Yup, there she is…my very first sweetie; a 1969 Oldsmobile Cutlass “S”. Of course this isn’t the exact same car; that one is long gone but she looked just like the one above with the small exception of some subtle pin striping I did along the main lines of the body.

My father had given her to me when I came back from Navy boot camp all those years ago and by the time I finished with her she had dual exhaust connected to BlackJack headers, a pair of “Hush Thrush” mufflers and an original Offenhauser 4 barrel manifold I took off an old wrecked Cutlass 442 of the same year with the original (rebuilt of course) 750 CFM “Quadra-Jet” 4 barrel carburetor. There were other miscellaneous tweaks here and there of course but I’ve forgotten most of them by now.

Since the same engine sizes were used in the 442 and the “S” models alike, the actual switchover was easy with only a minor change in the primary jets to make up for using exhaust headers instead of the original 442 exhaust manifolds (greater exhaust flow with the headers). Since the “S” and the “442″ could come with 350 and 400 cubic inch “Rocket” engines, or the record setting 455 “HO” in the rarer 442 “W-30″ editions, that wide block 350 in mine did well when she turned 425 horsepower on the dyno at the local speed shop when I was finished with her and that was with the (mostly) stock engine.

By the way, for the younger generation who are currently driving around these small cars with 4 banger engines stuffed in them, “442″ stood for…

4 on the floor
4 barrel
2 exhaust pipes (dual exhaust)

We traveled the roads for many years together my sweetie and I and won many road battles when those obnoxious, pushy, over-aggressive drivers who always think they own the road. A beautiful true love affair if any young man ever had one. Then one fateful winter day in the hands of my sister, who is an excellent driver in her own right, my first love met her end on her way back from Boston during a classic Nor’easter.

Normally an excellent handling car, summer or winter, she was pushed off the highway by an out of control 4 wheel drive Jeep whose driver thought 4 wheel drive meant they could do 80 miles an hour in a raging blizzard on a snow covered highway. She ripped out her guts on a large block of cement that was covered by a huge snow drift my sister had plowed the car through in a valiant attempt to slow her down. By the time the cops arrived my sister had removed my highly expensive stereo setup, the battery and was working on removing the intake manifold and carburetor from the engine when the officer finally had to make her stop to keep her from freezing to death before she was finished.

Where my first love ended up I never did find out nor did I want to. This had all occurred while I was poking holes in the ocean on board my submarine during my time in the Cold War, Naval Submarine Force and I didn’t find out until the boat had finally made home port in Norfolk, VA that following summer. I had left the car up north for safe keeping while I was out on a rather long deployment.

All I know was that my sister had recovered the car from where they took it after the accident and had it brought back to my parents place. But before she could have her mechanic friends look at it to see if the engine and drive train were repairable; my father had it towed off to the junk yard while she was at work (one of the only black marks on his record as my father). I couldn’t possibly describe my reaction when I found out I was so devastated.

And so I’ll always have a special place in my heart for that first love of mine and all the wondrous adventures we had together. And I’m always hoping she’s resting in peace rather than in pieces wherever she may be. Perhaps, when I die, we’ll go driving once more on the roads of some other place far away from here.

You never forget your first love.

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I remember my grandfather taking me to where he worked setting type into a Linotype machine. I was only 4 or 5 at the time but I was fascinated with machines from day one (almost) and the memory is still clear as a bell. I swear I remember thinking what a lousy way of doing things that was.

Funny how it seems I think the same thing about how I used to do things when I first started out in computers (1977). I’ve had experience with card punchers and readers, paper tape readers and writers, magnetic tape drives, early hard drives where the disk spins in an open air drawer with hydraulically actuated heads, hard drives with stacked, 2 foot wide platters spun by synchro motors the size of industrial furnace blower motors and still I think what a lousy way of doing things that was.

Displays embedded in contact lenses, micro computers on a chip connected to your brain, computer tables where the entire surface is a touch screen yet you can eat off of it, our grown children/grandchildren telling their friends that their parents actually had to drive their car…

Whatever is in store for us as far as the world of computers, electronics, the WWW and the Internet that it rides within I hope I never grow too old to keep up with it.

Then I got to pondering some more. I wondered how many folks between the ages of say 45 to 60 feel the same way? That we’re actually the only generation that grew up into adulthood well before any type of "Personal Computer" was ever thought of yet lived through the advent and subsequent evolution of said computer and associated electronics to where the majority of us couldn’t envision a life without them. I think I can now understand what it must have felt like for the folks that spent half their lives using a horse and buggy and the other half of their lives using a car with the possible exception that most of those folks could always go back to using the horse and buggy when the car broke down now couldn’t they? Perhaps we don’t even have that advantage?

