What was that strange sensation my body was feeling?
It was sometime last evening when I realized I was ... dare I say it? ...
cold! I was actually shivering and I got up and put on a
sweatshirt. When was the last time I wore a sweatshirt?
Can it be that we have at last survived this abominable summer and are
looking at fall?
I checked predicted temps for the rest of the week and there are 3 days at
the end with the temp predicted to be in the low 80s (which I used to think
of as "hot" and now regard as "pleasant"), but otherwise the temps will be
in the middle to high 70s and I may not have to hang up my sweatshirt, but
put it to good use.
I don't know how many days over 100⁰ we have had since the first one, but
July hit at least 90⁰ every day for the first time since 1877. I could
not find how many days over 100 we have had, as most articles about the heat
wave were written in June...and there were certainly a lot of hot, hot days
in July and August.
I love spring. It is a beautiful time around here, with blossoms
exploding all over town, and the orchards outside of town looking like
clouds of white everywhere.
The thing I don't like about spring is that it is too short and is followed
all too quickly by summer and, with global warming, it seems to get hotter
every year. Climate change deny-ers should come and spend a summer in
the Sacramento valley.
But I have to admit that summer in Davis is significantly better than summer
in San Francisco. Here we don't know how many days over 100 we will
have, but we know we will have them and so houses are equipped with air
conditioning and stores are equipped with air conditioning.
(I remember when we bought our first car here, the first year we lived here,
and we opted not to get air conditioning because of the added cost.
"It won't be that bad," I said, optimistically. Then summer came.
When we bought our next car, the very first thing I wanted in the car was
air conditioning!)
Much as I enjoy spring, I love fall because the trees are also
beautiful, with the reds and yellows and oranges everywhere and when the
leaves finally fall, it is the start of winter, of cold temps, and rain, and
my kinda weather.
So I am looking forward to reacquainting myself with my sweatshirts in the
near future and enjoying the brisk winds of autumn and looking forward to
winter.
Yesterday, I wrote about Pole Line Rd and our memorable trip down
that road. We were trying to figure out when it was and Char said
that it had to be 1963 if their baby daughter was along. I thought
Walt had bought the red Tempest convertible shortly before we married in
1965, but he remembers that he got out of the Air Force reserve in 1963
and bought the car shortly after that...so 1963 is probably when it was.
In 2013, I
told the story of Walt's old Rambler convertible, the car that hated
me.
You don't want to anthropomorphize inanimate objects, but I still
maintain that the car hated me. And it got angry with Walt when he
went off to boot camp and left it for me to use. It about
bankrupted me when it developed brake problems...or at least some
disreputable dealer told me it developed brake problems.
I still remember when Walt called from boot camp. I was so
excited to hear his voice (we only had "letters" in those days, so I was
writing to him about the problems I was having with the car). He
opened the conversation with "What are you doing to my CAR?" and
then went on to berate me for everything I'd done wrong. I was in
tears when I hung up. I'm sure the Rambler was very satisfied
about that!
We left our wedding reception in the Rambler, but only drove it as
far as where Walt had parked the Tempest and we left for our honeymoon
in that while someone else took the Rambler back to our apartment.
The story of our finally getting rid of the Rambler is unique and
also detailed in the old 2013 journal entry.
What is it with some people and their cars? (I wont’ be sexist and say
"men and their cars" because I’ve known some women with attachments too.)
This morning I was reading over the Sunday Stealling answers of some other people
and I read the answers of one man whose first car was a 1964 Rambler. Out of all
those answers for this week's Sunday Stealing, that was the one people commented on.
Apparently Ramblers have a certain mystique.
I should have known this about Walt before I married him. When we were dating, he
drove the 1953 Rambler that he bought when he was in college and which carried him from
Maryland to California in 1960. (If you ever watched the old George Reeve
"Superman" TV show, Lois Lane drove a car just like it, only it hers was shiny.)
It was a convertable, but it was unlike any convertible I’d ever seen before--and a
lot of the top was held together with safety pins. It got great gas mileage, but went
through oil faster than a fry cook at a greasy spoon. We once drove to Los Angeles and
stopped once for gas and 15 times to put another quart of oil in the car.
(the license, LWU 504, stood for
"Liquor, Women, and Unity of the church."
Don't ask)
The car had...character. It had a clock that refused to stop. No matter
what went wrong with the car, the clock always worked.
