Month: February 2018

Silver Streak

A 1949 Pontiac Silver Streak doesn’t just sit there. It lounges like a pregnant golden retriever, faithful, comforting, and swollen.

In 1956, I sat in the back seat of my uncle’s Silver Streak–uncle, aunt, mom, dad, brother, cousin and I all fit into that lump of a car, a trundling loaf of sourdough bread.

Fireflies lit up Ohio’s evening sky. Through the Silver Streak’s window, I watched them dance between me and the corner gas station and the stop light, which had advanced from amber to red as we came to a stop.

Instantly, the peaceful scene transformed. Behind us, tires howled; headlights glared, swerved, bounced. We lurched violently. Suddenly stilled, the headlights stared cross-eyed at the Silver Streak’s enormous trunk. All was silent, except for Uncle Chet, unrefined vocabulary seething in his breath.

Then the yelling began. First Chet, then the guy whose bumper had mangled our trunk. I don’t know how drunk a skunk can get, but he was all of it, and then some.

Chet dumped change into the gas station’s pay phone and called the cops. Meanwhile, the drunken driver somehow lurched into his car’s driver’s seat and blasted headlong down the country road.

Within minutes, a puzzled cop arrived. As Chet spilled the details to him, the policeman’s radio crackled. It was a quick call. “Which way did he go?” he bellowed. “The guy that hit you is the man we’re looking for!”

Long after the fireflies had extinguished for the night, Chet’s Silver Streak somehow crawled home with all of us still in it.

We all recognized the next morning’s newspaper headline story–drunk hits car at stop light, then speeds off.

But we could not have known the rest of the story.

The drunk man, car trunk filled with loaded firearms, so drunk he called his family, telling them he was coming to kill them all. On his way, drunk man’s car collided with our Pontiac Silver Streak. Discovering that his family had fled, he burned the house down. Drunk man was arrested for attempted murder.

Inside, in Chet’s house: us, greatly relieved.

Outside, in Chet’s driveway: the Silver Streak, bruised and heavy, a lump of a car, faithful, comforting, and swollen. And fireflies.

The Bus

When my young grandsons could no longer tolerate waiting for the grownups in the wine tasting room, we all stretched our legs and exited through the side door to the Texas Hill County acreage surrounding us. The rest of the family tumbled across the tree-shaded field to the goats and miniature horses gathered along the wire fence, awaiting each visitor’s customary food handout and head scratch.

Holland and I stayed behind to investigate the aged double-decker English city bus standing at the edge of the field, an ancient other-worldly sentinel, guarding a place to which it did not belong.

Visiting neighborhoods where we once lived is to return to the remnants of an earlier time, re-living cherished memories. It’s the same for this bus, shuttling strangers who forged deep friendships. We wonder at the passengers and the stories they once shared.

I recalled my own bus-riding chum, Joe. Why did every traveler on that bus know, like, and repect Joe? Self-deprecating, he wore a grin that possessed his entire face. Chicken-foot wrinkly skin embraced his blue-hued eyes, eyes that laughed and invited others to enjoy the silent joke. Joe was a toucher, not the kind of toucher that the news reports about. His was a hand on the shoulder or a gentle finger upon the humerus to let you know he was listening. Joe carried lunch in a backpack, a ritual since he began riding the bus after suffering a seizure, ending his freeway automobile commute. Will Rogers is famously quoted for never meeting a man he didn’t like. I believe in Joe’s case, it was true. Though he never finished high school, his bus ride transported him to his job as the COO of one of the state’s largest ice cream producers.

Humble man makes good.

Not a bad legacy for any of us.

The passengers from this misplaced English bus in a Texas Hill Country winery are long gone, taking with them their friendships and memories.

All who now remain are grandson Holland and myself. As I glimpse his tiny face in the abandoned bus mirror, I sense we are creating our own private history together.

I think it will be a good one.

Not a bad legacy for any of us.

Colonoscopy

The Winter Olympics have the luge event, toboggans violently hurtling tightly-fitting passengers down a tube of pure ice, slick and smooth as a child’s slide descending from an ice castle.

Instead of the luge, doctors have the colonoscopy. Like the luge, it requires guidance using surgical precision, and it necessitates traversing a long and winding passageway. Unlike the toboggan, the required equipment carries no passengers along its slow, meandering course. It delivers hi-tech equipment, snapping pictures, snipping samples, and performing minor medical corrections along its medical mission.

I’m now in the hospital’s gastro-intestinal waiting room. All around me there are procedures underway. Sloth-slow devices are creeping carefully along, fiber-optically photographing dark tunnels of colonoscopic flesh.

Meanwhile, in my waiting room, overhead televisions project the Winter Olympics, competing athletes performing sports perfection. If I’m fortunate, a luge event will be displayed on my television—sleds slicing breakneck down icy tunnels. At the eventual conclusion, a winner will be declared; medals will be awarded to the athletes atop a victor’s podium.

At the end of today’s event in my G.I. waiting room, a drugged patient with temporarily impaired memory will emerge and be rewarded with tourist-like photographs snapped along the slow, abdominal journey. Unlike the Olympic festivities, there will be no victor’s podium ceremony. No anthems played.

Well-deserved praise goes to the eventual breakneck-speeding Olympic luge champion–national flag unfurled, anthem playing in triumph.

And hail to the slow-motion, sloth-speed, fastidious colonoscopist for polyps discovered, removed, and clean bill of health restored. Surgical gown discarded, the hospital speakers page this doctor, urging him to yet another slow-motion, high-performance venue.