CSotD: How to Keep Your Memories Alive: A Manual of Step by Step Procedures For The Compleat Idiot
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One thing I don't understand in Zits is why Jeremy's folks would let a young driver have a Volkswagen van. The first car should be some kind of tank that avoids damage to self or contents regardless of the ignorance or inexperience of the driver.
That said, I had a red 1971 Volkswagen camper, which I got when it was only 10 years old and when I was old enough to start feeling nostalgic for things I hadn't had in the first place.
It wasn't even my idea; my then-wife wanted us to get it, drove it once and discovered she didn't like driving a van, whereupon it became my car.
Which is kind of like having her say, "I don't like scotch, but this Johnny Walker was on sale, so I bought you a case. Why is the label blue instead of red?"
I've had about a dozen cars over the years, but that is the only one I miss, and I really miss it. How I loved that van!
Not that there weren't disadvantages to it. One is that you are going down the highway with nothing between you and the other cars but the spare tire and a pair of cookie sheets (see above remark about young drivers).
That's balanced by the incredible visibility of sitting high behind those big windows. Even with a couple of Dodge Caravans I owned later, you couldn't see over the traffic the way you could from the driver's seat of the VW.
And, other than being a bit top heavy — especially if the camper top accidentally pops up while you're driving, which happened at least once — the van was a very maneuverable machine, and forgiving when it wasn't.
Fillmore Avenue in Colorado Springs is four lanes of traffic, with only painted lines and good manners separating you from the other three lanes. One morning, it was all covered with black ice, which nobody realized until they were on it, at which point we all became paranoid but had no choice but to carry on.
I was in the far-right lane when the fellow in front of me slowed down. I touched my brakes and I should perhaps mention here that the skis on Jeremy's van are superfluous in terms of road-hugging ability on ice, as Mssrs. Scott and Borgman pointed out three years ago:
I must have had much the same expression on my face as Jeremy, as the van went into elephant-on-skates mode. Given the choice between damaging two cars and damaging one, I directed the freefall towards the curb, hoping to get away with a bent wheel.
However, there was a curb cut at the point where we went from asphalt to cement and now I found myself on the sidewalk — mercifully free of pedestrians — and still moving with traffic at roughly the same speed I'd been going when I tapped the brakes, which is to say, slightly faster than the car ahead of me.
Which I passed, as I dodged a fire hydrant and a couple of telephone poles, after which came another curb cut which directed the van, will-he-or-nil-he, back down onto Fillmore Avenue, mercifully but improbably ahead of the car that had previously been in front of me.
I don't know the conventions in your part of the world, but, most places I've lived, it's rude enough to pass someone on the right and twice as inconsiderate to do so by driving up onto the sidewalk.
So, as we all — nobody having touched an accelerator pedal in the past quarter-mile — drifted up to the stop light at the next intersection, I realized that the fellow had by now shifted into the left lane and that we would be lined up together at the stop. And I hoped he didn't have a gun.
He didn't. What he had was as terrified an expression on his face as I had on mine, so that, when we glanced over at each other, we both burst into laughter. And then each went home for fresh underwear.
The only other remarkable misadventure with the van came when my wonderful shade-tree mechanic (as the best VW mechanics are) performed an oil change and tune up and told me that he had found brass in the oil and that the van was on the verge of throwing a rod.
Bad news at any time but particularly unwelcome when the oil change and tuneup are in preparation for leaving the next day to drive from Colorado to New York for a vacation. And, ideally, back again.
A round trip of just under 4,000 miles.
"You might make it," he said. "Then again, it could blow on your way home this afternoon."
And while I never did this sort of thing at any other time, I turned to my 10-year-old and said, "We won't tell Mommy about this. We don't have time to fix it before we leave, and it would only make her worry."
Which meant that she thought I must be some kind of automotive genius when, a few miles out of Brantford, Ontario, I knew exactly why the car had suddenly started making that incredibly loud banging noise.
Three days in Brantford might have gotten old, but we took a train into Toronto and had three delightful days there instead. It's a wonderful city with a nice zoo and a very good science museum.
The other delightful thing was that you could drop a rebuilt engine into a Volkswagen van for $750 Canadian, which even in 1982 was a helluva bargain, particularly if, when you get to the customs shed on the way back across the border and they ask if you purchased anything while you were in Canada, you don't mention a rebuilt Volkswagen engine.
After which question he asks where you're going and you say "Star Lake" and he asks your name and you say "Peterson" and he says, "Oh, you must be Art's son!" and you then have to say to your parents, "We won't tell any of the neighbors about stopping in Brantford. It would only make the federal government worry."
Half a dozen years later, when I moved back East, I knew I couldn't afford to keep a second car for summer driving, and that the VW was not going to be able to clear its windshield, much less heat its interior, in the sub-zero weather of Northern New York, so I regretfully parted with the old beast.
Which, as said, I still miss. I thought about keeping the string of camel bells, but I'll never have another car in which they would belong.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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