. It was green, because I saw it once. 

This lent me a small amount of status when I got to Independence, Missouri, because I had this kind of hippy wagon with California plates, no less, and I had long hair. But therein lied another problem, which is that every cop either in Kansas City or Independence who saw my bright yellow hippy wagon, then saw the California plates, and then me, would inevitably pull me over. It was always under some manufactured pretext, usually that a car was stolen “answering the description” of my car. Which would be a yellow 1957 Chevrolet Sedan Delivery?  Hardly likely. Like I said—the other one was green. It took me three or four stops before I caught on. I learned to be polite. Once, I was stopped in the small town of Sugar Creek, which nestles right up against Independence, and asked if I was lost. I replied that I was only looking for 24 Highway (I knew where it was.)  

Oh, he said. Then you’re just passing through. Yep, I replied. Good, he said. “We have a nice little town here and we want to keep it that way.” I agreed whole-heartedly, and he let me go on. 

I wasn’t really a hippy, is the ironic part. At some point I got a haircut, but that didn’t help. All of this stopped when I finally got my Missouri license plates. I can’t help but think I would have gotten along a lot better if I had driven a Rambler to Missouri. Good cars. I wish I had one now. 

Just How Bad Am I on the Guitar?

 This is my Father's Day post. The main tradition of the day, accepting collect phone calls from progeny, is no longer honored, because cell phones, so I might wind up buying lunch for my son instead. But, anyway, the post isn't about Father's Day, it's just Father's Day, and I'm posting here. 

But, since it is Father's Day, perhaps indulge me while I tell an excruciatingly boring story. That's another tradition, but I think I'm low on tradition, maybe, and anyhow my father wasn't one of those fathers. He actually told interesting stories--funny, leaning slightly toward self-deprecation. That is something I do, too, and as a matter of fact I submit that it is probably genetic, somehow, since I only met my father a handful of times, resulting in such a short span of accumulated time I could not possibly have "picked up"anything from him.

He played the ukulele, I know, and his father before him. In fact, Grandpa lived in a retirement nursing home whatever and organized a ukulele band with the other residents. The lyrics of the one song (intended to be a duet) my father sang one day in his kitchen in Hilo, Hawaii while accompanying himself on the ukulele were:

Aloha oy,

You smell like poi.

I know I do,

But so do you.

For the record, poi smells bad. Real bad. Also for the record, as an aside, I note that I think possibly the only persistent memory I have of my grandfather was from a time when he was younger than I am at the moment, at this writing. The main thing I took from him was that he took naps, so, genetics, and I can't be blamed and accused of being a ne'er-do-well layabout. 

My step-father gave me my first guitar when I was about 12. It was maybe one level above "toy guitar," and that is being generous. It was painted in a color and pattern that today would be called "tobacco sunburst," if that means anything to you. The action (distance of strings above the fingerboard) was so high that it was pretty much unplayable, and playing it anyway made your fingers hurt. Certain chords could only be accomplished with the use of extreme downward force, or a C-clamp on certain strings. 

The one advantage of this particular guitar as a beginner's instrument, compared to, say, a trumpet, or drums, was that it wasn't very loud and couldn't be heard that well. 

Anyway, for some reason I felt like I really had to learn to play this thing. Popular culture at the time told me so.  But, for me, the learning curve on this thing wasn't really a curve at all, nor was it a slope. It was more like being on a flat plain walking toward the mountains in the distance, but they never seem to get any nearer. Like driving through Nevada, let's say. 

Later that same decade, my mom and her boyfriend gave me another guitar. A Yamaha.  Ahh, this was much, much better. I picked it up and, instantly, I played better. I don't remember the exact model, but I wish I still had it. Of course, when I say "I played better," please note that the word, better, is by definition, a relative term. OK. 

