The Civic

copyright 2005 Dale Hansen - no reproduction without permission

Just out of high school I worked for my brother. He had his own real estate company and I ran errands for him; little odds and ends that he didn’t want to bother doing. I even did homework for him on occasion as he went through seminary. I didn’t do the theological heavy lifting, or anything related to math, but the occasional English assignment often topped my list of things to do.

About this time, he met a lovely woman whom he later married. During their courtship, he did all the thoughtful things a man does for a woman he wants to impress like changing oil and filter in her car and so on. In my brother’s case, he paid a shop to change the oil for him, and guess who he paid to drive the car to the shop.

My assignment was to take her car ten miles to have it oiled, lubed, filtered, hosed, stamped, spindled, mutilated and other nasty things that mechanics don’t want you to know about, and then drive it back.

This was 1980. She drove a Honda Civic. The original. The shoebox that made a VW beetle look like stretch limo. I know; I rode in a beetle many times, though I still tended to gag from having my knees pressed against my Adam’s apple.

I am not a small person and have never been. I topped six foot when I was fourteen and kept going on momentum until I added another six inches. After that, I kept on growing. Since I couldn’t get any taller, I got wider. I’d love to say it was my shoulders and chest that filled out, and while that is true, my stomach kept pace rather well. Eventually it surpassed both.

I asked my brother if it would be all right to just pick up the car and carry it to the shop. He was not amused. Thus I began the lengthy process of shoehorning my way into the matchbox toy from hell.

Getting the right leg into the car was no problem, but that was where the easy part ended. In order to sit, I first had to bend the knee. I hit the stick shift and put the car into neutral. It tried to roll away, though I think it saw what was trying to wedge itself inside of it and ran.

I stopped it easily enough; I was twice its size after all.

OK, first, the emergency brake. Now the leg, bend the knee. I got one cheek (yes that cheek) on the seat and realized I needed to insert the right arm first. I got back out and started over. Right leg, insert arm, bend knee, and choke as my neck crunched up against the roof.

I put my left elbow on the ground beside the car and rested my forehead on the pavement. This allowed me to slide the other cheek in, but I had to open the glove box first. Now I was exactly half in and half out, but the half that was out was looking under the car.

My right elbow was rubbing against the passenger side door handle, so I had to put my shoulder against the rear window to grasp the handle and pull. I sounded the horn every time I breathed in, but I had made it in as far as the stomach. Why the cigarette lighter kept popping in and out I never determined, but some part of my body evidently kept pushing it in.

I got the left leg in by virtue of crossing my ankles and got stopped cold. There was simply no way I was ever going to get my head, chest and left shoulder into the car, even if I did open the hatchback. I simply didn’t fit.

Still a job’s a job, so I improvised. I rolled down the driver’s side window and stuck my head, left shoulder, left arm and most of my torso out of the window.

Now I couldn’t reach the emergency brake release. After several moments of panic, I was finally able to release it when I belched and something caught on the handle.

I drove the car like this for the twenty-mile round trip, using the brake, clutch and accelerator with the opposite feet because I had my ankles crossed.

I read some time ago that Dolly Parton was once doing a live performance when the bodice of her dress burst open explosively. She ran offstage, donned a T-shirt and returned to say “That’s what happens when you pack ten pounds of manure into a five pound bag”.

To say that the Civic was a five-pound bag was probably accurate, but it certainly doesn’t cast me in a favorable light by comparison.

To make matters worse, the car tended to roll up on the driver’s side tires as though most of the weight of the vehicle was over balanced on that side.

HUMPH.

Laughing at cats

copyright 2005 Dale Hansen - no reproduction without permission

When I was first married to my wife, we lived in a little 2 room accident built somewhere between indoor plumbing and building codes. It was little more than a cracker box with delusions of grandeur, but it was cheap and that was what we needed at the time.

The kitchen sink of this little house shared the same wall as the bathroom, - albeit on the other side of the wall. The kitchen, the bathroom and the second bedroom made half of the square.

