daily post | The Gad About Town

A Two-Ton Hand-Me-Down

Posted on September 10, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

We are talking now of events in the fall of 1973, when the blue Buick came into our lives and the OPEC oil crisis started to unfold; the price of a gallon of gas went up by half in just a few months that year, from about 40 cents a gallon to just under 60 cents. Getting a second car was no one’s idea of practical, so I do not think it was in my father’s plans or dreams, either.

A 1955 Roadmaster in 1973 was not yet a collectible classic and it was also too old to be of much use as a second car for a young family with one driver. (Did it even have seatbelts?) Thus a 1955 blue Buick Roadmaster in 1973 sat smack in the middle of useless. Even though the car was 18 years old, it had not been driven much; for some reason I remember hearing the sentence, “It has its original tires.” This was probably not a selling point.

My great-uncle, my grandfather’s older brother, had died. If there is a statute of limitations on offering condolences, this meets the requirements: He was an elderly man, he died over 40 years ago, and I never met him. I have seen precisely one photo of him, and that viewing happened almost 30 years ago, too. In my memory, he is standing in a doorway in the photo and he looked like Myron Cohen. (For anyone who is even one day younger than me and not a fan of old Borscht Belt comics, this reference is perhaps a bit obscure.)

He left his personal sedan to his brother, my grandfather, who did not want the vehicle. To the best of my memory, my great-uncle lived in Manhattan and retrieving it was ~~going to be enough of a chore, I mean,~~ reward enough. My grandfather enlisted my dad, his son-in-law, to pick up the car and they brought it up to upstate New York and our home, where it became our first-ever second car. In the long history of uncomfortable and long car rides, I am given to understand that this may have been a top-ranked long, silent drive. (My father can be talkative only after he warms up to you, and my grandfather was not a communicator, either.)

To the best of my recollection and some reasearch, this is the Buick. A 1955 Roadmaster. (http://www.fossilcars.com/blog/classic-buick-fan/2012/10/15/1955-buick-roadmaster-series-70/)

The car sat in our driveway, a one-car-wide driveway, a blue mystery to my five-year-old eyes. Life had presented me with one more strange equation: “Someone that you have never heard of but is somehow related to you dies = new car.” No sadness, new car. Except the car was not new, it was old, even in my limited car knowledge. The backseat was not a seat, it was a bench, the same color as the outside of the car, and it was awkwardly, overly cushioned. Thus it was as welcoming and yet impossible to sit on as any plastic-covered furniture I had encountered in the living rooms of “old people.” I could kick out my legs without touching the back of the front seat, which was also a bench and not two seats. I do not have a photo of the vehicle that I came to loathe, but research and my memory has presented me with this photo of a 1955 Buick Roadmaster, a four-door, which is what I remember, in the car’s exact shade of blue. The exact shade of blue.

My father neither put the car on blocks nor sold it, at least not immediately. To be fair to him, even if he had tried to sell the car in that time period it probably had no takers, given that it was not yet a classic and never was fuel efficient. It was a two-ton tank. Thus, even in the gas rationing era of 1973-’74, we had a second car and it had to be started up and driven every so often. The destination was usually my elementary school two uphill blocks away, a ride that only took the blue Buick 20 minutes to make. These were the longest 20 minutes of my life every morning, especially in winter, because that car did not have a heater, or its heater was what people in 1955 expected, or it did not have a heater. I would walk from the back seat/bench to the front and ask when the heat was going to kick on. My father would reply with chattering teeth and I would walk back. At least the walk kept me warm.

The one thing I clearly remember about that evil car is crying from the cold. There is, as you know, outdoors cold, which can be tolerated because you know that you are outdoors, and indoors cold, which is always colder than anything you can tolerate because you simply expect it to be warmer inside a building or a vehicle. That Buick was always colder than the outdoors. Life had presented me with another new equation: It was a dead car given to us by a dead man who had cursed our family.

It disappeared one day. I think my father sold it or put a brick on its gas pedal and jumped out as it drove into the Hudson River. Its whereabouts today are unknown and perhaps unknowable. But I knew one thing, well, I knew two things about the blue Buick: it was frigid in all seasons and conditions, and if something like the blue Buick is what you get when you inherit something, this car was one more reason I wanted everyone around to me live forever.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 10 asks, “Clothes and toys, recipes and jokes, advice and prejudice: we all have to handle all sorts of hand-me-downs every day. Tell us about some of the meaningful hand-me-downs in your life.”

Daily Prompt: Uneasy Lies the Head That Wears a Crown

Posted on September 9, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

In a family with two children, the terms “oldest” and “youngest” are black and white, apples and tornadoes. I am the oldest of two, the older brother who acted like an heir to the throne in high school and then like the off-the-hook kid brother in an extended Peter Pan near-adulthood, both of which must have presented my kid sister with unique challenges.

Family order and the psychological effects of being sibling number one or being sibling number nine is a favorite topic for many commentators simply because we all carry around with us the expertise of being a member of a family. (Being adopted can sometimes make these concerns even more unique or sometimes prove them to be universal, anyway. Being an only child can, too.) I will never know what it is like to be the younger sibling. (There should be a support group for us; I am a member of quite a few already as it is.) My sister will never know what it is like to be the oldest—unless our septuagenarian parents do something rather odd in the near future, such as murder me and then manufacture or otherwise acquire a new child. But my parents are not royals, and my family does not live in a “Game of Thrones”-type world in which something like that might very well happen over brunch next Sunday.