I bought a brand new guitar when I was in my Twenties. Alvarez.  Better yet. I still have it, but sadly it is starting to warp, and to be honest, it never was a great guitar. It certainly wasn't that expensive for when I bought it in the early Seventies. This is the guitar I had when my son was born. At that time I had given up playing and put the Alvarez in a closet and pretty much forgot about it. When my son was two, I decided to drag it out so I could show it to him. 

He was very excited.  He pointed at it and said, quite clearly, "Loot!" 

Seeing a learning opportunity, I smiled and said, "This is a 'guitar.'  Can you say 'guitar?' "  

His little brow furrowed.  "Lute!" he repeated. 

"No, this is a guitar." I was such a good father. 

"Lute!" Now he was getting a little agitated in his efforts to teach me the word for this thing. I let it go, sat on the edge of the bed, him beside me, and made chords while he strummed.

On Writing (Again)

 It might be presumptuous of me to even start with this premise, but, if you had seen my blog before yesterday, you might have noticed that I had a page devoted to explaining my work-in-progress, the Busy Bee Cafe. In it I said some of my posts were labeled Busy Bee Interlude, where I had written experimental chapters, back stories, and maybe even a couple of serious drafts. 

After discussion with my partner/girlfriend/resident molecular biologist, I decided to take all that down, simply because if I was actually serious about publishing any of this, it would probably behoove me to keep it out of sight until then, for copyright reasons. 

That in itself might be presumptuous, but, hey, that's alright. Plus, I don't know anything about copyright law. 

This all brings up the subject of choosing an audience when writing something. my P/G/RMB is writing a book about, for one thing, hemoglobin. For her, knowing her audience is easy. It's not exactly a text book, but the same people will be reading it. For me, I have no idea. But, it IS sci-fi. I guess. Although I waver. 

Speaking of experimental chapters, I've been waffling on POV and first-person vs third-person, and narrator status. And somewhere along the line I became aware that my "voice" on my blog posts is different, (I think better,) than my narrative voice when writing a story. A blog audience, I think, tends to keep me informal and skew my style away from prose-y description. It's sort of like how none of us would talk to a group of friends, say, over a restaurant table in the same way we would write a story. But could the reverse work? And, you know, nobody wants to sound like William F. Buckley. I just can't look words up in the dictionary fast enough, for one thing. 

So, bottom line, I'm too old to spend too much time trying to figure this out right now.  And something about letting chips fall where they may. 

Have a good one. It's hump-day, if you're working. Slide on in to the weekend. You aren't paid enough. 

Take My Blog

Technology is wonderful. We know it is because we are being told so over and over again. Computers can do just about anything that we think up for them to do. We are just around the corner from making them like humans, probably with a soul and everything. As soon as we iron out a few glitches, they will drive our cars for us and never make mistakes. They will brake, swerve, and decide whether to run over the woman with the baby carriage or the Millennial computer programmer who is walking out into traffic with his nose in his iPhone, based on an irrefutable algorithm designed by . . . oops . . . a Millennial programmer. Oh well! 

I'm thinking that technology, and I stress, at least the day-to-day stuff we all deal with, is actually not all that good. We think it is, as I said, because we're constantly being told that it is. This does not explain why, when you Google the string windows update failed there will be roughly 452,000,000 hits. Consider the percentage of times the card reader at the store, gas station, fast food joint, whatever, won't work properly. Really?  I mean, should that happen as much as it does?  In the 21st Century?? Does your cell phone work properly all the time? What is your car dashboard thinking when it finds the restaurant you asked for in Rhode Island, when you are in Missouri? 

Should hackers be able to sneak ransomware onto corporate computer systems on pretty much a daily basis? Should Ford Motor Company sell me features on my new car that will only work on an app that requires I buy a new iPhone because the app requires a newer operating system than what my phone will support? Does any of this make my life better? 

I think it's all marketing hype, like how social media platforms lead us to believe how awesome we are when in fact the bulk of us are stunningly average.  Take my blog. Please.

