2. Driving with an object on your vehicle that might obstruct your vision, in any direction, is highly illegal, unless the vehicle is a four-wheel-drive pick-up, and the object in question is a gun rack, hunting dog cage, fishing rods stored upright on the truck’s grill, or a gigantic CB antenna. Who are we to take away your fun?

3. While approaching a “stop” sign, the motorist should observe the cross street. If oncoming vehicles do not seem to be in the immediate vicinity, the motorist may proceed through without stopping.

4. At a “yield” sign, motorists should come to a complete stop and stay there for several seconds, regardless of possible approaching cars.

5. In a traffic jam or crowded parking lot, a motorist must do the Christian thing and let one car that needs to get in line go in front of them. This means exactly one car. That’s the system. We all let one car in and everyone gets merged in in an efficient and orderly manner. Jesus himself would only let one car in. Even He wanted to get home at some point.

6. The official gesture for allowing a car in before you is making eye contact with the other motorist and then motioning towards the area in front you with a small wave. If you are piloting a vehicle that has been let in, you are obligated to remake eye contact with the driver holding up progress for you (do this as you are taking the spot, or once you have taken it, in your rearview mirror) and wave back to them. If circumstances prevent you from waving safely while operating your vehicle, a passenger may do it for you. If no one in your car has waved back to the car behind you within 15 seconds of assuming the position in front of them, they are well within their rights to ram into you.

7. When on a remote two-lane road, a motorist should acknowledge every passing motorist, as well each person sitting on their porch or standing in their yard — regardless of whether one actually knows them or not — with what we’ll call the “casual wave.” A “casual wave” is executed by lifting either the index finger, the index and middle finger, or all four fingers from a hand on the steering wheel, while nodding your head slightly.

8. When starting onto a remote two-lane road behind the wheel of farm equipment or a log truck, wait until you can pull in front of a group of at least two cars that just can’t bring themselves to use that oncoming lane to pass, even when it is obviously clear and they’ve got the dotted line and everything.

9. Use of turn signals, while not illegal, is highly discouraged.

10. Once a stoplight has turned green the motorist closest to the intersection should take some time to ponder the meaning of their existence before moving their foot off of the brake and placing it on the accelerator and where on earth are you off to in such a hurry, anyway?

11. Cyclists are allowed the same use of the road as motor vehicles. Drivers wishing to pass a cyclists should take care to give them a full 2–4″ of clearance as they go whizzing by.

12. When using one car to tow another car of equal or possibly greater size over a portion of interstate, simply connect the first car’s back tow hooks to the second car’s front tow hooks with a single length of chain you bought at a hardware store and hit the road. Should be fine.

13. Regardless of the effect it has on one’s ability to operate their car, talking on one’s cellphone while driving is permissible, as is applying make-up, reading the newspaper, eating biscuits & gravy, etc.

14. Use of the car’s horn to do anything other than say “hi” to a friend or neighbor is an intentional display of rudeness and is punishable by death.

Also, I like that I look like I know what I’m doing in this photo.

Anyway, this brings the list of large miscellaneous items I have hauled home in the truck to a perfectly manageable four (1-used christmas trees, 2-discarded secretary desk, 3-slightly damaged solar panels, 4-Baldwin spinet piano).

And we were worried about me getting what is basically junk storage on wheels!

I, for one, am impressed with my restraint.

That’s right, readers. Thanks to Craigslist, and Kevin’s shamanistic abilities to find great deals on Craigslist, I am now the proud owner of a pick-up truck.

A blue-ish green ’97 Chevy S-10, specifically, with 115,000 miles on it. (My dad has always maintained that Witchgers are incapable of buying cars with under 100,000 miles on them. It seems this is true.)

This one’s a 2-wheel-drive, which is funny because I always saw myself getting a 4-wheel-drive (i.e. a “real”) truck because, well, if you can’t tow a birthing cow out of a mudhole on the side of a mountain…why have a truck? Recently I’ve realized though, that that I am not in proximity to any birthing cows, mudholes, or mountainsides. My family has a 2-wheel-drive truck that I’ve borrowed many times, and it turns out that, for loading up a card table at a friend’s house two blocks away to deliver to a baby shower, running on 2-wheels is just fine…. Also, I enjoy getting optimal gas mileage.

