By Buster McNutt
Driving a big honking 4WD F-150 600 miles with a broken collarbone and your right arm in a sling is not the sort of adventure that is going to get its own cable TV channel anytime soon. As far as I know there isn’t even a country music song that addresses this issue, which is odd in that country music songs have always celebrated 4WD pickups and various body parts in less than proper working order. I suppose I’d have to add that my ex-girlfriend broke my collarbone after running over my dog and calling my Mama “fat”. Sure sounds like a hit to me. “The 4WD Pick’em Up Broken Collarbone Bruised Blues.”
I needed the bigger truck because our boat-towing friends moved away and the little S-10 would slash its own oil lines before trying to pull the 24-foot boat with the homemade cast-iron trailer. Trying to pull something that big with something that small ranks right up there with tugging on Superman’s cape, spitting into the wind, pulling the mask off the Lone Ranger and messing with pool hustlers named Jim (somebody should write a song about that).
So while I really did need the bigger truck, I most assuredly did not need the broken collarbone. Here I am into my sixth decade, and this is the first one of my own bones that has ever been broken. And could I start out with a toe, or a finger? No, I had to go for the Big Kahuna collarbone, whose only real function is to hold your shoulder on to the rest of your arm. I’m thinking most of us would consider that a pretty darn worthwhile endeavor!
Fortunately it is a pretty basic truck, with the transmission shifter on the column. Had it been on a console I’d have been up the creek, and forget about not having a paddle, I wouldn’t even have had the canoe. Shifting, or any other activity with my right arm any more strenuous than, say, arm curling a paperclip, just wasn’t going to happen. With a console I’d be forced to straddle the shifter, steer with my left arm, accelerate and brake with my left foot, and change gears by grasping the shifter with my thighs and squeezing and bumping and grinding the knob into the proper gear, in an action that would have made Suzanne Somers and the entire Thigh Master organization proud! But since this is an automatic transmission I wouldn’t be doing much shifting while the vehicle was actually moving, so when the need arose to shift gears, I could do it in the back section of a Walmart parking lot where none of their customers would think it was even slightly out of place.
With the column shifter I can contort my upper body into a Chinese acrobat-esque position and reach through the steering wheel with my left hand to change gears. Ditto with turning the ignition key.
The radio, however, is a lost cause. The only music I would be hearing would be “Sounds of Silence.” Did I mention this was a pretty basic truck? There is no CD player. There is no Blue or any other color Tooth connection. My niece offered to let me use her “MP3” with over 5,000 songs loaded on it. My niece is a 12-year-old. Who knew Justin Bieber, Milie Cirrus and that Latin girl singer had recorded 5,000 songs? If I listened to that music for 600 miles I would arrive home with acne!
So I called Latrell, and he contacted some of Trump’s Russian buddies, and was able to download enough “real” music to fill a dozen CDs, which the niece is “burning” for me now. She’s a minor — what can they do? Then off to Wally World to buy a cheap portable CD player and some headphones, and I would have been set. Only they no longer make cheap portable CD players, or pretty much any CD players anymore. You have to buy any number of devices that start with I-Dash, pay to download your music through an equal number of I-Stores, and then they are encrypted with secret code that, if you try to share the songs with anyone else, you get the Mission Impossible statement and your “device” self-destructs.
Fortunately there was a Goodwill store nearby, and I was able to buy three portable CD players for ten dollars total in the “Final Opportunity” bargain section.
So in a couple days I’ll fire up the F-150 and head back to Florida. Before that I’m going to a high-school reunion with way too many Roman numerals in it. I’ve never been to one before. Last night I was “studying” my senior annual. I recognized more than half the names and pictures, but I found myself remembering what vehicles they drove to school. It was a country school, so there were more than a few tractors and one horse, and I didn’t dwell on those. I’m pretty sure the horse won’t be at the reunion. I had a Falcon; Becky had a Corvair. We dated for a while, using whichever car was running at the time. We broke up shortly after the rear wheels fell off her car and mine caught fire and burned up. She was pretty religious and took the burning car as a sign from above. Jimmy had a ’58 Chevy with a hole in the gas tank, so he could only fill it halfway up. George had a ’49 Mercury Coupe, which was probably the coolest car, although Donald’s Austin Healy 3000 was right up there.
If I ever win the lottery really big, I’d like to see how many of those cars are still alive, and if they weren’t, I’d buy the same year/make/model, have them restored, give them to each of their “original” owners, and we’d all show up at next reunion driving them!
Except for Peggy. She turned me down for a date after I broke up with Becky. Plus I still didn’t have a car, and Peggy was the one who rode the horse to school. It could have been awkward. •