There was a short wall that divided the kitchen from the living room, and in order to get from bathroom to kitchen, you had to walk around this wall. We put a small couch along here which quickly became a favorite recreation area for our cat, Meisha.

Meisha was a small calico cat who like to snuggle until some sudden signal no one else could hear dictated snuggle time was over. There was apparently a heavy penalty for lingering on a lap, because she flew off the moment she heard the warning.

She would sit on that couch and sharpen her claws by the hour. No digging-her-claws-in-furniture-sharpening for her, no - that was for amateurs. She would take each claw individually into her mouth and run them over her teeth so that each one was as sharp as a pin and sliced like a ginsu.

A downside of this obsessive manicuring was that she had a little claw on the far right side of her right foot (her pinky, if you will) that got caught in everything. It caught on furniture, on carpet, on clothing; it got caught once on a visitor’s crotch when he wore sweat pants.

On this particular day, my wife was cleaning the house while I was, well, goofing off in the living room. She was going from kitchen to bathroom and bedroom and back again, passing this couch where our little kitten lay teeth-sharpening her claws.

We also had a dog. Probably because my wife was the only one of us actually moving, he followed her everywhere she went. This means he had his face glued to her leg. Back and forth in front of the couch. In front of the cat. Wagging his tail.

At the first pass, Meisha just ignored him, until that tail came and smacked her from behind. That got her attention.

Second pass, she swung a paw out to catch that tail and missed.

Third pass, she reached with both front legs to snatch that tail in a bear hug. Missed with both claws.

This was going to end. No dog was going to make a fool of her, much less a tail! She stood on the edge of the couch and waited like a lion knowing her prey would soon be in reach. My wife walked by, Meisha stretched. The tail came in sight. Meisha leapt off the couch in a beautiful dive that probably would have gotten her that tail. If her claw hadn’t stuck in the cushion.

As it was, she flattened out in mid air, pivoted on her claw and smashed face-first into the front of the couch.

While trying to extricate herself from the indignity of the position in which she found herself, the dog, who only just noticed the cat was there, turned around and began licking her.

By the way, it’s true. Cats do know when you are laughing at them.

Oh, that’s what they’re for?

copyright 2005 Dale Hansen - no reproduction without permission

In the early ‘80s, the Phoenix real estate market was booming. Houses were being bought sold at a dizzying rate.

My brother was a real-estate broker. for much of the early and middle 80s, he had his own realty company. Because the houses couldn’t fit into a showroom, he spent most of his day driving around the valley area. The “valley” as we refer to it, is more than 50 mile from north to south and about 70 miles east to west.

Driving in the city as much and as often as he did was difficult, especially in heavy traffic. Driving that much in the summer when the thermometer can easily top off at over 120 degrees F will tend to overheat a person. (Dry heat nothing!) When you have to wear a tie and dress like a businessman, you get hot and thirsty fast and stay that way.

Thank heaven for 7-11. Or Circle K. Or whatever.

My brother made convenience stores as much a part of his daily commute as home and office.

One thing you learn fairly quickly in the dessert, soda (pop) is not a good choice. It’s too heavy and too sticky, so while it pretends to quench your thirst, it only makes the heat and dryness worse once you’ve finished.

He turned to fruit juices. My brother was a fruit juice coinsure. His favorites were Hanson’s, because, despite the misspelling, his name was already on it. Whenever possible, he’d pull out of the heat and buy a can of Hanson’s apple, or orange, or mango, or if he was feeling particularly daring: papaya and banana mixed. We’re a wild family.

This was only possible when the purchasing department of whatever giant convenience store cooperated. Every once and a while he’d hit store that had nothing. They usually stocked up on soda for the benefit of those who hadn’t been here long enough to know better.

On this occasion, the store where he made his first pit stop of the day was one that had little to offer. It was just down the street from his home, he was on the way to his office, running late (it’s genetic) and grabbed the only juice they had in the refrigerated section.

He’d finished half of it before he made it back outside. Another quarter disappeared en rout.

It was a full quart jar, not one of those little two-bit twelve ounce kiddy drinks. Not for my big brother.