It’s an automatic too. A travesty I was willing to overlook for the low asking price and because “non-standard” Steph will now be able to drive our second vehicle.

Those were my only hang-ups. Despite them, I am elated about owning a truck. Kate stated a fact to me over gchat today that I already knew full-well, yet still made me stop and think about how lucky I was:

“now you can pick up shit off hte street”

If someone will just make me a needlepoint seat cover, displaying this bit of conventional wisdom (verbatim, please), I promise you that Teal-y and I will be present at every one of your moving days for the duration.

I’m now taking his keys off my ring, so I suppose I should mention the Chevy “The Only Car I’ve Ever Owned” Nova. I don’t know what the Nova’s fate will be. On one hand, it seems ridiculous for two people to own three cars and this one is old and needs some advanced engine work. On the other, it still runs, I doubt if I’d get enough for it to make it worth the trouble of selling, and, for 10 years now, it’s been “The Only Car I’ve Ever Owned.”

He’s pushed to the back of the driveway now and I can cleary see him eyeing me through the study window as we speak.

Let us discuss this another time.

Have you seen this? It’s an option you can open, after you’ve looked up a location on Google Maps, that allows you to move freely, up and down city streets, viewing real photos of all the surroundings. It’s pretty neat…and creepy.

According to the internet, in order to create this application, Google had to have photographers cruising every roadway of a designated area, with an 11 lens camera mounted to the top of a car, shooting constantly. This would explain why they’re only able to release a few “Street View”-ready places at a time. What it doesn’t explain is how I never noticed this Dr. Suess-sounding set-up pulling up next to me at a stoplight at any point in the past year. Raleigh has, after all, just had its “street view” activated.

When I found out about this, I, of course, immediately looked up my place of residence, to see if one could perhaps see me in my window — shirtless and picking my nose, ideally.

No dice there, but, almost as exciting was seeing my car out front.

I went one click further down the road, and lo and behold, my car was there again…in a different spot!

Apparently just before the corner of Morgan and Mayo was the photographer’s stopping point on a previous day, because these are clearly different weather conditions.

The next place I “visited” was my parent’s house in Cary, and my car was there too!

(It’s harder to tell here, but trust me, that is the corner of my ’88 Nova. I’ve been driving it for over 10 years now. I’d know that corner anywhere.)

I guess what I’m getting at here is, in Google’s ““Street View’ World,” I’m like some sort of mystical journeyman. Zipping through dimensions in a clunky sedan. Letting the old girl rest in three places, all at once.

Could even be more than three, actually. I’m still checking the roadsides to see if the Google car might have passed me by one of the many times I was broken down on the side of the road.

It was 1999 and I had just finished my freshman year of college. I was back home in Cary, looking for a summer job. My mom and dad were encouraging me to try and land something at least generally art-related. After several weeks of cold-calling print shops and art supply stores, scouring the newspaper, and filling out applications in pen (this was back in that hard-to-remember era before all you needed to pursue employment was an internet connection), Raleigh Parks and Recreation called me for an interview. It went well and I ended up accepting a job as — despite feeling that I may regret this, I am now going to tell you — an “Art Wizard.”

My role was to travel around the city, from day-camp to day-camp, hitting a new one each morning and each afternoon, with a trunk full of supplies, and to lead the kids in structured art projects.

Though they’re right next to each other, and you can float from Cary to Raleigh without even knowing it, they each have their own grocery stores and movies theaters and malls, and there are very few reasons for residents of one place to go to the other. I had probably been to larger, more urban Raleigh all of five times before I started this job. Now I was going to have to get from one end of it to the other in the span of a day. Every night while I had this job, I’d have to sit down with a city map and figure out where the Nova and I were venturing the next day. For four years now I’ve been working and/or living in Raleigh, and I’m still turning down streets I’ve haven’t been on since ’99.

As I had no prior teaching experience either, this would also be new to me. My supervisors didn’t see this as a problem, as they had purchased a detailed curriculum for me which was supposed to work right out of the box, and which I stopped following after five minutes in my very first class, when I realized I was reading an explanation of how the ancient Greeks decorated their vases to 25 gape-mouthed four-to-six-year-olds who clearly had no idea what the words “ancient,” “Greeks,” or “vases” meant yet. I haven’t done any teaching since, but I have a strong suspicion that curriculum-writers sit up in big, tall towers all day long, spewing out stuff that they think might work, without even a thought to field-testing. Then they turn it in, collect a handsome fee, and set off in their yachts to southern Greece. Back in the classroom, I had defaulted to letting the kids draw whatever they wanted in magic marker on two paper plates each, while I tried to figure out how I was going to handle the rest of the summer.

