Careful Blog postings…

I try to be careful with almost everything I do, and while I'm not completely successful, I have managed to stay alive for the better part of a half century. I started a posting about my daughters driving skills, it's still sitting there started and I'm thinking it's better left that way…started.

When I was growing up I started driving when I was eleven years old. We lived in the country, dirt roads, slow, heavy, steel cars. I remember losing control of my old red 1960 Dodge Senica Dart, on a curve when I had my aunt in the car with me. We slid across the road to the left, I corrected too much and we drove across the road to the right and right into a ditch embankment…bam complete stop from about 20 mph.

We looked at each other, I think she was yelling at me but don't remember for sure, but I just pushed the button that had the little 'R' on it and backed back out onto the road. She and I got out of the car and checked what we thought would be major damage to the front end, nope, no damage at all.

Now I'm wondering whether or not these new cars have anything on the old ones. Over five miles per hour and the bumpers fail AND the air bags blow up in your face. Now you have 1000 dollars worth of damage to the front end of the car and 5000 to replace the airbags at 6 mph.

I used to take the old Dodge out into the woods and run over trees that were 4 inches in diameter, hell we used it to clear brush with it. We used that car for everything, when it could no longer be used on the roads (mostly because of all the tickets I got with it) we took the doors, hood and windows off of it and turned it into a dune buggy. Well it was more of a stripped down tank because if you put it on sand it would sink like it was sitting on quicksand. Heck you park it on packed clay and it would sink when it rained.

We drove that car until it just wouldn't go any more. I remember riding on the trunk with my brother driving 50 or 60 mph down a dirt road. The car had fins on the back that were 8 inches high and we would lay on the trunk and hold onto the rear side windows while my brother or a friend would drive down the road…slide off, dead meat…hit something, dead meat.

When the old car wouldn't run any more we parked it in an old chicken house and fermented wine in the trunk…lousy wine but it had alcohol in it…good wine J As far as I know the car is still in that chicken house, though I wouldn't bet on it because it was more than 40 years ago.

That was just one car out of many in my lifetime so now you know why the posting about my daughters driving will sit there, just started…I love her…
prp