Note to Self...

I’ve been doing a lot of cleaning. Going through reams of old mail, undealt with paper from years past. I come across enigmatic notes to myself like this one, written on the front of an unopened piece of mail:

Sat. 29– after Tgiv.
safety, health
prob. sleeping in church
safety of possessions
don’t know where going exactly

What on earth does this mean? Is it a list of my own making, or was I taking notes from a phone call? Was it a list of prayer requests? If so, why would I or anyone else pray for “safety of possessions”? Does “prob.” stand for “probably” or “problem”? And that last line: “don’t know where going exactly”; what on earth does that mean?

I come across these strange little notes to myself a lot. Usually they're scribbled on unopened envelopes, napkins from restaurants, checking account deposit slips (goodness knows, I don't use them for their intended purpose), and the backs of crumpled old receipts that I fish out of my purse. I write little bits of stories that I think of, odd snippets of conversations that I either overhear or just imagine, bits of remembered dreams, to-do lists, and other random “notes to self.”

Many of them I can remember what their original purpose was, or there is at least enough in the note for me to be able to figure it out. But it is these odd ones that really cause me consternation. They seem important, yet I know that at this point, I'll never again know what they meant. I find these forgotten notes quite disturbing, as they seem to be ellipses in my life. Were they something I should have followed through on? Something I should have done, or resolved, or prayed about? Why were they important enough to write down?

One of my favorite (and most frequent) notes to self are potentially important phone numbers written on the same scraps of paper mentioned above. They are just phone numbers. No names written near them, no notes that might identify to whom the number belongs, no date to even inform me whether the number was written so long ago that I can safely discard it now. In the past, I kept these phone numbers, hastily inscribed on little bits of paper, thinking that maybe they were important and that their identity would come to me when I needed them. But that has never happened. So now I just throw them away, even though it causes me a little distress.

When I find these mysterious little notes, I try to use them as a reminder to myself to write better—more complete and self-explanatory—notes in the future. But I continue to write my enigmatic little notes to myself that run the gamut from the ordinary (Dentist, 10:00 a.m.) to the existential (don't know where going exactly) to the just plain odd (crazy old man with gun standing in road). I wish I would stop doing this, but it seems to just be my way.

Blogger's Block

I put off writing a blog for a long time. The reason was that I had come across many blogs that had started out well but then either petered out over a short period of time or just abruptly came to a halt after a short period of time. I didn't want to have that sort of blog. The kind where you write regularly for a little while, and then yours becomes yet another bit of detritus floating about in cyberspace. So I thought long and hard before I started this blog. I didn't want to do it unless I was going to stick with it. I vowed that I would write something new at least two or three times a week for my adoring fans (all three of them). Being a writer by trade, I knew that this would take some effort and that there would be times when I didn't feel like it. But I wanted to develop the discipline of writing even when I didn't “feel” like it, when the muse did not sing into my ear, when nothing seemed funny or interesting, when the inspiration pool was completely dried up, and when I was just plain tired (and cranky).

I had a good start, but then, like many bloggers, I had a rough spell in which I did very little writing for several months, followed by a renewed determination to forge ahead. I've been pretty regular about writing lately, even when I haven't had much to say. I know that sometimes my blog is pretty dull, but the point is to make myself write even when it's difficult. That means that every post will not necessarily inspire, amuse, or enlighten my readership.

So, I've been thinking today about what to write about, and I just haven't been able to dredge up anything. I tried to think of some funny stories from the past, I tried to think of lessons I've learned lately, I tried to think of anything at all that might be even mildly interesting to write about. But I didn't really want to write about any of the ideas I came up with. I once had to write an article about a parking lot that was going to be closed for a couple of months. “Good grief!” I had thought at the time, how am I going to pull this off? I needed to come up with about 350 words on a subject that could be summed up in a headline. Yet, once I got started on the article, I ended up going over my limit and I had to edit it down to 350 words. I had a lot to say about that closed parking lot, it turned out.