Over the course of three months, I completed six cycles through all the campsites. This meant every two weeks, at halfway through a cycle, I would look at the next lesson plan to see what general theme they were focusing on, then I’d come up with my own project — something related to that theme, but that I thought my four-to-six, seven-to-nine, and ten-to-twelve year-old groups could actually comprehend, and would actually find fun. I then put in my order for the required supplies and prayed that no one would notice a difference between what I was asking for and what I was supposed to be doing in class. (They never did.)

As an example, I did a lot of unsanctioned step-by-step drawing lessons that summer. I remembered, over the course of my early art education, people coming in to art classes I was taking and setting up big pads on easels and teaching us to render cartoon cats and dogs. I always liked that. My kids did too, but in order to keep all these lessons going, I needed pencils. Vast amounts of pencils. Baltic Seas of pencils. Kids want to draw in pencil. They have to be able to erase. Kids, however, also obliterate pencils. Just stand next to a kid while holding a pencil and it will disintegrate in your hand. Each day, I would dole pencils out before I started a lesson and by the time I got to the last kid, the first one had summoned me over to request a new one, theirs being broken in half, with the point worn down to a useless nub and the eraser ripped out and laying halfway across the room. We hadn’t even drawn anything yet. How did they manage this? How, I ask you? Also, getting everyone to share two cheap plastic sharpeners and not get their shavings everywhere was a big challenge.

More than anything though, this was the summer that I — a white, middle-class person, from the suburbs — spent my time in lower, working, and lower-middle class areas almost exclusively, and around African-American people almost exclusively. I had never been privy to the nuances of “black culture” in this area before.

Something that jumped out at me right away was that, while I was used to hearing people call their elders “Mr./Ms. That Person’s Last Name,” my kids always referred to me as “Mista Bob.” When addressing the kids, the counselors would refer to me this way too:

“Everyone take your seats. Mista Bob is here to teach you an art lesson.”

“Antoine is asking for another pencil, Mista Bob.”

And (when they were acting up): “You children are disrespecting Mista Bob!”

I grew extremely fond of many of the communities I visited, and I like to think they grew fond of “Mista Bob,” but I’m not going to lie to you and say we locked arms and sang “We are the World” when I visited. There was a lot of very apparent distance between us. This is why I felt the need to “put myself out there” and make a deeper connection with them. I did this about halfway into the summer, through the power of percussion.

African-American people enjoy their rhythm. This was not and is not me going all “Imus” on you and relying on stereotypes. I saw it everyday. The boys and girls I taught “beatboxed” and did step routines together — activities I’ve witnessed other groups of children doing…never. The vast majority of these kids also drummed on the tables with their hands. A lot of them were pretty good at it. Of course, I was better.

At that point in my life, I’d been playing drums for 10 years, pretty much non-stop. (My parents will vouch for this.) Not to brag on myself, but I was capable of laying down a “fat” beat, er, “phat” beat or two. I’m sure I didn’t look it. I was scrawny and pale and uncoordinated (nothing like now, of course), and if one had to venture some guesses as to my character traits I’m sure “rhythmically-challenged” and “scared of loud noises” would come up more than once.

So when it was time to do the music-related art unit, and the lesson plan recommended making maracas out of paper plates (paper plates were a cornerstone of this art program) and dried beans, I decided we would do this project, but this would be prefaced with a little table-drumming. For two weeks, I opened each class with a little demo on the nearest horizontal surface. Almost immediately after I started, jaws dropped. From paradiddle one, I had their attention like never before. I played them some examples of different types of beats that one could play on a table-top with one’s hands, inviting the kids to play with me and to see if we get the whole room going together. I got a little faster and more complex with each one, ’til no one else could keep up, and the room was boiling over with giddiness. Even the counselors’ interests were peeked.

