Some older men sit on a porch with a pot of morning coffee. They speculate if Clint Eastwood and Willy Nelson made it through the night. “Yep” offered one geezer, “they’re both older’n dirt. Can’t live forever.”
“Well so are we!” another geriatric retorted. “No point in buying green bananas for any of us.”
Which brings me to a marvellous music link at Sam Dad Radio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkWbYjunkfs&list=RDxkWbYjunkfs&start_radio=1
It is three minutes of wonderful down south blues and should cheer anyone up. If the link doesn’t work just Google up Sam Dad Radio green bananas. Uhuh.
So here I sit at 04:00 on the last Sunday in June. The glass of 2025 is at halves, full or empty, that’s up to you. Venus, the morning star, sits brightly in a cloudless sky. Various yachts sit anchored in the harbour, their anchor lights glowing prettily. I’m sleepless again. And here I muse over a mug of tea, my churning brain contemplating issues of no consequence that I can’t flush. It’s no way to start the day.
Now it is the first day of July. 09:00 in the Morning. A flawless weather day with tepid breezes wafting in through the open window at my desk. The lemming race down on the highway is building already. Hurry up and relax. Now the first yacht leaves the anchorage, rushing home to see tonight’s fireworks and then be in the office tomorrow.
(In my opinion)
After misadventures last year with my drone I’m battling with the insurance replacement unit which has sat in my closet all this time. I will admit I’ve been afraid to use the thing. Booting up the wee flying computer now has it asking questions which I’ve never seen before. Tektwits! Every electronic device seems determined to subjugate its operator. Facebook now demands that I wait for them to email me a password so I can finally open the account to read a message someone sent me. Then…they email me a query about me being active with passwords. WTF? YOU just sent them to me!
What the hell ever happened to simple old emails? Now everyone wants to use quack, twitter, squawk, fart, bleep and bark instead of going with what works. I refuse to be trendy especially if it requires downloading more apps that instantly scramble other enablements already lurking in my laptops dark brain.
My existence seems to be punctuated by moments of things with red wheels. When I was very young my father owned a 1938 Ford car. At that time it would have been 17 years old. I don’t remember rust but can see a gleaming dark blue car accented with chrome trim spotted with a bit of red paint. For example there were V8 emblems on the hood and red wheels with V8 logos on the hubcaps. I can certainly remember the warm aroma of the fabric interior. I have anecdotes about that vehicle and it is one of the few things from from my childhood I would love to see again. Another item from that era was my Werlich wagon. Werlich was a company in Preston Ontario which produced wooden items like toboggans and wagons. I don’t know who provided it to me but I loved it for many years.
I owned it before we moved from farm to town but that was where I really began to exploit its possibilities. I would kneel in it with my right leg and propel myself along the concrete side walks of the block around our house with my left foot. Mother could never work out why my left shoe was always so badly worn. We lived across Church Street from the fire hall and my world was the four sides of that block. I loved the firehall. I loved the clackety clack of the cracks in the sidewalk as I scooted along and steered with the tongue of the wagon folded back to work as a tiller. One day I swerved around a pedestrian and rammed a parking meter. Unbelievably, the meter’s lid popped open and a cascade of pennies and nickles rained into the bed of my wagon. Around the corner was the local pharmacy and confectionery. That wagon came home with a heap of candy. My parents were boggled. There was probably some sort of martial law applied, there was for nearly everything, I can’t recall, but it was a glorious day which I’ll always remember.
In later years, that wagon was used to deliver newspapers. Neither rain nor snow held me back as I delivered the Toronto Telegram. On Saturdays I had 120 customers and each thick paper could weigh up to 12 pounds. You can now find those antique wagons for sale on Ebay for stupendous prices. I still remember the dark wet and cold of late Saturday afternoon and the added misery of collecting payments. As an adult I’ve proven to be an abject failure as an entrepreneur so clearly I learned little from my early endeavours.
As our daughter approached her 16th birthday she began to campaign for a red Saab turbo convertible. I tried to describe my first car, a 1957 Vauxhall Victor. It was red and white and rust and rust. “Vauxhall? Wasn’t that some sort of vacuum cleaner?” I answered that indeed it had really sucked! Eventually she received a very basic Nissan Sentra which proved to be the most impossibly reliable car ever. It never quit, ever! “Dad…that piece-of-shit car you forced on me is broken down again.”
“You mean it’s out of gas again.”
“Well I put five dollars in last week!”
“And look, it’s out of water!”
“Water? C’mon!”
We bought and moved to a lovely house last fall. The neighbour had one of those ubiquitous eternally closed garage doors. That, of course, excites a growing curiosity. Then one day this spring the door was open and there to my wondering eyes appeared one little red British sports car. A 1973 Triumph TR6. As a nostalgic old mechanic I soon found myself tinkering on it. I soon recalled that my love/hate relationship for old British cars requires accepting a curse that you are never done tinkering. A tune-up involves eternal adjustments, nothing is ever set forever.
A torqy wee bugger.
However, this cherished relic does have a wonderful sound when it is running. That throaty roar is probably why so many people bought the things. This one also possesses a rare set of fully functional brakes. I don’t think I ever owned a British car which didn’t require pumping the brakes every stop. Getting in and out of the wee fliver is a challenge for this old dumpling. The foot pedals are ridiculously close together for my pair of boats, the seat does not adjust back far enough. It is not comfortable. I can’t drive it without one elbow hanging over the door. Frankly, after having known British cars, boats and aircraft it seems a requirement that nothing ever be comfortable. “Wot? Comfort? Naaw, we’re British!”
There is nearly always someone beaking away at the car with their usual vomit of testosterone-induced bullshit about their vast knowledge of British sport cars. That gets to be irritating. On a test drive, a Mazda MX-5 convertible pulled out ahead of me. “Wow,” I thought, “They sure don’t make them like they used to, thank God.” But then, being of British descent I understand that we are a race of masochists and that comfort is irrelevant to holding a cutting image. “Keep your pecker up” is an iconic British declaration. So is “Stay calm and carry on.”
My latest foray into wee red wheels is to acquire a 1981 Honda CT110 motorbike. That was built 2 years before my wife and I met. It was a beast with a whumping 110cc motor and a double range of gears which gives the rider 8 speeds. You can climb cliffs and pull stumps. There is a huge cult following of millions around the world. In Australia they were known as “Posties” for their long service there in the postal service. They must have worked well, Australian Post sold them all off. Crowds of delighted folks proudly own them now. There are parts available nearly everywhere. The little trekkers are still made, now sporting a 125cc motor and disc brakes but that old gearbox is gone. The old bikes hold their value often selling for more than when new. I feel like a bear on a roller skate in the saddle but it fits easily onto a rear bumper carrying rack and makes a perfect exploration vehicle for little jaunts into the back of beyond.
So, if you see a portly geezer wobbling down the road it is only me on a beer run. If the day comes when I’m whisking along on my electric scooter, chances are It’ll be red. There is already one in town lurching down the sidewalks and flying a Jolly Roger flag.
Geezers rule!
“Don’t let yesterday take up too much of today.”—Will Rogers