I tried to use that as inspiration. I thought about funny stories about stupid classes I took in college (golf, bowling, industrial geography). I thought about the many hilarious stories that my family has about our clumsiness, our multitudinous accidents, our trips to the emergency room, and similar tales of injury and hilarity. Yes, some of them are good stories, but I just didn't feel like writing about them today.

I ended up deciding to write about having nothing to write about. I figured that that is a subject that I could go on about forever. In fact, I've already written four full paragraphs about it, and I'm only just now getting started. Ha, ha! Just kidding. This will end soon, for those of you who are still reading at this point (I assume that to be absolutely no one). But really, now that I'm writing about it, I find that I have a lot to say about not being able to think of anything to write about. My point in writing this blog—besides becoming wildly popular with millions of readers across the globe who found it while researching the plight of women living in poverty throughout the world—was to develop some discipline about writing and thereby improving the quality of my writing. The point is not to always have something interesting to say and saying it as succinctly as possible. The point is to be able to say nothing at all as eloquently as possible.

So, now that I've come to some kind of point, I will stop writing about not being able to write about anything. And I said it in just 735 words.

The Gospel of Sweet Tea

We who are from the Southern U.S. become familiar with iced tea, and particularly sweet tea, from the time that we begin drinking anything besides mother's milk. Sweet tea is just a natural part of life in the South, and it flows like water across every strata of society, class, race, and generation. If there is anything that Southerners can agree on, I think that it is sweet tea. Now, how to barbecue a piece of meat (and which kind and cut of meat to barbecue) is in dispute in every Southern state, and sometimes within regions of the same state. Not every Southerner even agrees on what constitutes “the South,” an argument I do not plan to even approach in this treatise. But sweet tea is sweet tea just about anywhere, from Kentucky to Louisiana and from South Carolina to Mississippi and everywhere in between. A Georgian can go into a diner in Tennessee and order tea and know that it is going to be 1) served with plenty of ice and 2) sweet. Very sweet, usually.

I have always loved iced tea. I remember when I was about eight years old, my oldest brother, R, taught me how to make it. At that time, R was the primary tea-preparer in our home. He had learned how to do it from Mom, and he passed the knowledge on to the rest of us as soon as we were allowed to boil water in a pan on the stove. He showed me how much water to boil, how many tea bags to use (depending on the size pitcher he was going to use), and—the really key part—how much sugar to add to the boiling hot water. And then he added what made our house tea better than my friends' teas at home. We would have already gone out to the back yard and cut a couple of sprigs of spearmint that mom had planted in the shade right up against the wall of the house. He would stir these mint sprigs into the hot water, where they would add just a light minty flavor to the tea, and that would give our tea that extra boost of refreshment on a hot Southern summer day. (By the way, you take the mint out before you serve the tea. No one wants limp black mint leaves in their tea.)

I learned two basic lessons about food preparation from my brother and my dad. My dad taught me that there is never, ever any reason to use anything other than real potatoes when serving potatoes for dinner. Dad thought that instant mashed potatoes were an abomination on the earth and a possible sign of the Apocalypse. Dad preached that there is never any time in our lives when we cannot take the little bit of extra time to peel (optional), boil, and mash real potatoes to make any kind of potato dish. My dad never had an instant potato or anything made from potato flakes in his life. Similarly, my brother R taught me that there is never, never, never, never, ever any reason why a person would choose to make instant iced tea over brewed iced tea. To R, making tea was almost as simple as getting water from the kitchen faucet, or as easy as dad's real mashed potatoes. It didn't take very long at all to whip up a big, sparkling pitcher of fresh iced tea. Why would anyone ever drink that awful instant tea mix? It doesn't even taste like tea. Instant tea is to real tea what orange Koolaid is to orange juice. There's just no comparison.

