CSotD: Learning How Things Work: The Subtle Clues
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A follow-up on the "Childhood Heroes" arc from Betty, starting with a salute for using heroes from the current parent-generation and not from back at the dawn of time.
Even Doc would be a hero from my young-adulthood, so, if you have to ask who Doc is when MJ's name is in the mix, you might be in the current parent population.
Unless you thought I meant Blanchard in which case you can get your own strip about them consarned kids and their fancy coffee and their hippity-hoppity music.
But the McNally brothers made me think of my friend Kenny, who lived on the other side of town, not next door. But on Fridays, when I went to the dentist after school to get my braces tightened, I'd walk the mile or so with Kenny.
Kenny always had something to adjust on or modify on or add to his car, even if it were only some flames coming out of the wheel-wells. He was serious enough about things that when he added a Mr. Horsepower sticker, however Walter Lantz may have felt about the logo, it meant that he had, in fact, installed a set of Clay Smith cams.
Though perhaps I'd have learned little living next door to him anyway, since I was always more interested in his collie, King, who was a truly great, sweet dog and always delighted to see that Kenny had once more come home from school.
Later, however, I lived with a mechanic for a year, which taught me mostly that, if you work the night shift at a gas station, you can pick up deathbed junkers for basically nothing.
For instance, while he taught me that there were some kinds of noises you mentioned the next time you visited your mechanic-equipped gas station, and some kinds of noises that you took in to him right away, and some kinds of noises where you pulled over and called a tow truck, I didn't know that, when you had an engine rebuilt in those days, they put in a different grade of oil and you were supposed to keep it down under about 45 for the first hundred miles while you "ran in" the engine and got the rods and pistons and cylinders working together.
Which made me laugh at today's BC from a couple of memories, the main one being a college roommate who had a TR3 that, like most British sportscars of its era, spent a lot of time being serviced.
He lived in Peoria, and the Triumph spent Easter of sophomore year to mid-July in the shop there being rebuilt, at the end of which he and my girlfriend and I drove down in his mother's decidedly unhot car to pick up his very hot Triumph and drive it back to South Bend. At considerably more than 45 mph.
Two days later, she and I came out into the backyard at her place to find out why an ailing B-52 was landing in the driveway, to find him sitting, cursing in a cloud of black smoke.
Which wouldn't be a particularly funny story except that a few weeks after that, they took up together and I was kicked to the curb along with the TR3, so maybe there were some other noises I should have paid more attention to.
Karman Ghia's a bitch.
That was the summer before I moved in with the mechanic, which wasn't as good as living with the girl, but I'd learned all she was gonna teach me anyway.
About 12 years later, I took my VW bus into my VW shadetree mechanic for a tune-up and oil change prior to driving from Colorado to the Adirondacks and back, and he came out with a grim expression to tell me that he had found copper in the oil.
Which mean I was on the verge of blowing the engine.
And my wife had taken two weeks off for this vacation and we were leaving in 24 hours, which I explained to him.
"It might make it," he said. "Or it might blow on your way home right now."
The first secret I ever asked my then 10-year-old to keep from his mother: "Look, we're going on this vacation, and either it happens or it doesn't. No need for all of us to worry about it, right?"
So we went and made it as far as Chatham, Ontario, before either a dwarf with a sledge hammer began trying to escape from the engine compartment or something occurred that was even more distressing but less surprising to two of us.
And that's a noise you can go ahead and drive with for another few miles or kilometers because what the hell at that point.
The van spent three days at the VW dealership in Chatham, while we took the kids on the train to Toronto which is more fun even than Chatham, and then we drove up the 401 to Ganonoque at 45 mph/70 kmh (not a normal speed on the 401) and crossed back into the US.
I told the customs agent we had crossed at Windsor, which we had, and were going to my parents home in the Adirondacks, which we were, and that we hadn't acquired anything in Canada, because I had forgotten the part where we bought, dropped in and were importing, a newly-rebuilt Volkswagen engine.
And he said, "Where are you headed in the Adirondacks?" and I told him and he told me that he was a teacher there working customs for the summer and knew my parents very well and I should tell them hello from him.
And that became the first time I ever asked my parents, not so much to lie, but to not tell a lot of people the hilarious story of my trip through Canada.
That was also about the first time I noticed copper in my marriage, too.
Probably should have stopped and fixed it then, but that's another story.
Now here are some subtle audio cues about women and cars
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