Whoever said ignorance is bliss was apparently never uniformed about the medical miracle of - you guessed it – prune juice. My brother suffered under this innocence, however, suffering being the operative word. He chugged three quarters of the quart jar of prune juice in less than ten minutes.

Someone once said that experience is a lousy teacher because it always gives the exam before the lesson. In my brother’s case, experience is also a lousy driver, though a fast and panicky one.

The benefit of owning your own business is that you can take the odd occasion to call in sick without ever having to explain why.

He was fine the next day, though his wife still chuckled randomly for the next three weeks. Only his immediate family knew about his discomfiture that day.

Then I got a BLOG.

I only hope he’ll forgive me when I see him in heaven.

No, I only hope I don’t start chuckling.

The best All Hallow's Eve ever

copyright 2005 Dale Hansen - no reproduction without permission


Halloween 1972 began as one of the worst days of my young life. I was ten years old and curled up in my room, flooded in tears.

I had been looking forward to the holiday all month.

It was Halloween! Free candy! All you had to do was ask! Well, I always kind of figured that the costumes we wore were the price we paid to get sugar, but the costume was mother’s problem.

My mother, who later became a professional seamstress, created a cat costume for me. It was a jumper, and a little too small, and a little too tight. I hated it. Mostly because she said I looked “cute”; the death sentence for a ten year old boy. Still it was a minor price to pay for free chocolate.

My neighborhood stood on the verge of farm country, a little development oasis tucked into a valley. We all knew one another in that neighborhood; we were a small section of a small town

It never occurred to any of us to be cautious about the candy or knocking on a neighbor’s door. It was a year or two later I’d even heard about razor blades in candy apples. Even then we were warned at school to eat only the stuff that was wrapped (as if something couldn’t be re-wrapped, but what did we know?).

I had my little Trick-Or-Treat-For-Unicef box – the milk carton with the clever little slit in the side that I punched out myself. I had the brown paper grocery bag, the hated costume, black lines painted on my face to look like cat whiskers (kind of).

And I had brand new glasses that cost a fortune.

It wasn’t quite dark yet when I started out. It was just dusk and the twilight in Minnesota lasts forever.

I went to the first house, the one closest to mine, and made off with two candy bars and a Unicef dime. The next house was dark, all the kids knew they never gave out candy anyway, so we all left them alone.

The house across the street, however was an unknown. The couple who had just built that house were young and had no children. A couple of the neighbor kids I met while on my excursions told me the two newlyweds weren’t home, but I needed to check for myself. Never turn down the possibility of chocolate.

I ran across the narrow, empty street to the brand new house, and knocked. Nothing. They may not be home, after all. I reasoned that if they weren’t there then it didn’t matter if I rang the bell too. After all, candy was on the line here, I had to be sure.

I rang the bell again, then knocked once more. That last was more from frustration and faded hope. Nevertheless, there were allot of other unexploited houses out there, and I was going to get to every one of them.

I traipsed down the driveway of the deserted house and as I got about half way, I thought I’d heard something and turned around.

In retrospect, I should have also stopped walking.

I didn’t.

In my position, walking forward while looking backward, I never noticed when I drifted off the concrete and into the only rock in the entire yard.

I went down in the wet grass and mud, instantly ruining my cat costume. The bag holding two bars of chocolate flew off in one direction, the Unicef box in another, but to my absolute horror, my glasses took off in a direction all to themselves.

I’d had them for a week, maybe two and now they were simply gone. My mother and father both had made a point to impress upon me the value of those glasses and how I was to care for them, as they were the last I would get for a while. I didn’t dare walk around the yard to try and find them, for fear of stepping on them.

The only thing I could do was crawl. I spent over an hour crawling around in the wet grass and mud, drenching the costume and myself while growing more and more hysterical with each passing minute. I might have gone by them a dozen times blind and panicked in the darkness,.

Eventually, I had no choice. I had to make my way home as best I could. I had to tell my parents that I had lost my glasses.

I peeled off the cat suit in the garage. It was literally dropping thick gobbets of dirt and grass as I walked, and I was going to get into enough trouble because of my glasses, and ruining my mother’s careful work. I didn’t want to make things worse by destroying her floors.