So, during my time in Boston, I was determined to do what I could to spread the gospel of iced tea. I knew right away that I had my work cut out for me when, on my first day, I was served “iced tea” in a large pitcher. I could tell from the color that it was instant, not brewed. Even worse, these Northerners think that just because a drink was made with cold water or has been in the refrigerator, you can call it “iced” and dispense with serving it in a glass heaped with ice cubes. So, my first week or so in Boston, I had to try to drink cold instant tea. It just made me miss home all the more.

I and a fellow Tennessean decided to set things straight, and we started making our own sweet tea. It went over fairly well; people seemed to enjoy drinking it, but it was hard to keep enough made to serve a large group of people who were drinking tea all day long. By the time that lunch or dinner came, we'd be out of tea again. But the idea had begun to take hold. Some of the Northerners' eyes had been opened to the epiphany that real, brewed tea is a whole 'nother animal from instant. They started requesting it. Then, some people started making it on their own. They—being Northern adults—could not be indoctrinated into the cult of Sweet Tea as Southern children are, so they made some mistakes in the beginning. When we were low on tea bags, they suggested that we could use green tea. (Blecchhh!!) Yes, I know that some drink makers are producing bottled green tea to be served cold. Some people even claim to like it. But I've tried it, and it's really awful stuff. One has to think of it as something completely different from real iced tea to even get it down. Another person, who liked the idea of “natural” sweetener over processed white sugar, started sweetening her iced tea with honey. She also reduced the amount to tone down the “sweet” part of sweet tea. Well, that might float in Boston, but it'd get you run out of town on a rail down South. We like our processed white sugar, and we like copious amounts of it in our iced tea.

I will not be in Boston much longer. I may not have accomplished much while I was here, but if I did even a little to spread the gospel of the joys of real sweet tea in the Northern regions, then I feel some satisfaction in a job well done. Since I've been here, I've been to a couple of restaurants that served unsweet iced tea, which is a step in the right direction. I like to think that I might come back in a few years and find that every restaurant in Boston will know what you mean when you say that you would like sweet tea.

It's Like Your Mama Always Said

I find that much of the advice I'm getting these days from highly esteemed professionals whose services I pay for is pretty much in line with what my mother always said. The problem was that I didn't listen to my mother much of the time, and even when I did listen, I didn't usually do what she said.

The latest one is the Premack Principle, or Premack's Principle, which “suggests that if a person wants to perform a given activity, the person will perform a less desirable activity to get at the more desirable activity.” [wikipedia] The idea is that if you have two tasks that you need to perform, and one is more desirable to you than the other, you should do the less desirable task firsst because this will keep you from procrastinating on the less desirable task, since you really want to get to the desirable task.

I procrastinate a LOT. This is, in fact, a skill that I picked up from my mother, both genetically and experientially. My mom can procrastinate with the best of them, although I think that I have perfected the activity into an art form. Maybe both my mom and I should've listened when she said, “If you don't eat your peas and carrots, you aren't going to get dessert.” When we are young children, this is the most common way that we hear Premack's Principle stated. If you don't do [undesirable] Task A, then you won't get [desirable] Task B. Growing up, we also hear it stated as “No TV till you've finished your homework,” and “You're not going anywhere with your friends till you've done your chores.”

So, it turns out that the strategies that my mom used to motivate me to do anything as a child is not only valid, but it has been proved valid in funded studies engineered by highly qualified psychology professors and graduate students. If only I had listened to my mom, I would not be paying professionals to give me this advice.

I Miss My Mind

I am a ruminator (not a ruminant, which is an animal that has multiple stomachs and chews on cud). I didn't really know this until recently. Very recently. I always thought that the way in which I rolled ideas around in my head and thought through them over and over and over and over again was just how human beings think. I would review all of the happenings of my day (both actual and imagined), processs them, tell them to myself over and over again to set them in concrete, decide what to do about them, make up other people's parts of the conversation in my head, embellish them, and just generally have fun with my own thoughts. I've done this all my life. This is what people do, I assumed.

