Plingk!
My father was a gifted truck driver and never had any problems driving anything, except for maybe the riding lawnmower he bought. He insisted he could mow the ditch in our front yard by going down into it at an angle and coming up from it at a different angle. He nearly always tipped the tractor. When it came to hauling a trailer from our home to some faraway destination like Florida, my dad was in his element.
Plingk!
For a while after returning from World War II, his dad and his brothers tried their hand at a towing service. I have one picture in a family album of a tow truck with our name on it in a family album. When that was no longer a business, my dad got a job as a truck driver for a Detroit brewery. That lasted until the brewery closed and moved to Indiana. Later, he went to work for General Motors where he retired sometime in the eighties at sixty-five. Shortly after that, he bought a fifth-wheel trailer and a Chevy pickup truck to haul it. Almost seventy now, he and my mother shared their few remaining golden years as vagabonds, touring the country east of the Mississippi. My dad loved camping.
Plingk!
Sometimes after a trip, he'd park our trailer in the backyard. Other times he left it in the front yard outside the backyard gate on a secondary driveway he put in for my oldest sister to park her car. No one complained, that I know of. The people who bought the empty lot next to us parked trailers and boats and motorcycles in their drive. The guy across the street had a truckbed camper he left in his driveway on poles so he could load it on his pickup and go. Two houses down the son of the family who lived there bought a backhoe and parked it next to a field.
Plingk!
There were just enough kids on our half of the dead-end street that we could put together scratch baseball games in the field where the backhoe sat. Five-on-five. was the lowest we would go. Ghosties on base. Pitcher's mound out for first. No stealing. No walks. Three outs or six runs an inning. Fourth foul is an out. We ranged in age from six to twelve.
Plingk!
In our midst was a prodigy. The six-year-old could pitch. We called him the Mick, after Detroit Tiger pitcher Mickey Lolich who lived north of us at the time. The Mick was a natural at the sinker. He had a wicked curve. But what really got us was his fastball. He zipped it past us like, as Ernie Harwell used to stay, left us standing there like a barn on the side of the road.
Plingk!
The Mick was always throwing but it wasn't always a baseball. Sometimes he stood on the shoulder of the street throwing rocks. His backstop was the two tandem propane gas tanks on the front of our trailer.
Plingk!
For years before his retirement, my dad used to wonder why the paint on the tanks was chipped. Back then you didn't just buy a replacement tank. You had trailer-specific tanks you took to a propane dealer who filled them for you. It might still be that way. My camping days ended when I moved out of my parents' home. I tried driving an RV a couple of times but I wasn't my dad.
Plingk!
Finally, when my dad retired, he found out why the paint was chipped. He was sitting in the living room with the front door open and the screen door closed watching some cop movie on cable. Every few seconds he looked up and looked at the door. Finally, he got up and looked out the window. The Mick stood there, winding up. He sent a rocket at the trailer.
Plingk!
My dad put a sheet of plywood in front of the tanks. He painted target circles on it.
Cra-lak!
No comments:
Post a Comment