In a royal family, sibling order is truly defining. Sibling number one is the heir to a throne, any throne, and everyone else is tied for not-first. Every person born into a royal system has a job to do that they are born into; the first (and sometimes, only) job requirement is to be born. Not one successful royal on this planet has failed to be born—yet. In well-entrenched royal families, all of the other siblings (and cousins and extended cousins and all the myriad not-firsts, the “soblings”) have duties to perform and fiefdoms to fief over. Each one is number one in his or her own respective well-defined and limited roles and traditions, which usually require them to wear remarkable costumes. And then, in turn, all of their first-borns are the heirs and chief inheritors of whatever their specific fiefdoms include.

In America, the world of Big Business, we sometimes see something similar transpire with corporations and inheritances, but not as often as the soap operas (and the news programs that can seem like soap operas) depict.

Of course, the impending growth of the British royal family, the one that inspired today’s question, would be of no interest to us had it not been for the fact that in 1936 the then-king, Edward VIII, decided to quit and cede the crown to his younger brother. The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 9, asks, “A second #RoyalBaby will soon be joining the Windsors in England. Given the choice, would you rather be heir to the throne, or the (probably) off-the-hook sibling?” Edward VIII’s younger brother could have been an “off-the-hook” kickabout, but, per his royal training, he proved to a quite capable king (whatever that means), George VI. (This is a good thing, as many historians—not some, many—have found and shown evidence that Edward rather liked Hitler and his plans and would not have opposed a Nazi-governed Great Britain. The government under his younger brother appointed him governor of the Bahamas to keep him out of Europe for the duration of the Second World War.) The current royal family is George VI’s; his daughter is the queen and his grandson is the current heir, Charles; William is Charles’ first-born, and since William and Kate have already produced his first-born, the new baby is William’s potential gadabout, layabout, off-the-hook kid royal.

In the House of Aldrich, my not-at-all-royal house, I am the first-born but I spent much of my adulthood as the Failure in Waiting, so I have lived versions of both answers to this question. One of my larger contributions to my sibling’s adult life (she is only two-and-a-half years younger than me, so we have shared many experiences in life and sometimes she has a clearer memory of my life than I have) has been as an signpost warning her against venturing where I did. Perhaps my providing an example of how not to live has been a version of being a dutiful older sibling; now that my life is a bit clearer and happier, perhaps I am filling that role better now.

But we’ll never be royals.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 9 asks, “A second #RoyalBaby will soon be joining the Windsors in England. Given the choice, would you rather be heir to the throne, or the (probably) off-the-hook sibling?”

Daily Prompt: ‘That Was Random’

Posted on September 8, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

A young woman and a child, a toddler young enough for a stroller but old enough to walk alongside it, entered the elevator my friend and I were already on. The doors shut, and the child looked at me, looked me square in the eyes, and said, “Hi, Mark.” Precisely enunciated. Distinctly direct.

Mark is my name. I had never seen the woman, or boy, before. My friend looked at me and I suppose he saw a shocked look come over my face. When we got off the elevator—not at our floor, but the next available, because I was spooked—he asked, “Do you know them?”

“No. That was random. Did that kid say my name?”

“Yeah. Definitely. As if he was about to tell you something important.”

Every once in a while, I wonder about that encounter. In subsequent years, I have confirmed with my friend that this really happened, both the unmemorable banalities and the one memorable bit. When one describes an event as random, really what one is saying is that something incredibly specific took place with absolutely no context around it and none to be found. “It was like it happened at random.”

This was over 20 years ago. Was the child prescient and have I since become an important person in his life? No 20-something person that I have gotten to know recently has told me that I look familiar or asked if we have already met. How random can random be? Is there a scale to measure random? Is there an ultimate random?

If there is, I may have caught a glimpse of it one glorious day.

I have few specific memories of the event; the fact it was a woman with a boy with a stroller is remembered, but both of their faces have receded into blank, amorphous, generic people-faces. Were they on my right or on my left? If I work on it, I can remember myself facing in either direction. I have said hello to strangers on elevators many times since, and all those people have similarly melted into faceless, generic folks. (If I am ever required to give evidence in a trial, I will be close to useless, as I do not notice specifics like what someone is wearing or what color anything is—which is one more way in which I really would make a terrible new boyfriend if I was single, so I am lucky that my girlfriend accepts me as I am—but I retain quite precisely the things people say. I am now constantly working on remembering details, to be a better boyfriend and a better writer.)

I remember the distinct precision of that anonymous little boy speaking my name, clearly and randomly. That is what remains; the creeped-out and surprised feeling remains ever accessible to me.

It is one of those moments that I feel like I flubbed on my first go at it, and I have lived the 20 years since as if waiting for something similar to happen again, to get it right this time around; I will not leave the elevator in surprise next time.

Of course, the chance of a next time, the possibility that something like this will ever happen again in my life is almost nil; this was a true-life encounter with infinite probability, with something similar to the infinite monkey theorem—you know, the thought that given enough time (infinite time), a chimp pounding randomly on a keyboard will accidentally or coincidentally type out all of “Hamlet.” One will encounter many children who are learning words for things and names of people and how to talk and one of them may blurt a name out and coincidentally it will be yours. It happened to me and I am writing about it two decades later.

I will not leave the elevator in surprise next time. No, I will confirm my name and tell the child who accidentally said it about how rare it is to encounter this moment twice in one’s life—the true random moment—and how moved I am by the opportunity to experience it again. I will tell the child to celebrate the fantastic accidents that make life special, the “fabulous realities,” as one of my teachers used to call them.

And then the mother and child will quickly leave the elevator, before they reach their desired floor, a bit spooked.
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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 8 asks, “You’re sitting at a café when a stranger approaches you. This person asks what your name is, and, for some reason, you reply. The stranger nods, ‘I’ve been looking for you.’ What happens next?”