But then they told me that my brain works differently from other people's brains. That I think too much and that I need to stop it. So they put me on a new medication to make me like everyone else. (I wanted to be like everyone else.) At first the medication seemed to not be working, as I didn't see any real difference in how I felt. Until a couple of nights ago, as I was lying in bed, waiting for unconsciousness. This is one of my favorite times to review my day; think everything over once, twice, or 38 times; decide what I should've said or done; and come to the conclusion that I am an idiot. Now, I do not mean that I always come to the conclusion that I am an idiot. Sometimes, I decide that other people are idiots, but in the end, I don't come off looking so good eaither. Still, I run and jump and play with my thoughts for a wihle, until sleep overtakes me (about 17 seconds afeter I lie down). There are other times that I spend even more time with my thoughts, like when I'm awake. Pretty much all of the time I'm awake, in fact. Generally speaking, my thoughts entertain and occupy me during the boring parts of my day (called “life”). Sometimes they play a little rough, which is not much fun. But I put up with their harshness because they also help me figure things out, tell stories, play with words, and other fun stuff.

So, I was lying there in bed, ready to review the day, and I came to the realization that the film footage was not running. There was also no tape playing. There was just...silence. So I waited around for some thoughts to show up, as they always do. But they didn't. They didn't want to come out and play. I went looking for them.

“Yoo hoo!” I hollered through the open door. “Come on out now! It's time to play.”

Nothing.

“Hey, really! Come on out so that I can take a look at you. I need to see how my day went, how I did, what's going on in my life.”

Nothing. Just silence. I went in the door and really starting looking for them in all of the nooks and crannies, the corners and closets, the dusty attic, the dank basement. I looked everywhere, but I couldn't find any thoughts at all to play with.

I tried to generate some actual new thoughts. But I couldn't. I just couln't get anything going in my brain. I wasn't particularly sleepy, so it wasn't that my brain was saying that it needed to rest. It just didn't particularly feel like filling me in on how my day had gone. I hung around in my empty brain for a while and then I fell asleep frm boredom.

Several times the next day, I went looking for my thoughts and still couldn't find them. No funny comments, no self-reproach, no criticisms of myself or the world around me, nothing. Since then, I've been looking everywhere for my thoughts, but I just can't find many of them. They tend to be factual things like, “I need to get out of bed now” or “It's time for breakfast.” At other times, when it should be running off and doing other things, I find that my brain is actually paying attention to what is going on and being said around it and then responding appropriately with genuine, sincere, useful ideas that might help myself or other people.

This is so strange. I do not know what to make of it. Did my brain suddenly grow up? Become an adult? Every great once in a while, it makes a joke, but it's not as funny as usual. I do not know what to make of this dearth of ideas. Is this how it is for other pepole? Do they just think finite, concrete things about their day, about what they need to do, about other people? I thought that all I wanted was to be like other people, but now I'm not so sure. This silence in my brain is quite disturbing. I don't feel like a robot or a Stepford wife. I still feel like me. Just me without something. Maybe this is what adulthood is like. It's what I always feared adulthood would be like. No nonsense. Get down to business. Make a schedule. Eat a good breakfast. File your taxes before the deadline. Pay attention in meetings. Don't make silly comments. Be serious. Life is not all fun and games, you know.

It's not bad, really. It's just kind of boring in here without my thoughts. It's been several days now, and they don't seem to be inclined to come back. I wonder if I'll get used to this new way of using my brain and eventually not miss my old thoughts. I've spent so much time the last few years trying to figure out how not to have certain thoughts that it never occurred to me that there were some thoughts that I wanted to keep. I want those thouhts back, but the others you can keep. But what if it's an all-or-nothing proposition? Hmmm. I'll have to think about that.

