(This isn’t the Nash Metro Dad bought for Mom. That Metropolitan had the same colors and had been built in the UK and represented part of George Romney’s effort to compete in the Car Wars of the mid-1950s. Ours was naturally built to British standards. There was no “trunk lid” since access to what they called The Boot was through a drop-down mechanism for the back of the rear seat. Dad cut one himself, saved the pieces and crafted an American style lid from the pieces. That helped sell the concept of a small popular car that could be sold for $1,500. The little brand stayed in the Rambler family until Dad left to accept a position heading the styling for the Kelvinator Appliance division. Who thought kitchens could have style? Times change. Don’t they?)

I had a couple of the devices with me while in hospital care. What was interesting about it was the material contained on long unseen files. The desktop Mac back in my bedroom has been untouched since this little health adventure. The Laptop may have all the documents, but the smaller iPad had only a few patches of files from the 2000 decade. It was interesting to look back and see what one used to worry about when healthy. And still relatively young.

Amid the other chaos of institutional life- “We sent one back to the ER this afternoon and one to the morgue.” There was the current stream of information in the daily traffic, the most entertaining accounts of the current- 2022 current- Car Week out at Pebble Beach. The Old Salts who are covering it have tantalized with pictures of proud old automobiles at the Concours leavened with humor at the vehicles at the Concours D’Lemons, a parade of vehicles that represent ordinary Shade Tree mechanics who did the best they could with what was available at the time. “Best of the Worst!” is the way they sum it up, and that is not an amalgamation of unrelated terms.

My Brother had one of the strange bubble cars at the lower right hand of the image above, an AMC Pacer.

I think it wound up as a sort of home-built pickup truck before being cast aside. But the Concours D’Lemons is the sort of car show in which old car geeks can recall what it was like to walk out to the driveway with a metal saw and a long extension cord and enjoy an afternoon in the sun.

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