For a grand finale, I asked the kids if they thought we could divide the room up into three groups, each playing a different pattern, so they would all could come together to create a beat, like the elements of a drum set do. They were always up for this. So we established some dividing lines in the room, and I started “Group 1” playing the hi-hat’s typical steady eighth notes. After those kids were keeping it up on their own, I moved to “Group 2” and started them thumping out a kick drum pattern, then I had “Group Three” act as the snare and really smack down on the 2 and 4…. 9 times out of 10, this took. Even kids who didn’t get the concepts of sharing or teamwork or pencil-usage yet were functioning as part of a musical unit. They would keep it going for a few seconds, ’til they got so excited over what they were doing that it dissolved into hysterics.

I am currently working on a screenplay of such events entitled Mista Bob’s Opus. Johnny Depp is slated to star.

So this was my summer of driving around Raleigh in the hotness, drawing countless cartoon bulldogs and telling my students to adorn theirs however they wished — girls thus opting for a bow and eyelashes, and boys for a spiked collar and often a rocket launcher of some kind — and it was also my “Summer of Diversity.” (Though it wasn’t technically that “diverse”…. Still, I stand by this word choice, as these are sensitive times, and I know it to be safe.) This was an important experience for me, because I actually saw what was going on with a different race and class of people, just a few miles from me. I saw people living life, as I did, but in a different way. Different triumphs. Different joys. A whole set of hardships I can’t even fathom.

These aren’t such bad things to be reminded of, every time you get in a broiling car.

There are many good reasons for this, not the least of which being that, for their ’88 Nova, Chevrolet engineered a horn that emits a comical little “meep” not unlike that of the Warner Brothers’ Roadrunner…only less threatening. This would actually be fine for “alerting other drivers to possible hazards,” which I seem to recall learning the purpose of the horn was, and which, let’s face it, no one has in mind when they are using it. No, a beep is criticism. Or even an insult (“Learn to drive, jackass!”). If you’re the beepee, it’s hard not to take it this way. (“Alright! Alright! I’m moving! Happy…? Jackass.”) This no place for the voicings of a lovable cartoon character/internet service provider mascot.

Truthfully though, even if I had one of those menacing, twelve-notes-at-
once semi-truck arrangements that you have to activate by pulling a cord, I wouldn’t use it. (Except, of course, when kids rode by and gave me the classic “pull the horn” signal, which I’m pretty sure kids do not give anymore, seeing as how they each have their own personal in-car DVD player/MP3 player/gaming stations to keep them amused.) I am a chronically non-aggressive, non-confrontational person, and somehow — for in my experience this is more of an exception than a rule — these characteristics actually remain intact when I get behind the wheel.

This is how I ended up sitting directly behind a guy at a stoplight last week for probably half-a-minute after it had turned green. (I couldn’t actually see, but we can assume he was on his cell phone.) It was amazing. I waited patiently as time rolled by, confident he’d wake up any second. We idled there, with the permission to proceed right in front of us. Eventually, I grew sure one of the many people lined up behind me had noticed the green by now, and that one of them would feel obliged to offer the helpful suggestion to this dude that he f-ing go. Surprisingly none of them did. Probably they were looking to me to handle the situation — as second in line, it did kind of seem like my responsibility. I placed my thumb on the horn, but just before I depressed it, Kevin-Spacey snapped out of it and we were off.

While this incident was slightly frustrating, I was never mad at the guy. Everyone has a lot on their mind these days. I zone out all the time. (Except, of course, when I’m here with my eager readers. You guys always get my utmost care get my utmost and attention and and utmost attention.) I did, however, want to give him the vehicular equivalent of the “They’re open down there” you give when you’re at the bank and the person ahead of you doesn’t notice when a teller becomes available. The closest we have to this is the “tap,” which, with it’s forceful jabbiness, isn’t that much better than really laying on it.

This is why I have decided that we should all equip our cars with a second, altogether different noise, so we have options. My recommendation? Bells. Something similar to the ringing of an old-fashioned phone.

Sounding your car’s bells would be the new “friendly honk.” It would say “Person-on-the-sidewalk-I-know, look over here,” “So long, relatives whose house we were visiting. It was fun…we’ll miss you…we can’t wait to be home,” “They’re open down there.”

Now you have choices. What does that person who cut you off deserve? You’ve got your bell and your horn. Ring or honk. “Jing” or “’eep.” Helpful motorist who understands we are all in this transportation thing together, or mean-spirited jerk.

