In Memory Of

Originally written October 20, 2006

Funny thing happened on the way to one hundred. I realized that the gospel according to McLaughlin has been falling deaf upon those that it was meant for.

Of coarse we have our true believers, as it were. We have our bible study groups and cult like following in the places of the usual suspects; Chicago, Kansas, the D.C. area, and here and there in between. But what have we really accomplished? Have we been able to change the hearts and minds of those that follow you into battle, or are we just being watched by witnesses to a car crash, a horrible scene of which they cannot look away?

I suppose we have our Kansas City bella donna making her way in Chicago, looking on, leaving comments for us all to enjoy. Perhaps Virginia, the state and not the lass, looks on with her eyes wide open wondering where do we go from here. And it is just a cloud messing up the sunshine of the happiest place on earth. Yet 100 will have its day, the significance of it is not lost upon me, and nor should be lost upon you.

The escort was dying when I left her in storage, but she was still the big black bad. There was a semester in college where it is possible that I spent more time traveling in that car than I did in my apartment. The passage from being the kid at Lake Geneva to entering big bad land on that last night I will ever see those shores, and the consequences I faced when I came home.

In six years, I took on over 75,000 miles with her. When she purred, I knew when to hit that gas and let her ride through the countryside. On that Chicago expressway, drunk as hell in the middle of the night, sunglasses on and Achilles' Last Stand playing, taking her nascar style not caring whether we made it home alive. Standing out of a sunroof from the driver's seat while going 85 miles per hour, fate given back to the gods, arms stretched out from here to heavens saying “I am not to be touched today”, that I am invincible.

From that first night of driving it with Joyce, Tyler and Logan up and down the edens, then taking it over to show John. Sure she had her problems, the chopstick that put her in gear, the gear shift that eventually fell off, the worn out steering wheel cover. Two years ago I drove it back from Chicago, coming home to Lawrence after winter break. The entire drive the car was making noises, when I turned those wheels a clunking noise would scream something bad is going on. Of coarse I was driving in rural Iowa through an ice storm. When I took it to a mechanic the next day in Kansas, the guy was surprised I was not dead as the tires were about to collapse in on each other. Not to mention he could not find my break pads, since they had been worn into dust a year earlier.

There was the night when my brother called and said my grandmother was in the hospital. I got into that car and drove 430 miles in less than five hours in the middle of the night screaming like a bat out of hell to get to her bedside by the light of the morning dawn. We drove around Illinois while on the state's payroll, working county fairs for the treasurer. I saw the bright lights of every city in the midwest, and the darkness of the endless countryside.

There was the time when the super mario kart video game saved my life. Driving back to the north shore on winter break soph year of college, through the worst ice storm I have ever known. I must have stopped a dozen times that night to kick the ice off the headlights. Northern Missouri is filled with hills, and every time we would go over one, the car would sway on its descent. I watched as a station wagon spun out in front of me into the median. Cars were wrecking every few miles. As I approached a hill, with a large truck on my right, I could feel her tail end swaying back and forth on me. And on instinct, I tapped that break once, twice, three times...and hit that gas past the truck into open air. Exactly how you stop from spinning out in mario kart.

The escort was a witness to all my confessions, to all my stories, and my delusions of grandeur. She kept good care of me.

And now she is nothing more than a smoldering, melted pile.

As one might say, in times such as these...I suppose these things happen.