Jenna and the Secret Seriviece

So it turns out that I've been living near and walking past Mitt Romney's Boston-area condo for the last couple of months. I mean, walking right past it. Who knew?

I found out on Super Tuesday, when there were a bunhc of media people and Secret Service guys hanging out in our neighborhood. It took a while for word to trickle down to us what was going on, but we eventually all heard about our cfamous neighbor.

We joked around quite a bit about various things that we could do to get Mitt's attention. But we were aware that our antics were more likely to attaract the Secret Service guys' attention and land us in federal prison. There were litrerally Secret Service guys prowiling around in the woods behind Mitt's condo, keeping the area safe for democracy.

We pretty much agave up the idea of approaching Mitt's condo. (You may questio my use of Mitts first name instead of using the more journalistic “Romney” but I figuere that since were' neighbors, we can be on a first-name basis.) So anyway, we joked about trying to approach the condo but we all decided that there are wose things than being a mental hospital, and federal prison is one of them.

That's why I was really surprised when Jenna came in fairly late last nigt and said, “I talked to the Secret service!” It turns out that she wrote a quick letter to Mitt, put it in an envelope, and then wandered up to the condo. Jshe was wearing jeans and a black T-sohirt with some words on it (not words like “Anarchy rules!” or “DEMOCRAT.”) and she said that the Secret Service guys started coming towad her, saying, “Ma'am, ma'am, what yare you doing?” “You can't come up here.” “Stop where you are! Get on the ground! Face down with your hands behind your head!” Ha, ha. Not really. Well, they said the first two things but they didn't say that last bit. So, Jenna, who is in her late 20s and looks about 15, said “I just wanted to deliver a letter to Mr. Romney.”

They asked what kind of leter it was. She carefully ecxplaiened that it was a very repspectful letter, tahnkaking him for hit community involvement . It was not a ltetter saying that she had his children and would release them for a certain sum of money or helicopters to take her to Nicaragua, it wasn't a letter with the mad ramblings of a crazy person, it was just a nice, complitmentary letter for Mr. Romney.

That's when they threw her to the ground and handcuffed her. Ha, ha. Just kidding again. I don't remember whtehter they opened the envoeolope and read the letter, but they did accept the letter from Jenna's hand, and assured her that they would give it to Mr. Romney's secretary , who would see to it that Mr. Romney would actually read the letter.

I wish I had a more interesting story—perhaps one that had someone ending up in federal prison—but this is my closest brush with a famours poilitical figure, and I felt obliged to stick to the truth. Mostly.

Get on the Bus

As you drive through the hills of rural East Tennessee, it is not uncommon to come upon houses that have some or all of the following items in the yard or on the porch: a refrigerator; an old, extremely worn out and dilapidated couch; a couple of old tractor tires; an ancient car or truck sitting on blocks; and perhaps an old school bus.

I was talking to some new friends from various places around the Northeastern U.S. today, and they were all quite astonished to hear about these yard decorations. They thought that we were kidding, but I can assure you that we were not. I have seen all of these things in the yards of rural homes (and some not-so-rural). The couch and refrigerator are usually out on the porch, protected somewhat from the wether. The couch is there for obvious reasons. It became too worn to continue to be furniture in the house, so it was relegated to the porch. Porch visitors, as opposed to house visitors, can set down and rest a spell on the old couch, which is fairly comfortable, for all its looks, as long as one knows where the sprung springs are and avoids them. Of course, there are more porch visitors than there are home visitors, as the porch is a brighter, cooler place to be during the dog days of an East Tennessee summer. So the old couch sees more service than the the couch that replaced it in the living room. Despite the protection of the porch roof, the fridge is rusted on the outisde. It may or may not be in working order. If it's working, it almost surely is stocked with beer and maybe a few half-empty cardboard cartons of earthworms to be used as bait. However , it's just as likely that it does not work and that the residents of the house meant to haul it off to the local dump (or illegally dump it in some nearby woods), but their truck wasn't running at the time. So there it sits.