More importantly, I would like us all to come to a concensus on something. When we are in our expensive, inefficient, polluting cars, and we see a new Volkswagen Beetle are we allowed to do “Punchbug” to the person next to us?

I say “no.” The custom started with the original cars and I believe they alone deserve this special place of honor (especially considering they are still running so many years later). Sure the reissue is nice and, visually, stays pretty true to the original design, but come on: engine in the front?

Please don’t think me a stick-in-the-mud here. I know there is no feeling more delightful than the one you get when you catch sight of a Beetle before the person next to you (especially if this person happens to be your sibling). It pulls up on your side and they don’t ever notice. They’re over there, listlessly staring out their window, lost in their own peaceful, little world. That feeling as you tighten your fist and turn toward them. Slowwwwly now. Make it last.

THWACK!

Ha-ha-ha! Right in the shoulder! And what makes it all so sweet? There is nothing the punchee can do about it, as long as you have made it clear that “Punchbug!” is occurring and defined the car color causing cthe commotion (How ’bout that for an alliterative streak! What’s that? “The word ‘the’ does not start with or even contain ‘c’.” Man, I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.). You are protected, by the US constitution, from punch-backs.

Actually, I have been benefited from probably the only loophole you can find in this tradition. It happened back in Greenville, NC, when Steph and I were still in school. We were in the car and she was first to notice a VW Beetle as it approached us on the opposite side of the road. She punched me. “Punchbug!” she exclaimed. Then she proceeded to call out the wrong car color. For real. I don’t remember what color she said, nor do I remember what color the car was, but I definitely remember she was way off. This was no “Punchbug Teal!” instead of “Punchbug Seafoam!” or “Punchbug Tan!” instead of “Punchbug Beige!” This was “Punchbug Blue!” as a bright red Beetle cruised past us. This was what mental health professionals refer to as a “brain fart.”

Now I have the utmost respect for sacred rites such as “Punchbug” — even when I’m on the sucky end of them — but I think we can all agree that pronouncing the hue of the car correctly is key to this ritual. Only then can it be absolutely clear to everyone what has transpired and what rules and regulations are in place. As Stephanie had been off by a mile on the vehicle’s color, I felt fully entitled to proclaim the actual color of the motor vehicle and to administer an accompanying punch….

And I could not help myself. Perhaps this is why I have been sleeping on the couch ever since we got married.

Anyway, you can see the lengths I’m willing to go to for “Punchbug.” Still I believe extending this to the new Beetles is disrespectful to the original vehicles and to the ritual.

There have to be some newer car-model-induced-acts-of-malice we can introduce to the world instead. (I don’t know about you, but every time I see a Hummer I just want to take a swing at something.)

Maybe every time you see a Honda Element you yell out “Box Car!” and box the ears of the person next to you. How about that? Alright, alright. I’m just throwing out ideas here.

Maybe you quickly dread the hair of your victim when you see a Prius — a car that, by the way, has made great strides in the area of alternative energy, another issue that is of great importance to me.

This week, specifically, I’m talking about this new Lexus that parks itself. And we’re not even talking your normal, everyday, pull-straight-into-the-space kind of parking. We’re talking threading itself in between two distinct boundaries while aligning itself with the curb in a parallel fashion.

In the commercial they show a guy pull up to the space and hit this magic button. He lets go of the steering wheel and the car dutifully and precisely puts itself into the available space. And when it’s done it says, “There you go, Michael,” in a robotic voice.

Ok I made that last bit up so I could throw in a Knight Rider reference. But I’m serious about the main part of this. The parking part.

What does this say about us, as a culture? Yes, parallel parking is difficult. It takes concentration. It takes time and effort to master, and sometimes, when you have to do it under pressure, it can be tedious and even panic-inducing…. So what do we demand? A computer that does it for us.

This is the exact same attitude that brought us the drum machine.

And this is to say nothing of the fact that the whole self-maneuvering car idea seems pretty ridiculous. I have a hard time believing that, in all the different environments and circumstances where you’re required to parallel park, this car will work as advertised.

All you really need, those of you who were excited by prospect of this car, is a Smitty to ride shotgun with you. Then when you came across some insurmountable parking situation, you could switch places and let Smitty put your car where it needed to go.

