Wonderful, Bizarre Afternoon

Sunday March 15, 2015 I started the day working outside picking up branches so I would be able to mow the grass which will be coming up very soon. I even had to start up my push mower (thank you Rhett for fixing that for me) it started on the first pull after sitting for months through the winter. It had sat so long half of the gas in the tank had evaporated. I  mowed some tall grass so I could have a direct path to my brush piles to dump the branches I was picking up in the yard. It got to be around 1:30 in the afternoon, so I stopped for a refreshing brew with my lovely bride. That is so unusual for me to be drinking in the afternoon. I rarely do that more than once a day. I was just out of fuel for any more work. We were sitting having a cold beer when Joyce said there’s a slow moving car driving by and it just pulled into the driveway. I got up and went to the front door to see what was going on. A young man approached the front door to let me know he and his friend were having car trouble. The 1999 Cadillac they were driving in was overheating. They had gotten off the main highway so if the car stalled they would not be on a major highway, but getting off the beaten path they were lost. The car overheated and that’s how they arrived here. The young man who approached the front door had both arms covered in tattoos, but had a nice haircut as did the other young man. This is not the first time people have had trouble and pulled into our driveway. I probably should have taken more care in walking out with the two of them, but I did not. I knew that Joyce had my back with the loaded .38 and even if she couldn't have hit much at that distance there would be enough noise from the snub nosed pistol that they would have scattered. When I got to the car the one man was working on removing the thermostat from the car. I found out he was nearly a graduate of our local Ozarks Technical College in automotive science. I saw he had two vice grip pliers and thought he was using them to remove the bolts from the thermostat housing. It turned out the previous time he had to remove it, he had snapped the heads off both bolts and the thermostat was just held attached to the engine block by those two vice grip pliers. It turned out they were on their way to a Kansas City casino. I helped them with some coffee cans to drain what coolant there was left in the radiator and added some water to get them on their way. I could not leave them there to go back to my work with Joyce alone in the house. When the mechanic finally removed the thermostat and they were ready to continue on their way, they were still headed to the casino in the somewhat dicey Cadillac.  I gave them the coffee cans to drain the radiator fluids again should they need to. The mechanic popped the trunk and I saw he had two large 12 inch woofer speakers in the trunk along with a huge amplifier. They definitely had some big sound for their music. I came back to the house to have another brew with Joyce and I kept giggling with her through the afternoon, remembering how silly I was at that age with driving beat up old cars without a care in the world. Our first trip from Saint Louis to San Diego we left in a 1960 Corvair that had a busted head gasket and a bad tie rod on the front end that threw the steering wheel into an epileptic fit every time it hit a pothole or a railroad crossing, I thought about my old 1957 Mercury that continually overheated and did not even have a parking brake that worked. I thought about our 1973 Ford Gran Torino that we left in from Camdenton for San Diego. It busted a radiator hose in Texas, and then lost its alternator in Las Cruses, New Mexico. I drove all day without any electrical accessories to Tucson Arizona where we were able to get a new alternator. Then if that wasn’t bad enough, the rear end started whining as we rolled through the mountains down to San Diego. I was on my way to a job interview with my now good friend Ted at Burroughs Computer Company when the drive wheel slid out of the rear end axle half way up the hill to Burroughs. I had to walk back down the hill to a garage to have them tow it into their repair shop. I ended up taking the bus back to Coronado that day on a journey that took four or five hours. So after my experiences, I am sympathetic to those with car trouble. As the young men started the old Cadillac up they were happily on their way to the casino without a care in the world. The tattooed one said, "we travel on our time, no one else’s." I thought they are living the good life. I don’t know how they supported themselves, but they were living. The mechanical one told me he quit the mechanics program because while he liked working on his car he did not like working on other people’s cars. The reason struck me as very considerate when he said he was concerned that if he fixed someone else’s car and did something wrong he would feel terrible. I liked and appreciated that as I used to feel that same way when working on airplanes. Now the young erstwhile mechanic is taking classes in psychology. I am giggling as I write this thinking if he was concerned about screwing up someone’s car what will happen when he has the potential to screw up someone’s life? I am still chuckling as I have been since 2:30 this afternoon, thinking of all the situations I had at their ages when I never gave thought to things that could go wrong with cars on the road and how even though they had what I consider a serious problem with the car, they continued on without a second thought or a care in the world. I do not know either of their names, but they gave me a wonderful afternoon that continues to this moment.