Make sure you read Rhea’s post and take a good look back at what you knew before and then think about what life might be like if we suddenly had to do without our current "technology". Here’s a few points to ponder:

Could you go back to:

• Using the library for your research projects.
• Trusting to newspapers, radio and television for all your news.
• Using the postal service and the telephone for all your communication.
• Applying for anything by obtaining and filling out a paper form.
• Using paper, word of mouth, inter-office mail and postal mail to run your business.
• Having to do all your merchandise ordering from an old style paper catalogue.
• Having hospitals, government agencies, etc having to do things the "old fashioned way".

Kind of a scary proposition isn’t it? And I know all too well that I wouldn’t like it one bit. What about you?

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The day was warm and sunny and the woods smelled of high summer. The old mountain road was overgrown with the efforts of the forest to reclaim it’s own but was easily passable nonetheless. My father was slightly ahead of me as we followed the old road to the right into a long straightway that passed between what obviously used to be farmland with still standing rock walls lining either side of the road.

“There used to be a farm here”, my father said quietly, his eyes focused on another time and place far in the past, a big place that included several fields and pastures. The farmhouse that once stood out from the road on the other side of the two middle most fields on the right was a big white place he told me. No one had lived there even then but the house had still stood.

The thing that always made me love these hikes around the green mountains of Vermont in search of some long past memory of my father’s was that he was actually old enough to be my grandfather. It was 1974 and here I was all of 15 and we were heading up the same road that he went exploring back in 1932 when he was but one year older than I was at the time. And on these trips of ours, just myself and my dad, I was guaranteed stories of the past as it referred whatever particular adventure we were on and my father was an excellent story teller with almost perfect recall of his past and the related history that surrounded these mountains. A very personal history that unfortunately vanished along with the passing of my father in 2000.

This time we were on the hunt for a spring. A spring that ran from the ground at the very top of the mountain, ice cold and some of the sweetest water you could find he had told me. I didn’t doubt this one bit since Vermont has some of the best tasting spring water to be found anywhere or at least the water I’d had the pleasure to drink every time we made the pilgrimage to the old family farmhouse every summer from the southern coast of Massachusetts. Considering what the water there tasted like, it was no wonder. So that was an added bonus to our adventure that day.

We traversed up that long straight stretch of road, taking side trips out into the fields, looking here and there and searching for old farm implements that he knew had been there on his previous trek to this wondrous place. We had been hiking since mid-morning and it was early afternoon when we stopped and paid homage to what was left of the old homestead where once a hard working family had strove to bring out an existence form the land. Young children playing in the yard of the big, white farmhouse while the older ones and the father were out in the fields tending to the day’s chores. All that was left now was an overgrown field that contained a cellar hole in one corner that if you weren’t careful, you could easily step right into, it was that hidden form view. I felt a bit sad as I starred down into it. Nothing showed of the old place except a large mound of unidentifiable material which filled the old cellar half way to the top. But just because it was gone didn’t mean that life had drifted away because out of the peak of this mound sprang a young maple tree, tall and strong with a full crown of leaves that waved and whispered in the breeze as if it were telling tales of days gone by. This made me feel a bit better about the whole thing that life had indeed not entirely left but had sprouted anew in a different form. I said a silent goodbye to all those that had lived, loved, worked and died here and we turned and made are way back to the road.

He told me we were near the cutoff into the woods that led the way to the spring when we had reached the end of that long stretch–and to keep a sharp eye out to the left. The old path he had found way back when, was probably mostly gone by now but he would know it when he saw it. He told me to look for a break between a maple and an oak that were still fairly young when he had found them all those years ago, so they might be pretty big by now and that I needed to look carefully. 20 minutes had gone by when we finally we stumbled onto the very place he was looking for. We had actually tried that same place once before but we hadn’t realized that yet another tree that had seeded long ago and situated itself between that maple and oak, had grown tall enough to fool us into passing it by the first time. Once we had pushed our way past the now close set of the three trees, the way opened up and the old path lay before us.

The path itself was clear enough thanks to the high, closely packed canopy of the part of the woods we were traversing through and it led gently down into a hollow and up the other side, the amazing peace and quiet solitude of the forest surrounding us. The path wound around the various hummocks, boulders and other obstructions that one always finds in these parts and eventually led us to where another edge of the tree line opened up as my father had said it would, into a large meadow with the spring off in the upper right corner coming straight out of a large expanse of ledge.