Liminal Spaces

Anyway, liminal spaces. It's uncomfortable, flirting with existential angst. One time when I was a little kid, I wondered how my Etch-A-Sketch worked, so I carefully and methodically used the two knobs to draw lines on the screen back and forth, working my way down the screen until it was a solid mass of lines, clearing it, and allowing the inner workings to be revealed. (Would a crazy person do that?? At least give me points for not smashing it with a hammer.) I saw the little cables and pulleys that enabled the XY grid, and while it was kind of disappointing, I understood!  Truth to tell, it made me better at Etch-A-Sketch, but at the same time, it lost its magic. 

I'm not exactly sure how that relates to liminal spaces, but it feels like it does. The infrastructure of our world, including the inner workings of the Etch-A-Sketch, I guess, sitting idle, vacant, we find unsettling, but I'm not sure why. Does it remind us how silly this all is?  That without the walls and the levers and pulleys, we are . . . what? 

The Demise of a Tree

The day before yesterday, the tree company came. They were to "remove" the tree in the front yard, for one thing. The word "removed" was used instead of the phrase "cut down" for the same reason, I think, that dentists refer to yanking teeth out as "removing" or, better yet, "extracting." 

So they hacked down the tree.  It was not a good tree, and had never been properly pruned, so it looked like an enormous, noxious weed and even had a split between two of the leaders, which means the tree had more than one trunk--the result of wild growth with no mediation. They said it would die within a two or three year period.  Down it went. I made a video of it because how often do you get to see a tree being felled? Right? I put the video on Facebook.

One kind person posted a comment that read something like, nice looking tree--why did it have to be cut down? I explained, carefully wording my response so that everyone understood I am not a mean person. This was because the comment right before that was:

    WHY???!!!

So, OK, I get it; I killed a tree. 

I'm not one of those people who thinks trees should be cut down because either 1.) they produce leaves that are difficult to pick up, or b.) we need the paper, but I like to think I have the whole plant thing in proper perspective. I wanted to respond to the "WHY" comment with something like, calm down. It's not like we ATE IT after we cut it down. That would have been truly disgusting, to EAT a plant, ew, gross. 

But I am seldom rewarded for snark on Facebook. 

Keep Trump Off Facebook

I enjoy my Facebook as much as the next guy, but I grow tired of the politics, and of Zuckerberg's calls on how to handle Trump's negative, destructive presence on it. If this starts up again, I will quit, if for no other reason than to add a little calm to my life, which is too short, by the way, to lend space to Trump and his ilk. 

From the website: 

Keep Trump Off Facebook

Any day now, Facebook could reinstate Donald Trump's accounts. I don’t want to even imagine Facebook reinstating Trump. We’ve lived through the trauma of his Facebook posts in the past. No amount of ad dollars can justify giving him back his blowhorn for violent extremism, disinformation, hate, and discrimination.

Join me in fighting to keep Trump off Facebook: https://www.keeptrumpofffacebook.com/

Have a good one!  -Roy

Edit: 6/5 It looks like Facebook is keeping Trump off their platform for two more years. I applaud that, but I still wonder what the absolutely correct actions would look like. We have yet to even figure out what "correct" is. 

Stories

 I have always held a (half-baked) theory that the stories we write are like dreams. In school, it always seemed that to analyze a novel or a short story was akin to analyzing the author herself. At least, I thought that in many cases the conclusions might have been just as valid. Stories written by masterful writers, of course, would be more lucid and more consciously thought out and arranged. Then I always ask myself, how often do authors read their reviews and smile at the extra ideas that had been projected onto their work. (Or maybe, not smile.) 

From a comment exchange of a few days ago: maybe dreams start out as random neural firings in the brain as it performs its nightly housekeeping chores. Maybe then, our brains being what they are, our subconscious starts valiantly to connect the dots, and thus creates a story--our dream. This seems very much like the process of creating and writing a story--even if it happens while we sleep. 

I constantly read that authors universally dislike the question, where do you get your ideas? Maybe because they kind of understand that the ideas are already in their heads. Where else?