If you read much here, you know I’m really big on using things ‘til their end. A kind of animism, forming a relationship with out “stuff” and eschewing the disposable, always shiny and new ethos that modernity drugs us with.
My dad just got a “new” car. It’s old but he thinks it is the best thing since diced carrots. The old one just died, tranny gone and can’t get it into gear.
I recount this because it shows how much we live through our “things”. He’s 80 and still feeling like a young boy in his car, emphasis on “his”.
The poem also touched me, it is a metaphor for my own self, bodily self. Getting old but still all the equipment works and I can do all the important things. As I quipped recently, “I used to run. I still run. But I used to, too.” I did a 5k test run, no real training for it. 19 minutes. Far off my former glory but still moving along.
I remember my first car. Old orange Toyota Corolla. I bought for $3,000 bucks and paid off in a year of hard work on the construction site, while attending university. Years later, healing up after falling off a building, watching from bed, as it was being towed away. Sold it for $100 as junk. The thing rusted out. Watching the truck lift it up and take it away … laying in bed, unable to walk, feeble, feeling like my car.
Reminds me of my fav. song on this topic - Water In The Fuel by Fred Eaglesmith. Such a wonderful metaphor, comparing a car with your own self-supporting capsule. Here’s his song, live from my hometown, N. Ontario. If you listen closely you can hear me laughing in the audience. Fred would come up every summer and visit us with his songs and stories.
But alas, this isn’t a post about cars, or our love of cars. That would take too much time. Just a few words to share this fine poem by Thomas Bolt and maybe make some people more aware of what he wrote during his time and place, here on earth.
I don’t know why but this poem also reminded me of one helluva fine piece of writing by another writer who deserves more eyeballin’ Edwin Dobbs - his essay - A Kiss Is Still A Kiss.
1971 Pontiac LeMans
- Thomas Bolt
Auto in sunlight: every trace of gloss
Is dulled a rusting green.
Even the fenders are a dirty chrome
Which blunts light like a pine log;
Still, it runs.
This is the car someone abandons
At a grassy roadside,
Like an old punt, rotten-hulled,
Sunk in river muck above the seats.
Near this realization,
It will do 90 still.
Or, filled with gasoline, will drive all night
Toward any destination;
It can kill.
This is the real world.
Paka - David
Cars