Currently you’re probably wondering “Who is this ‘Smitty’?” and “Is he really that good at parking?” and “Should I keep reading this nonsense or go check the weather?” Well, to answer your first two questions…. In this day and age, we no longer gather ’round the hearth and invent “tall tales” as a form of entertainment (thanks again, technology), but were this tradition still in practice, I would most certainly spin you a yarn about Smitty and his amazing parking ability. As exaggeration and farfetchedness are key in a tall tale, I’d probably claim Smitty once road a blue whale to shore and parallel-parked it in a shoebox…though this scenario would definitely take me some time to set up.

In other words, yes, wherever you needed your car parked, he can do it. I used to work with the guy, and quite often we’d go to lunch in downtown Raleigh. He could spot a sufficient space on the street from blocks away, then swing up just ahead of it, and the next thing you knew you were standing outside, on the sidewalk. Smitty’s manual transmission Chevy Blazer (not the tiniest of vehicles, by the way) was perfectly-positioned in the space and you had no recollection of how it got there. I don’t even think, during the process, that he had to touch his foot to the brake pedal. It was all so seamless.

I guess what I’m really getting at here is: I’d like to put Smitty in a “John Henry”-style-parallel-parking-show-down with this new LS 460L.

You just name the time and place, Lexus.

This may sound pretty uneventful, but our ventures up and back are never without some type of incident. There’s always something along the way giving us white knuckles. Over Christmas it was ice covering the steep mountain roads. This last trip the “Check Engine” light in Steph’s Hyundai came on, for some unknown reason, in the middle of nowhere. We drove home with it staring back at us, knowing full well that you can’t get cell phone reception for almost half the trip home, so there’s no way to call for help when you get in trouble…. Good times.

Also, we have yet to complete a trip to Steph’s family’s without getting lost at least once. Partly because we’re always trying new, unfamiliar routes. Partly because we’re always get into serious discussions (“where we are going with our lives,” etc.) on long car trips, to the point where we’re no longer looking out for the requisite highway signs.

Not that the signage is very helpful, in this case. The roads in these parts are really only meant for people who have lived in the area all their lives and just know where they need to go. On our journey up last fall, we decided to take all back roads once we got to the mid-section of Virginia. Well, somewhere in there, we missed whatever highway it was that would have taken us west. (I maintain to this day that the turn we were supposed to make had no label whatsoever.) Once we realized we were off course, I consulted the map. I found what looked like a reasonable route from where we were. No need to back track. So we kept going. Soon, even the few little homes and farm operations that had kept us company on most the trip had disappeared. Then it got dark. And out came the deer. I was already on edge, waiting to hear those first few notes of “Duelin’ Banjos,” and these groups of deer darting across the road every few minutes were not helping. We kept plugging along. At certain points the car was at what felt like a 45-degree angle, heading up some very steep inclines. The car’s 4-cylinder engine was straining for every last bit of torque. After driving in these conditions for hours we got to a place where deer were just hanging out in the middle of the road…. Have you ever driven up to a deer that doesn’t so much as flinch? Not the most comforting experience. We’d pull right up and honk the horn and they’d turn, look at us for a minute, and then slowly saunter off the gravel. (The “highway,” by the way, had deteriorated into a gravel road many miles before this.) The needle of the gas gauge was fast approaching “E.” Then, I swear to you, we started to hear howling in the distance. Wolves or coyotes or something. Who knows where we were? I hadn’t seen any indication of what road we were on for 90 miles. Then we passed a group of deer that were just leaning against a guard rail, smoking…. But wait, the road is sloping downward! We’re heading down the mountain! Oh my God, there’s The Homestead! We’re saved!

And this is basically how the trip up to Hot Springs works. Every time. If it’s daylight and your car is working ok, it is one of the most beautiful parts of the country. Of course, after many hours of it, you become less enthralled and more concerned that you’ve been driving in circles…. There’s a lot of it and it all looks very similar. If you go far enough down 220 (the only path to and through Hot Springs) though, the little two-lane road eventually runs smack into a huge, ornate, mansion-type building. This is the one major attraction Bath county has to offer: The Homestead. It’s a resort, nestled high in the Blue Ridge mountains, where you can go to get away from it all — if you can afford it. Based on the number of Land Rovers I’ve seen zipping about and the number of ladies I’ve seen walking around in fur coats, it’s a bit pricey.

