Home again, home again, jiggety-jog

It was Moving Out Day for Emily today. Despite this being predicted to be our fifth straight rainy disgusting day, we wound up facing a strange color in the sky- blue- and an explosive bright object not seen in the sky of this unfashionable sector of the galaxy for most of this month.  These were good things, since it meant that Em's stuff in the exposed bed of Eleanor's truck managed to make it home without getting doused.

Things at the end of the year are far more staggered than the load-in time, when all the dorm kids show up a few hours apart. All the same, it was plenty busy in the parking lot, elevators and handcart-laden hallways.  At least some of these kids had movers doing the work for them. Must be ni-i-i-ce, la-di-da.  Others seemed more like us, with the only Allied Van Lines being the alliance of Mom and Dad; I sympathized with one of the latter who I saw grimacing as he loaded his son's dirty socks into a plastic bag-protected box, probably having been on the kid's floor since the last week of August.

At least one of Emily's three roommates slept through virtually our entire move-out, complete with shoving about of boxes, constant chatter, and even vacuuming. She did, finally, rise from the dead right before we left for the last trip down the hall.

Eleanor and I enjoyed freaking out the younguns with tales of how things were when we were in college. "My, those sammiches in the vending machine look just like the ones when we were there." "Forget looking like them; they are the same sammiches. That little packet of mayo is eligible for Medicare."

A little freakiness on the way back. Em followed us from the last chance gas fill-up to get back to the 90, a different way than she's used to, and naturally, she got stuck behind a red light that we'd beaten, so Eleanor slowed, and put her flashers on, so the kid could catch up. Some less-than-observant guy saw her right turn signal flashing, failed to see the left one flashing along with it, and assumed her nonexistent right turn, and almost plowed into the corner of the truck. Fortunately, its honkin' yellow character once again saved us from unfortunate encounters with the blind and stupid.

So Em's re-setting her room, Eleanor's enjoying the sudden if brief return of nicer weather outside, and I've got a few pre-Rapture errands still to run.

That was then. This is now.

Driving back ahead of our daughter earlier today, I was reminded of the far more tortured journey that I took to get home from MY dorm after my first year of college, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth (real ones, not the cheesy-CGI ones in Jurassic Park that wife and child are watching at this very moment).

As I've mentioned, my father was a bit of a, what's the word?, oh yeah- asshole. It was made clear that I would not be allowed to drive his car once I "came home" for that first summer, because such things were Expensive. Blessedly, my sister, who lived an hour away from me in college, was more than happy to conspire against such limits. She had a friend who had a seven-year-old used car she wanted to offload, and Donna made it possible for me, if not to own it, at least to drive it and insure my use of it.

"Nancy Ann" (the friend's nickname, I don't even remember her real one) lived in Sayre PA, just over the state border a bit over half an hour away from both Donna's then-home and my then-dorm. It was an odd detour if you weren't buying a car, but in the end it wasn't all that far from Ithaca, so I somehow got to Sayre, slapped on my first-ever NY plates and ten-day inspection sticker, and rammed the car into gear to drive it north on Route 34 to Cornell, all by myself.

It was a stick, you see. I'd never driven one before in my life other than on driver ed simulators.  Nancy Ann gave me a brief lesson to keep me from stalling or slamming the car into the car ahead of me, enough for me to "have the hang" of it; and I crossed back into New York, fiddled with my newfound gearheadery, put the clutch down to get cruising in fourth gear,....

and had the stick separate from the rest of the tranny in my very nervous hand.

----

Some perspective here. This was 1978. Mobile phones were only seen on the TV show "Cannon." Praise the Lord, I did have a AAA membership, and payphones were relatively plentiful back then, so I somehow attracted the attention of both a cop and a tow truck, who jammed the tran into second and got word to my sister and her boyfriend of my verklemptness.  Donna was pissed, but somehow we got that wreck back to Binghamton along Route 17, never going out of second gear, forming a slow and painful funeral procession that probably took 90 minutes but seemed like nine and a half weeks.

Days later, the stick was fixed, and I was back to my dorm room to reclaim my few possessions and take the fixed car the 250 miles back to Long Island.  Two or three weeks after that, I totalled it on a clear June day, when an oncoming car hit it at highway speed while I was attempting a left turn in front of a median high with grass. (The grass was on the median, not in us.)

Oh, did I mention what kind of car this was? It was the same year and model my roommate for the next three years came back from Boston with- his, luckily retrofitted, to prevent the kind of human immolation that got revealed later that same summer about this particular brand of Fords, which was still being made fun of years later in the Zucker-Abrahams movie Top Secret:

Yes, friends, I present to you, my 1971 Pinto:

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I never did drive my father's car, beyond an emergency or two, and I didn't buy my own car for more than two years after that. It was still a Ford, a malady I still suffer from to this very day.