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Notice: Uninitialized string offset: 0 in /usr/home/web/users/a0026794/html/wp-includes/blocks/blocks-json.php on line 1 March 2019 • words and images↓
I’d heard (or possibly saw) that Anne of Green Gables — or was it Megan Follows? — had been on a bus that I sometimes take, which seemed odd for many reasons. Somehow I knew she wanted a keychain figure of herself (the actor? or the character?), which I had or could get so I took the bus in hopes of “running into” her.
I worked up the nerve to talk to her and mid-conversation remembered I’d left my purse behind on a seat. When I looked, it was gone. This surprised me.
Next I found myself in a filthy beauty parlor where a rat was nosing around on the floor.
I had no money and no phone and no way to contact my parents to pick me up, where ever I was. Panicked, the rare and interesting encounter (with an actor? or a fictional character?) took a back seat to the terror of being stranded.
The dream began when I became aware that I was not in pain, or not much — but only in the dream.
I was walking with high school friends when they veered off through a meadow where there were no visible paths and disappeared. We had been trying to get to a train station, and I was surprised by the detour. Shortcut?
I tried to follow their track and reached a point where it wrapped around a house. Only a few inches of ground and grass separated the house from a sheer drop into a gorge thousands of feet deep. I couldn’t walk on that — how could they have? Were they that much bolder? They had never been.
In front of the house was a sign like those you see at rural bars. “Not a good idea,” I thought. Alcohol, a precariously perched house, and death only a few inches and a few thousand feet away.
Lightt was a short-lived video app I still miss. I didn’t have time to master it but I liked some of its effects. This video and a few others demonstrate motion parallax, which I had to look up after I noticed it.
I came back to my shared desk at work and discovered one of three figurines (trolls?) was missing, but I couldn’t remember what the missing one looked like. I was upset by its loss nonetheless.
Dark stuff was smeared all over the desk, which could be explained by the two balls of graphite I eventually found, first one, then the other.
I opened the drawer to find what looked like sawdust and wood flakes.
Someone sitting in my chair had moved when I returned, but she had no explanation and had not seen anything.
I doubted myself over the third figurine.
After time had passed, a note appeared written clumsily on tattered cardboard explaining someone in their area had used my desk to shred particleboard. To compensate me for the inconvenience, they had ordered me office supplies. Awkward drawings accompanied the text.
Unrelated, I later headed to Human Resources, but kept finding myself in a high-rise mall-like setting with many unusual shops and lots of workers browsing.
I had to get back (having never made it to HR), but I couldn’t find an elevator. I thought I had seen one but it went missing. Finally I discovered one hidden behind a conventional office door, but it was up three steep, oddly angled steps that I couldn’t navigate — but I tried.
A woman stuck her head out of a window in the lower part of the frosted glass elevator door to see if I was coming but I said I’d catch the next one. I was very late already, though, and there was no way I could get up those three steps.
I can’t say we took any great American road trips when I was a child — mostly 200-mile jaunts to visit family in the Altoona area of Pennsylvania or rare shorter ones to local attractions like Niagara Falls or Letchworth State Park. The first car I remember was a powder blue Ford Falcon. With Virgil and me in the back seat picking on each other and wondering “Are we there yet?” after 25 or 50 miles, time and money may not have been the only reason we didn’t travel far or often.
Later, my dad bought a used van with two back seats. This was such a novelty that kids stopped by to pile in. All that room! Of course it was bare bones, a working man’s van, with none of the comforts of today’s SUVs and minivans, like DVD players or even — gasp! — cup holders. We “roughed it” back in those days with tap water or water from a roadside spring in Pennsylvania kept in a jug. We’d have to pull over to drink it. And we didn’t know about “hydration,” only thirst.
We had only an over-the-air radio — no Sirius, no subscription services tailored to our tastes. You might find yourself in a part of the country with only bland pop and country & western. Our series of bare-bones vehicles didn’t have 8-track tape decks or CB radios for chatting with passing truckers. I don’t think the radio played much of a role in our trips, except to get traffic and weather.
We had games like “punch bug,” in which being the first to see a Volkswagen Beetle on the highway entitled you to punch your annoying brother, sister, or friend. We also kept an eye peeled for “beavers,” station wagons with wood-paneled sides. We’d make a pulling motion to truck drivers to try to get them to pull their air horns. We liked the ones who accommodated us. I understand the tradition continues today, although with safety first (no startling of unaware drivers) and the hope it doesn’t provoke a modern road rage incident.
Of course there were no USB ports, but there were cigarette lighters — in 1965, a whopping 45 percent of Americans smoked. I’ve never bought a car, but it sounds like what Wikipedia describes as a “de facto DC connector,” or cigarette lighter receptacle, is more likely to be used to power portable accessories (“lights, fans, beverage heating devices, and air compressors for inflating tires”). I wonder if it can be used for e-cigarettes? J’s is used for an iPhone charger. With only about 15 percent of Americans smoking today, I suspect the car cigarette lighter as such has achieved “relic” status for many of us.
Neither the Ford Falcon nor the vans that followed had air conditioning save that offered by an open window and a speed-generated breeze. I don’t know how we held conversations on the open highway. Maybe we didn’t, other than, “He’s picking on me!” and “Are we there yet?” punctuated by “Ralph, STOP!” (My mother had imaginary brakes on her side and possibly a worn-out floorboard.)
Most cars sold in the U.S. now come with air conditioning as a standard; it’s a given, not a luxury — not so north of the border. Today we “wind” the windows down mostly to take photos, ask passers-by questions, pay entrance fees or talk to booth operators, and on occasion encourage a fly or mosquito to vamoose. I say “wind” even though the push of a button opens the windows (as long as they’re powered, that is).
In the old Ford Falcon and vans, you did wind the windows up and down, just like we used window winders to open and close the trailer’s jalousie windows. I had to look that term up — jalousie windows in campers/trailers/mobile homes were common in the 1950s and ‘60s, but aren’t anymore.
Jalousie window opened with a window winder in Riverside, Illinois
Although cars.com talks about “old-school manual crank windows that seem, especially now, from a bygone automotive era,” they’re also not quite a relic. People don’t want them for themselves, but they do want the lower car price. They’re also found in many trucks. The 2015 cars.com article concludes, “For now, at least, it’s clear there are enough price-conscious new-car shoppers to keep manual windows around.”
I’ve never been a smoker, and I don’t feel nostalgic about car cigarette lighters. As with push lawn mowers and clotheslines, however, I do miss manual windows and window winders. Power windows have their advantages when you spot something and want to take a photo or video quickly (although they make enough noise to scare off animals). On the other hand, when I wait in the car I don’t always remember to open the window when the power is on, so I resort to the alternative, awkward in a parking lot, of opening the door. It doesn’t sound like much, but sometimes I want to crank open the window.
At least it’s not because someone used the cigarette lighter.