The Homestead is where almost everyone who lives in Hot Springs works. Steph’s step-grandad, Mac, works there as a cook.

The scene when you come over the mountain and first see this behemoth really sticks in your mind. This is why I recognized a snapshot of it in a box of photos that my family received after they’d been cleaned out of my grandma’s house. I didn’t understand why grandma had this picture, since she’s been a resident of Michigan all her life, but it turns out it was from she and my grandpa’s honeymoon! They went to The Homestead! (Steph’s mom and step dad Larry came up to The Homestead for their honeymoon, too, though they were still living in North Carolina at that time!) And, get this, my dad was born nine months after my grandparent’s honeymoon, so when I go to visit my in-laws I could be in the very town where he was conceived!

I’m sorry, but when we’re all finally in the same room I’m going to suggest we lock arms and sing a rousing chorus of “It’s a Small World After All.”

I’ll be singing the loudest. After the crazy trips I’ve had to that town, I’m just happy to still be alive.

The Car Talk guys are always recommending stuff like this to people whose cars are basically lost causes. “Find something with ‘Miracle’ printed on it somewhere,” they’ll say. Their tone suggests that the additive won’t actually do anything, but that, after it’s administered, the problem may diminish for a completely unrelated reason, or the placebo effects may take hold and the problem will disappear in the car-owner’s head, because, after all, they used an additive. A miracle additive.

Driving an old, beat-up, point-A-to-point-B car, I am also a big proponent of additives…. I don’t do a great deal of “regular maintenance” on my car. About once every six months I will change my oil. I check my fluids then too, if I remember. Oh, and I clean out the boxes and bags and clothes and papers that have piled up in my back seat and trunk. And finally, for good measure, I throw in some additives. They make them for your oil and your gas and your coolant, but Fuel Injector/Carburetor cleaner is my favorite. Does it actually improve my gas mileage and make my engine run better? Probably not. But it gives me what I’m looking for: a quantifiable, immediate result that is fun to watch.

Now this won’t happen if you actually follow the directions on the back. You have to do it Dad’s way. First of all, do not even glance at the directions; Dad has never read them. While the car is running, quickly remove the lid for the air filter and pour the entire bottle directly into the carburetor. The engine will gasp and sputter and eventually stall out. Let it sit in there for a good ten minutes. Then try to start the car. Given that you just flooded the engine, this will not happen without a fight. However, when it finally does…wow…. Cascades of black smoke — like the stuff you see billowing out of coal-powered plants in photos from the industrial revolution — will shoot from your tailpipe. And every time you hit the gas, you’ll get more. You’ll feel a tinge of guilt for polluting so heavily, but then you’ll think, “All that crap used to be in my engine,” and this is a great feeling.

I highly recommend this method to anyone else whose car has a carburetor. I guarantee you an hour of driving without a single tailgater behind you.

The night Dad and I first brought my car home, about eight years ago, he decided we should clean the carburetor out in this manner. Kate, Kevin, and I were watching, and, after it started again, we all piled in to take it for a drive. I didn’t know how to drive stick yet, so Dad was driving, running the engine really high, blowing all this stuff out. I remember looking back and seeing this expanse of filthy clouds in our wake.

As we were rounding a corner in our neighborhood, we saw Fr. Wall, the priest from our church…. He was probably about 65 back then. He was in the street helping a woman who was even older out of a car and into her house. My dad pulled up and said “hi” to him. They talked for a few minutes about what was going on with the church…you could see the exhaust was really starting to bother Fr. Wall and the woman. Finally he asked “Bob, is your car ok?” Dad explained what we’re out doing, and with that said “Ok, well, we’ll see you later,” he hit the gas, and, as we took off…bam.

I still remember looking in the rear view mirror and seeing the silhouettes of two figures coughing and frantically waving their hands in front of their faces, as the explosion of smoke engulfed them. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my Dad laugh so hard as when he realized what he had just done. I’m sure all the years of Catholic school and life in the Catholic church had made it clear that you were never, ever supposed to do anything like that to a priest, even accidentally.

To this day, when we recall this story, Dad goes into a fit of laughter so violent that he can barely breathe. Though part of that is probably due to all the smoke inhalation.