But that brings us to the car up on blocks. This car was manufactured sometime between about 1950 and 1984. The tires are long gone, thus the cinder blocks that hold it up off the ground. It is sitting there, rusting, because someone is going to get it running some day. All it needs is a new transmission or a new motor or something like that (no one seems to remember now what was wrong with it when they put it up on blocks), and it'll be good as new. Junior Sparks, who lives down the road a ways, is keeping an eye out for the particular make and model of your car to come in that you might get some used parts of off. You've been waiting for a while, but you haven't heard from Junior yet.

Now, the tractor tires clearly serve the purpose of containing a small flower garden. The tires are almost always painted white, to improve their aesthetic appeal and perhaps make them look a little less obviously like, well, tires. The flower garden may or may not be in current existence. It may have been an idea that someone had but never got around to following through on. Or there may be a few bedraggled pansies struggling against the summer heat in the long-forgotten tire garden.

But the item of prime curiosity at this point, the “piece of resistance,” as my Aint Jo says, is the dilapidated school bus. It usually sits off in the side yard somewhere, some distance from the house itself. There are several reasons that a person might have an old school bus in one's yard. You might be—or at some point have been—a school bus driver. You parked it in the yard one day, and for whatever reason, your services were no longer required by the local school district, and you just left it there, in case you ever get a call that you need to go pick up some kids again. Or, you may have gotten a great deal on an old school bus, maybe someone was getting rid of it for around a hundred bucks, maybe less. And you thought how handy it might come in for storage or if you have guests who need a place to sleep or something like that. You plan to perk it up someday by maybe painting it, and you might strip out the seats to make room for beds or shelves or something like that, but you haven't quite gotten around to renovating it yet because you just can't decide which way to go: storage shed or guest house. So, there it has sat since about 1974, give or take a decade or so, until you decide what to do with it.

Now, you are probably most likely to find this yard décor if you get lost somewhere near the Smoky Mountains—the part of Appalachia that runs through East Tennessee and Western North Carolina. The farther you get from Gatlinburg or Pigeon Forge—we are talking about really lost now—the more likely you are to find a yard such as the one described here.

But if you haven't the time or patience to get lost in the Smoky Mountains (Warning: if you are not from around there, do not stop at some tiny gas station to ask for directions to civilization. They will recognize your accent as a foreign one and will probably be somber, silent, and utterly unhelpful until you leave. They don't mean to be unfriendly, it's just their way. Plus, they can't understand a damned word you're saying.) Anyway, if you don't happen to get lost in the mountains, you can still find the domestic scene that I've described here by just driving around in small communities anywhere in East Tennessee that do not have neighborhood associations and the regulations that go along with them, and enough yard space in which to compile the necessary elements.  

'68 Ford

 Last night I dreamt of my first car: a 1968 Ford Fairlane Torino. It was the ugliest color you ever saw; a friend of mine called it “ocher.” It was the color of dried-up mustard. Sort of . Maybe a littlel greener than that. It had a black vinyl top in the style that was popular in the 60s, to make it look like a convertible, I guess (though that ploy didn't work).

That car and I had a lot of fun in the years that I owned it, which was from 1982 to about 1987 or so. It had this massive V-8 engine which allowed me to overpower and pass just about anything else on the road at the time. The black top was beginning to crack and peel, so the car didn’t look like much. Frankely it was kind of a junker. But I kept it in great running order by taking it to my mechanic, Dave. Dave loved working on old Fords, and he kept that car running well beyond the normal mileage that a Ford of that age would normaly have gotten. I have so many stories and memories about that car and about Dave, who became kind of a father figure to me, and how he cared about me and the car and he kept us both on the road.

Anyway, In the dream last night, I was surprised to learn that I still had the car. I was keeping it in a barn or something, but I’d forgoteen that I had it. I was so thrilled to see it again. I think that it had actually become a convertible in the dream. I won’t go into the hazy details of the dream because it was, like most dreams, pretty ethereal. The thing is, that dream brought back lots of pleasant memories of that great old Ford.

