I am both exhilarated and appalled at the latest project, which is to complete the editing of a couple books I had started while on the way to something else. I enjoyed the daily addition to the stories, and the sundry distractions of life that wrapped itself around longer term issues. I have three or four thick stacks of paper, purporting to account for some aspects of the unique culture of America, at the zenith of the 20th Century, and the rude awakening of what promises to be an entirely less forgiving 21st.

One of the projects is a book called “Car People,” which may or may not be the title that remains on the flyleaf by the time my fingers tire on the keyboard. You may have seen the latest contribution about the 1991 Syclone the other day. It was an attempt to set up my marketing strategy to stockpile some cash to buy new teeth, or remove some cataracts, and to simultaneously chuck another chapter at the automobile book. You may remember some tales about the purchase of a 1959 Rambler Custom Cross Country Station Wagon, a wild joint venture of my brother and I. The wagon was a lovely old gal in pale pink with white inserts on her fins. This bit of personal and clan history has been something I have been meaning to address for years, but was easy enough to put out of mind once we got her installed in a museum on the flat green part of Indiana.

Which of course went bankrupt. We wound up donating the car to the local American Motors Club in town in honor of Dad’s contribution to the design of what we decided was the suitable symbol of the majesty of America’s global triumph, and our small part of it.

Or something. I think we were right, but these days if you seem to be invoking some history they didn’t teach when I was in school, and you will just wind up with masked people crowded around the front door, bringing more trouble than memory is worth.

The Wagon needed some work in Culpeper between the drive up from Florida and our dash to Indiana, looking for parts that have not been manufactured in over seventy-years.

I was trying to puzzle through what part of the project to include in the larger tome about idiots who attempt to restore old machines, but I have to be brutally honest. I am a recovering car guy. and not fully over the madness. First car memories are those associated with Dad cutting a trunk lid into the body of an early Nash Metropolitan. And the sale of the new family’s first new car, a 1948 Chevrolet.

These things always take longer than you expect, and I have every confidence that I will ring them all in while there is still time, and they might even be fun. Another is a curious tale related by two amazing World War II heroes about the fate of the only Naval Intelligence Officer who did not come home from the war in Vietnam.
That one is going to be interesting, though I have been working on the description of the boundary stones of the original District of Columbia. They say the Federal funds expended on the survey crews constitute the first national monument of the youthful United States. It was an adventure in 19 parts, one for each of the severe short towers that mark some of our beginning. So, that and a Civil War love story that made my g-g-g Grandfather James a deserter from the Union Army, and the lurid accounts of g-g-g Uncle Patrick and his service with John Bell Hood. The marriage between James and Patrick’s sister actually served to sunder relations on the Irish side of the family from that date on, and we wisely just let the matter lie.

General Hood is having his statues torn down now. Things change, I guess.

When I was tracking things more closely, one of the motor-rags claimed the average age of the car on the road is a little over eleven years. That is getting long in the tooth, compared to the ones I knew in my youth. In Michigan, our road salt was enough to open rusty holes in the fenders of most new Detroit iron.
Rosie did pretty well in her first 61 years. Hell, there might even be a book in it!
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