This guy's wife is a saint.
I'm generally a purist when it comes to old cars. Restore them, don't butcher. But this car begs for the full treatment. Chopped, shaved, slammed. Sedans of this vintage are sometimes called lead sleds because they're so big and heavy, but they make great customs.
Black. Maybe a very dark purple with just a little very thin light purple pinstripes. Tan leather interior with brushed aluminum gauges.
heavy sigh
I heard that Honda is recalling a gazillion CRV's because an electrical switch in the door can short and cause a fire. They didn't say what that switch does. Probably turn on the automatic foot massage machine.
This morning I finished up the doors on the VW. Ilsa now has all the rubber seals, window channels with felt, glass (including wind wings) and regulators (window raising/lowering mechanism) installed. There will be no fires because there are no switches. You want the window up? Turn the crank. You want the door locked? Put the key in the lock on the outside of the door and turn it. (No, no button on the inside.) In 1962 cars were cars, not appliances.
I especially enjoyed my bike ride this morning. I left at 9:00 and when I got back about an hour later it was 80 degrees. Perfect temp with almost no wind. I finally feel like I have a base back, which allows me to spin or hammer as the mood dictates. Today was spinning for the first six miles, which are a gradual but steady climb up Lake Pleasant Parkway. Once I turned the corner at Westwing Pkwy. it was head down and push it the rest of the way.
I know from the old, now-dead bike computer that today's route is 15 miles, and my average speed was probably in the 16-17 mph range. This new computer registered 29 miles when I got home, and my average speed was something like 37 mph.
I think something's wrong.
These things require that you program them first, entering your wheel size and mph or kph. I have done that twice, each time following the directions very carefully, but with the same really wrong results. I'll call tech support Monday. I'm really bad at math but I don't think I've messed this up that much.
The college where I taught allowed profs to take one course per semester without charge. They paid us what worked out to be about half of minimum wage, so this and one meal a day in the cafeteria proved their compassion for our plight. (Or so they convinced themselves.)
One semester I took a creative writing class from one of my colleagues, an English prof whom I learned the students had nicknamed "Ice Queen." Half the semester was spent learning different forms of poetry with the assignment to write our own example of each one studied.
Yeah, me writing poetry seemed like a stretch to me, too.
One of the assigned forms was a "memory poem." In class we read and discussed several examples, noting the characteristics of the genre. The memory should be of a real event but the emphasis is not on factual accuracy. In fact, it's considered perfectly OK to leave that aside since the goal of the poem is to record the images and emotions of the event. You can't intentionally distort the historical data but it's more about how you remember it and your mind's reliving of the event than about doing the work of an historian to reconstruct it precisely.
I wrote about the morning my dad came up to the bedroom my brother and I shared (I was home from college for Christmas break) to tell us our sister and her husband had been reported overdue and missing. They were flying in a Cessna 125, returning from a Christmas visit to his family's home in Wisconsin to their home in Holland, Michigan where he served as a church youth pastor.
I think that if the three of us sat down and compared notes I'd learn that my recollection of being awakened and told the news is incorrect on several details. But in some sense (besides just a poetry assignment) it doesn't matter. My memory of that early morning conversation is my reality. My recollection of the next two or three weeks - the waiting for news, the abandoned search, the memorial services - became part of who I am. Not the actual historical facts, but how I experienced them. I think I probably have 90% of it right, but that other 10% has been just as formative as the parts I remember accurately. I can't distinguish between the two, don't know where the line is.
Western cultures have grown too obsessed with accurate data. A world of bits and bytes has exacerbated that tendency. Fact checking may have a place after a Presidential debate but our lives aren't debates. For me and for those with whom I interact perception is reality. If we're doing conflict resolution there's a place for working through what happened when, but our memories, no matter how accurate and precise, have shaped who we are and how we see the world around us. At some point we're wasting our time to argue data if a memory has become part of life's tapestry.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
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