Of course, I hadn’t appreciated it fully at the time I had it. To me, fresh out of college and setting out on my own, it was just a 14-year-old car that was kind of a clunker and a really ugly color. But over time, I came to really appreciate that car. The trunk was so big that you could just about step into it and walk around. I really did have to go into the trunk to get the spare tire out. 

I did a lot of work on the car myself because I didn’t have the money to take it to Dave every time the car had a problem. But also, it was so easy to work on that even an idiot coul do simple tasks. I changed the oil myself on a regular schedule. I replaced hoses and belts that had worn out and stuff like that. One time, I had diagnosed a problem (with my brother M’s help) as a bad fuel filter. I decided to take the fuel filter off the carburetor myself and replace it. (The car was made before the days of fuel injection, or at least before fuel injection became common in passenger cars.) The thing is, I have always been confused about which way to turn things to loosen them. I have trouble telling right from left and so forth, so I get confused about a lot of directional things. So I often end up tightening tthings that I had set out to loosen.

I was trying to take this fuel filter out of the carburetor, and it had to be screwed out. I had a pair of pliers, and I kept turning and turning that fuel filter. By the way, the fuel filter was inside this gold- colored metal cylinder, which is what I was actully trying to unscrew. Finally, I decided that maybe I was turning it the wrong way, so I began turning it the opposite way. After about 30 minutes of trying turning it this way and that, and almost surely making more preogress at tightening the darned thing reather than loosening it, I lost my temper, as I am wont to do when I become frustrated with mechanical things. I had already had a few choice words for the filter casing. I had questioned its heritage and had possibly insulted its mother. But it had gotten to where mere curse words, no matter how creatively used, did not quite express my true level of frustration. At that point, I wanted to pound on something. I had pliers in my hand, so I already had the tool I needed, and the fule filter was the most immediate thing in front of me, plus it had the benefit of being the actual object of my wrath. So, I began whanging away at it with the pliers. This felt really good for a few momnets, until the @##$&$% filter suddenly broke off from the side of the carburetor. It had sheered off right at the place where it was attached to the carburetor, leaving not even a small fragment of itself sticking out.

Now I was really in a bind. The part of the fuel filter casing that screwed into the carburetor was still there, but there was now no fuel filter attached. I did as I always do in such situations: call one of my brothers. In this case, the most useful of whom was M. Also known for his volatile temper, in addition to his excellent mechanical skills, I knew that he would not only know how to solve this new dilemma but he would also be understanding of theh temper tantrum that had caused it.

The end of the story was that, when he had time, M came over with the correct tools and drilled out the part of the fuel filter that was stuck in the carburetor. We then went and got the replacement part, installed it in the carburetor, and the car was good to go.

That car got me wherever I needed to go during the early days of my independent adulthood, and I remember it very fondly now. At the time, I worked nights, alone, at a small neighborhood liquor store so that I could spend my days flying as I was working toward getting my pilot's license. Many of the men who came into the store asked about my car. They would then stand around and reminisce about similar cars that they had owned in high school or college. “Those were the days,” they'd sigh wistfully. Often, they'd ask me if it was for sale. At the time, I'd have loved to sell it to get something smaller, newer, and more economical, but I knew that I couldn't find as good a deal on another car as the 800 bucks that my dad had sold it to me for, so I always told them no. They would then tell me that that was a good decision, as I should really enjoy that car while I had it. I would scoff at the very idea. The thing seemed as big as a houseboat, it was ugly, and it got about 16 miles to the gallon.

But last night's dream reminded me of that great old Ford Torino and how much fun I had in it. My liquor store customers were right, I should've enjoyed the car more when I had it, and now I'm as nostalgic about my '68 Ford as those guys were about their first cars.