And what we saw when we cleared that tree line stopped us dead in our tracks for we were not facing a peaceful meadow at all but rather a pond as big as the meadow had been or at least that’s what my father stated when he was through scratching his head. Then he chuckled and pointed out across the pond to where the large dome of a beaver dam and den rose out of the water and there was no doubt that by the look of it, it had been there for quite some time. Now we knew what had happened to my father’s spring. It had been keeping house and home for several generations of beavers over who knew how many years. And it wasn’t long before we spotted one or two members of the latest generation leaving their wakes across the surface. We watched this magical setting for nearly an hour before we got up and turned back into the woods and to the path which would lead us to the road and home.

On the way back we got caught in a good size thunderstorm that had plowed into the mountainside and were thoroughly soaked by the time we came to the end of that old road and my dad’s car. All the way down we were laughing, singing and poking fun at how we both looked like a couple of drowned rats. A good end to an excellent day.

I can’t recall now where that old road was or even what road we were on when my dad pulled over to the side and we headed into the woods all those years ago. It’s like the place closed around itself after we left that rainy late afternoon and has hid itself from sight since. I’m glad that it chose to open the way for my father and I when he wished to show his son a memory.

Technorati tags: memories, green mountains, vermont, old roads

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For those of us who strive everyday to live life as well as we can, this post might reflect upon what experiences we have gone through in our own past and the lessons learned from them. Another anchor in this wild ride we call life.

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There came a time in my life where everything became black and white and at best, shades of gray. I despised everything and everybody. I was at a cusp where the responsibilities (taking care of ailing parents) were horrendous and my life was at a major turning point. The kind of change that you survive…or don’t. Without getting into too personal details, I found out three things from the experience.

It doesn’t take drugs or alcohol to hit “rock bottom”. Not at all. It’s finding your life turned upside down and losing everything you ever knew so quickly that there is no time to adjust. Simple as that and it can happen just like that with little or no warning. So take nothing for granted.

The second thing I learned is that it’s not hitting rock bottom that drives one to consider ending one’s life…hitting rock bottom means you’re forced to look hard at the “dirty” side of your soul, that place you shove all the bad experiences away in where you can bury them…forget them. You have no choice now and it’s that looking that can drive one to end their life if they find the sight too much to bear. And the third thing I learned is…

I could never take the life that I was given. My life had been filled with all sorts of unusually unique experiences, both good and bad and all marvelous and to take away what had been built up over all those years would be unforgivable.

Funny about how Liz put it in her post, about how she made to the allusion of a place or a room where the bad things are because that’s how I saw it also. I forced open the door and walked in and saw the light streaming in from the cracks and seams of the boarded up windows. I took a deep breath and pried those boards off and the “sun” streamed in. I propped open the windows with the very boards I had pried off and turned around for a look. The room was full of dust and cobwebs and in the center of the room was a pile of trash. Some in bags, some loose…all the nasty experiences of my life were there. So I went over and sat down in front of the pile (it seemed not as big as I thought it would be) and started picking through it one piece at a time. Those pieces that obviously didn’t matter anymore I threw into a discard pile to be thrown out and when I was done, all that was left were those experiences that I had failed to learn from before. And one by one I picked them up, turned them over and took them apart…and I learned what I should have learned before.

When I had finished, I bagged up the discards, put them outside the door and swept the place out. I left the windows open and the last thing I did was remove the door and prop it against a wall inside the room. I shouldered my broom, picked up the trash bag of discards and made my way back to reality and my life.

It took a few years before reality’s sun started to shine for me and I began to see the world in color again but I found that climbing out of the well I fell in and reaching the top was only the beginning (as I lay on the grass catching my breath from the climb). Now I had to continue on for nothing had changed as far as reality was concerned…only my outlook.

It’s a different life now and it’s a continuation. I’ll never again regret anything that came before. Answers to those questions everyone asks about who, what, where and why they are or why “this” happened, have slowly come my way, always when I least expect it, something that never happened before that fall to the bottom of the well.

And life is good again.

All this took place almost 9 years ago. I’m still having those “questions” answered as I mentioned above and although my own health has had it’s ups and downs, life is still good and looking better everyday. Sometimes, when our lives are at it’s darkest point and there seems to be no hope…no end in sight, we just have to hold on for just one more day and every day we have to say the same thing…just one more day. Nothing ever remains the same and if we can make through the darkness we’ll eventually come out into the light. I’m certainly glad I did.

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