Made in America

Made in America

October 25, 2013 at 4:39pm

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For no particular reason the other day, while looking around at an interstate choked with Nissans and Toyotas and Hondas, I proclaimed loudly, “I am never buying a Japanese car.”

 

Why, my wife asked? (Apparently, I’d forgotten she was in the car).

 

“Are you kidding me?” I said. “My father fought against that country and died in World War 2. How could I in good conscience buy one of their cars?”

 

“Aren’t you taking your father to the doctor next week?” she asked.

 

“Well, yes. Men of that generation were a lot tougher than those today. You had to kill them more than once.”

 

This was in my mind because I had to buy a new car recently. My sporty 2000 beige Chevrolet Impala with the cracked windshield and functioning cassette deck was totaled in a hit-and-run accident. I settled on a nice new Buick, which I know takes my coolness factor from 1 to minus-20.

 

I decided early in the process that I would buy an American car. This commitment to the red, white and blue has not always served me well. I once bought a Dodge Shadow, which appears on just about every “Worst car of all time” list you can find. It had an engine built by Briggs and Stratton and was less reliable than George Jones in the '70s.

 

My father worked for many years at General Motors, so I’ve always been loyal to those brands. However, it is probably here that I should point out that two of my dad’s most recent vehicle purchases were a Dodge truck and a Ford sedan. So clearly, I’m the only one who cares.

 

Well, whatever. I yam what I yam.

 

As dad and I were driving up the interstate on the way to the doctor, I was expounding on my theory that it was a dishonor to his memory, even though he’s still alive, to buy a Japanese car. So the World War 2 veteran pointed to an Altima just head of us and said, “That’s a nice car.”

 

“Daddy!” I said. “That’s a Japanese car. I would never buy one of those.”

 

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Me either.” I also got him to agree that neither of us would ever buy any damn Korean car, though they never attacked us directly, and they came off as pretty decent people in all the M*A*S*H episodes I saw. Then I saw a nice Mercedes-Benz and said “Now, if I had the money, I wouldn’t mind one of those.”

 

“You know, the Germans were involved in World War 2, as well,” he said. Well, nobody’s perfect.

 

Now, I know plenty of people would accuse me of being small-minded or jingoistic or just behind-the-times when it comes to not buying foreign-made cars. Maybe so. Maybe I was too affected when I watched “Tora! Tora! Tora!” as a kid. But for me, I guess it will always be baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet – or at least a cool Buick.

Couch potato

My wife informed me the other day that she intended to buy a new sofa.

“But we already have a sofa,” I said.

She glared at me and said she didn’t want something that was old, worn out, dirty, out-of-style, and needed to be replaced in her house anymore. At least I THINK she was talking about the sofa.

She showed me the one she was getting and, after I was revived from passing out when I saw the price tag, I allowed that it was a nice sofa, and should make for some pleasant, comfortable afternoon naps.

“Oh, no,” she said. “You can’t lie on this sofa.”

Now hold on just a cotton-pickin’ minute here. I’m ok with the fact that we have entire cabinets full of dishes and china that I’m not allowed to use. I made peace with the fact that I’m not supposed to dry my hands (or anything else, apparently) on the perfectly usable hand towels in the downstairs bathroom. I’ve accepted that cutting my toenails in bed is not conducive to a harmonious household – though in my defense, I only did it on MY side of the bed.

Anyway, my point is, there are certain concessions and compromises you have to make in life. But what good is a sofa you can’t lie on?

I am not going to give up lying on the couch and watching sports on my ridiculously large TV. It’s one of my hobbies.

I’m kidding. It’s my ONLY hobby.

I made this point and my wife said that we could move the old sofa upstairs to the bonus room, and I could lie on it there. Well, there are a couple of problems with that. For one, our bonus room looks like a highway underpass where homeless people live, minus the homeless people. And more importantly, there is no TV in there.

Well, she says, we can “fix it up.” Get a new TV to go in there. Clear out my prized record album collection, to which I am very attached even though I haven’t had a working turntable since before the Berlin Wall fell.

I don’t think this bonus room thing is going to happen, and I think I’m going to be reduced to taking naps on the floor, next to the dog, who is flatulent and snores violently. This is not working out well for me – I’ve been tricked.

At least I got to approve the sofa purchase. You have to watch women or they’ll sneak stuff in on you when you’re not looking. I just happened to notice what appeared to be some new pictures hanging on the wall of the bathroom the other day, so I asked about them.

“Yes,” my wife said. “I bought new pictures.”

“But what was wrong with the pictures we had in there before?”

“They were old,” she said.

Uh, hello – have you ever been to a museum? EVERY picture in there is old. It’s what makes them good. Do you think they’re going to go and replace the Mona Lisa because somebody saw a cute picture of an Amish family having a picnic in Kirkland’s? If it’s good enough for The Louvre, it’s good enough for my loo.

Did cavemen go through this? I picture the following happening after a Neanderthal walks into his cave one day and looks around:

Man: “Honey, what happened to the picture I drew on the wall of me hunting a bison?”

Woman: “Oh, I got rid of that. I didn’t like it.”

Man: “OK, but do you realize that was, like, the first attempt at language in the history of man, and that one day historians and archaeologists can use it to learn how we lived?”

Woman: “It was old. Oh, and by the way, they’re delivering a new rock to the cave tomorrow. You can’t lie on it. We’re moving your old rock to the bonus cave.”