It also hated me.
I don’t mean to anthropomorphize an inanimate object. But this damn car was
alive. It was the 1953 version of "Kit" or "My Mother, the Car." And
it hated me.
Walt would occasionally let me drive it. When he went off to boot camp for six
weeks, he left it with me. Whenever I got behind the wheel, things fell off. Things
locked. Things leaked. Things rattled and clattered. It coughed, sputtered and died. I
paid the equivalent of two weeks worth of my salary to get the damn brakes fixed when they
went out while he was gone.
When Walt got behind the wheel, it purred. Walt always thought I was making it up
when I complained that the car hated me. But trust me. It hated me. And I hated it too.
When we got married, we bought an "us" car. It was another convertible.
A red Tempest convertible. Very flashy. Very nice.
(We left the wedding in the Rambler, and
transferred to the Tempest which was hidden on
a nearby street)
But Walt couldn’t bear to get rid of the Rambler, and so we parked it on the
street with our new car and it sat there. Occasionally Walt would start it to keep the
battery running. It would be enough to start the clock and it would continue to tick.
Jeri was born and then Ned was expected so we moved to a larger rental house. By
now the Rambler really didn’t work at all (except for the clock, of course). So it
would be logical to get rid of it, but we didn’t. Instead, Walt put it in the garage
of the new house, leaving the brand new flashy car out on the street in the elements. The
Rambler sat there for the year or so that we were in the new house.
Then Paul was coming, so we decided to buy our own house. I finally convinced Walt
that we had pushed, pulled, and towed the Rambler all over the place and it was time to
get rid of it. Reluctantly, most reluctantly, he agreed. (We did, for a time, discuss the
possibility of having it pressed into a coffee table with the clock imbedded in it, still
working, but decided it would probably be too heavy to move)
We tried to call junk yards to find a place that would take the car, but
discovered that junk yards are elitists. They won’t take a car older than a certain
age, and the Rambler had long since passed the cut-off point. We couldn’t even give
the damn thing away!
Walt finally found a place which would reluctantly take it, if we could get it
there. They wouldn’t come to pick it up.
They closed each day about the time Walt got off work and we knew we couldn’t
just drive it there and turn it in--getting it there would be a slow process and there
wasn’t enough time. So we took it to the junk yard after hours (Walt drove very
slowly and I followed him, ready to push or whatever when the car stopped) and parked it
across the street, intending the return the next day and drive it into the yard.
When we returned home, the next door neighbor asked what had happened to the car.
Walt told him the story.
"That’s too bad," he said. "I would have taken it for my
son."
A home for his baby!
We went back to the junk yard and brought the Rambler back to the
house and gave it to the neighbor, happy, finally that it would have a new home.
And then we moved.
We moved to the other side of town, maybe 10 miles away.
Shortly after we moved, we drove off in the shiny new car one day, turned the
corner at the bottom of our hill and....there was the Rambler. Just parked on the street.
It had an "abandoned car" sticker on it, placed by an alert police officer. We
didn’t know what to make of it. The neighbor didn't even know where we had moved.
What was the car doing here?
We called the neighbor. It turns out that the son wasn’t quite as enamored of
the car as Walt was and so he gave it to a friend of his. The story was that the friend
had been driving the car and it got to this street and just died.
My story is that it smelled Walt and refused to go farther.
The problem was that we no longer had the key to the car, and we had never
transferred ownership, so technically it was our responsibility. But we couldn’t find
the kid who had abandoned the car. It sat there for many days while we tried to explain to
the police that we couldn’t move the car. But we waved at it whenever we passed by.
One day it was gone. We didn't know who had taken it, but were glad to see that we
no longer had to worry about it.
The next day Walt was taking the bus to work, got halfway there, looked out the
bus window and...there was the Rambler! It was now parked on his bus route. This was one
stubborn car.
But it wasn’t abandoned now and so it just sat there, parked legally, and
Walt passed it every morning for weeks until the day when it finally disappeared.
Near where it had been parked was a junk yard and there was always a huge mountain
of car bodies heaped up, awaiting crushing. We always expected to find the Rambler turn up
on top of the junk heap, but we never did. It appeared that we had finally seen the last
of the car.
I may have hated the car and it may have hated me, but we've never had a car since
that has as many memories or has such a great story to tell.
