Kids will groan when you tell a story, complaining that they've heard it a hundred times. Then, one day, unaccountably, they'll ask you to tell it again. Wives will insist they can tell it better.
The Pickup
When the VW died in a wreck, I bought a used 1959 pickup truck. A Chevy, I think, but possibly a Ford. I know it was light green.
I eventually took this vehicle to Wichita in late 1972, where every winter
it would fishtail a few times on icy streets.
Usually a curb would stop the spin.
One summer night, for some reason, I mindlessly locked it up when it was
parked on the street. Naturally,
somebody broke the right-side window in order to steal, um, nothing, of
course. Or maybe a fledgling thief broke
in just for the practice. In any case,
even after I had a new window put in, the vehicle still wasn’t exactly
cherry.
In fact, this truck became increasingly run down, and at one point the
windshield wipers stopped functioning correctly. That is, they would have enough poop to sweep
up to the left, but not enough to go back down to the right. I didn’t learn this in shop at AHS, but I
tied a heavy cord to the right-side wiper arm and ran the cord through the
right wing-window into the cab of truck, with enough cord in the interior to
reach over to the driver. Thus, when it
rained, I could turn on the wipers, and when they got stuck (i.e., every time
they went up to the left), I could tug on the cord so that they would return to
their “down” position. Eventually, I
improved on this design when I found that, if I shut the right wing-window on
the cord with just the right amount of tension, the cord would work like a
bungee, and the wipers would return to their “down” position with virtually no effort
by me.
One day, however, after I had parked the car to the side of the driveway
of the house I was renting, I found when I returned to it that it wouldn’t
start. As it happened—wait a minute, the
wife insists on hijacking this narrative.
Both my fathers
were race car drivers, so I grew up watching and listening to super mechanics
who knew how to make ordinary cars into faster cars, winning cars, treasured
and legendary cars. (My first car was
a '55 Chevy that could do 105 in a quarter.)
Sometime in the
late 70s, when my first father was visiting, I asked him to take a look at
the Ford truck that my professor-boyfriend had left parked beside his house’s
driveway because, he said, it wouldn't start and he didn't know what was
wrong. Professor Broadhead happened
to be out of town that weekend, so this was to be a surprise for him. (Yes, I got all As; now please try to focus
on the story.) Dad agreed to take a
look.
It was an old,
faded green truck, tired and scruffy—all
the more so as I now viewed it through my father's eyes, who at that
time had a pristine red Dino Ferrari tucked into his garage back in Bellevue,
Washington.
The first task,
of course, was to raise the hood and check for possible problems. The old engines were slight compared to the
tightly-packed conglomerations of metal you find under hoods today. Back then, you could sit on a fender with
your feet propped inside to work on one.
As we peered into
the engine compartment, Dad gave me a WTF look but said only, "The
battery." I looked.
It had tumbled from its rusty perch and collapsed onto a hose beneath
it, where it dangled by a single cable.
Dad used his
handkerchief to lift the battery back onto its little platform and reattach
the other cable while I went into the house to look for something to secure
it with.
All I could find
was a pack of multi-colored pipe cleaners, so I twisted them together and
strapped the battery back in place while Dad worked on straightening out the
hose.
We discussed
trying to start the car, but in the end it seemed best to leave well enough
alone.
Sidebar: Later, that vehicle was to become known as
"the truck I gave up for the woman I love" when he sold it to buy a
station wagon that would hold a new wife and three tall step-children. That car is a whole other story.
Marlis Manley Broadhead
|
Remember, she has an MFA in fiction.
However you tell it, this incident apparently gave Frank no very
positive opinion of my mechanical skills or general mental capabilities. I’m not sure about Marlis. But her pipe-cleaner remedy proved to be equally
as effective as my windshield wiper cord, proving that women can be just as good
with mechanical objects as men.
More about the pickup soon.