Hopefully he at least had a TV in there.

The old man and the garden

So it was time to plant the garden again. I planted butterbeans and squash and green beans and cucumbers and watermelons and I look forward to spending the next few weeks tending it carefully and boring people to death telling them about it.

I guess this is some sort of mid-life crisis thing, taking up gardening just before the age of 50. But hey, some guys get Corvettes, some guys run off with strippers. In comparison, my new vegetable obsession doesn’t seem so bad.

I learned some lessons last year, my first a full-time gardener. One was that deer love to eat peas, well before they are ready to be picked. Those SOBs ate every last plant, which is why I support hunting them to extinction.

I also learned that you need to study the seed packets carefully before planting. I grew some watermelons and they got to be about the size of a cantaloupe in a few weeks, and I thought mmmm, these are going to be good.

Then, for weeks after that, they remained the size of a cantaloupe, and finally I realized I had planted some variety of “dwarf” watermelons, and they weren’t going to get any bigger. Why is there even such a thing as a “dwarf” watermelon? Who eats these, Snow White?

I plant the garden on a patch of land out in Lamar County where my dad lives. He’s almost 86 and last year he assured me that he was done with gardening, and he was not going to plant anything this year. Month by month, his commitment to retiring from gardening began to erode. “Well, maybe a few tomatoes” became “I might plant some squash” then “I’m thinking about rowing some peppers” and so on. When I finally went to plant my portion, he had already plowed and planted enough to feed the population of Turkmenistan.

On the day of the planting, I took him to a follow-up doctor’s visit. While it is kind of cool to take advantage of the handicapped parking sticker on his car, these trips cab be a little discouraging. That’s when he seems older, a little more feeble every time, walking a little slower.

But out there in the garden, that all goes away. He’s out there manhandling the tiller up and down the rows to turn the ground and hardly breaking a sweat. Out there in his element, he doesn’t look like an old man at all. He looks like my daddy. Meanwhile, I used that tiller for about an hour and it made me so sore I needed help combing my hair for the next two days.

As I prepared to re-till the ground for planting, I asked my dad if he had any gloves. He looked at me kind of funny and said, “No. Why?” I said well, I just thought I’d use some, because last time I did this I got blisters.  He didn’t say anything, but the look on his face pretty much communicated “You’re a sissy.” Hey, I have delicate hands. Does that make me a sissy?

Don’t answer that.

Anyway, the seeds are in the ground, the anticipation has begun, and it won’t be long before I’ll be complaining about all the work this stupid garden has created and how much my back hurts and wondering why I can’t just be satisfied with eating green beans from a can. And I’ll be loving every minute of it.

Being neighborly

We had some new neighbors move in last week, a couple that appears to be about our age. I’ve met them both and they seem like perfectly nice people, but I’m going to reserve judgment because they could turn out to be something terrifying, like serial killers or swingers or Tennessee fans. They were wearing shoes and I didn’t need Honey Boo Boo-type subtitles to understand them when they talked, so I can probably eliminate the Tennessee angle.

It should be a nice change, because that house has been a nightmare next door for several years. First there was a couple that apparently suffered from agoraphobia, and neglected the front lawn until it became nothing but weeds and rocks. There’s more grass in Willie Nelson’s pocket than there is in that yard. After they moved out they started renting the house to a succession of rednecks who would move in, live for a while, and then escape under the cover of darkness.

There are some nice neighbors around me, on the other side and across the street, and although I like them and talk to them frequently, I couldn’t tell you any of their last names at gunpoint. These new folks have already worked on the lawn and spread pine straw and pressure-washed the house, so I think we might get along. But while it is nice to have neighbors who view their front yard as something other than a place to park their cars, I realize I’m going to have to adjust my behaviors.

For example, in the warmer months, I have been known to walk outside in only my boxer shorts after dark to get something out of the car or throw something in the trash can. My wife really wishes I wouldn’t do this – not because she’s afraid someone will see me half-naked, but because she doesn’t want people to know I wear Sponge-Bob Squarepants underwear.

I may also have to curtail my anti-squirrel crusade in the back yard. I like to sit out back on the patio when I’m grilling something, drink a nice cold beverage, and shoot at these despicable varmints with a .BB gun. It’s not powerful enough to do them any harm, but it is fun to watch them jump up in the air in surprise when I score a direct hit. Anyway, I can imagine how this will probably look to the neighbors.

Then there is my annual late winter-early spring backyard fire, which is also harmless and quite probably illegal.  I basically gather all of the sticks and limbs and leaves that have accumulated over the past year and put them in a pile, and then I pull up a nice lawn chair, get some lighter fluid and matches, and let the fun begin.

The highlight always comes when I toss the Christmas tree on top. Let me tell you, a Leyland Cypress that’s been lying in the yard, drying out for three months, lights up like a Saturn rocket when it’s tossed into the flames. The last time I did it, a legion of warriors from Gondor rode up and offered to help me in battle (that one was just for you Lord of the Rings fans).

I think I’m going to go ahead and have my fire this year and just see what happens. I may get some marshmallows and graham crackers and Hershey bars and keep them on hand, so if the cops show up I can say I was just making S’mores for me and Lucky.

I guess I’ll try to act decent for a while and not scare these poor people away. Maybe at some point, I’ll ever learn their last names.