I ran inside wearing only underwear and a t-shirt, crying my eyes out.

She cleaned me up, threw out the cat suit and had me go and put on jeans and tennis shoes. Grabbing a flashlight, she walked me outside to where I had fallen.

We spent another half hour searching the ground. She finally found them in a ditch at the edge of a culvert.

No wonder I couldn’t find them.

I was no longer in costume, but I still had my bag, and it was Halloween, after all. I’d only garnered the two bars and was determined to add more. Mom wasn’t too happy about me being out as late as it had become, so she went with me to “a few” houses so I could have my holiday.

I was too late. All the houses we went to had run out. The other kids in the neighborhood had all finished and gone home while I was searching for my glasses. Now, when I was able to start trick or treating, they were already deep into their anticipated sugar coma.

They had taken every last piece of candy in the neighborhood.

I was devastated. I went home with Mom, and said not a word the entire walk.

I had been robbed by the other kids, cheated by God, and betrayed by my own nearsightedness. My holiday, the one I had anticipated for so very long was over, and I had spent all of it crawling around in the dark.

I curled up on my bed, deep in the agony only a ten year old could feel.

Then Mother came in and told me that Dad had a service call.

My father owned a gas and service station. In those days service actually meant service. Every once in a while, he’d get called out in the middle of the night to jumpstart a car or make repairs on a car that couldn’t make it into his shop on it’s own.

I loved going on service calls with him. I was like a puppy who heard the word “Ride” and jumped in the truck. Service calls were cool, even if waiting for him to do the actual work was a little dull. It was the time with him that I liked.

Mother said that he had a service call and wanted me to go along. I was too miserable, in too much pain at the injustice of the world, and angry at God and glasses. I just couldn’t do it.

She kept after me, trying to get me out of the house, to at least try and cheer up.

I finally relented.

A sullen, quite, little boy in the passenger side of my father’s truck, I presented the world at large with the greatest and most sincere pout any child ever did. I positively glared out the window, defying any house or street to dare and show something cheery or festive.

Dad pulled up in front of a house less than two miles away.

There was no car on the street.

“Why don’t you go up and see if they have any candy?” my father said.

“No.” I couldn’t bear to have my holiday shattered further. “They’re out, everybody is”.

“Just try it.” He insisted.

“But I ruined my costume.”

“Try it anyway.”

I found out later that during the half hour or so that I was curled up in my room feeling the great weight of disappointment and grievance, my father was on the phone calling all of his regular customers to see who had candy left over.

We spent the night (a school night, no less) driving around the little town where we lived, visiting each house in turn.

We didn’t get home until late, very late. Dad had to get up at 4 the next morning and put in a 14 hour day, but stuck it out so his son could have the holiday he almost missed.

I got less than a quarter of the candy I’d normally get in any given year, but that Halloween is the only one I remember. I remember too how wonderful each and every one of those candies tasted; better than any I’d ever had before or since.

The part I remember the best is sharing with dad on the way home.

I gave him some of the little candy I had.

He gave me some of the little time he had.

I, BLOG

copyright 2005 Dale Hansen - no reproduction without permission

I am not a BLOGger.

You may have noticed.

I have been paging through some of these wonderful BLOG sites and I’ve noticed they are consistently full of short, pithy stories of daily life. I have become interested in the comings and goings of people I have never met, though I have begun a sort of correspondence with a few.

Leaving aside the word “pithy” for a moment (a good choice for a word like that!), what I write here is neither short (as has been pointed out), nor does it much concern my daily life. That’s not what this BLOG is for.

I write because I can’t stop. It’s like breathing, eating and sleeping – my three favorite activities. I write when I sleep, when I watch TV, when I drive, even when I’m reading someone else’s book. I can’t help it.

So when a friend of mine told me he had a BLOG, the second thing I thought was; “Sure, it makes sense for you, you have something to say.” The first thing was “BLOG? What in the world is a BLOG?”

The more I thought of it though, the more it exited me. Here was a small window which I could use to ease the pressure of writing. I was once told, and still believe, that “nothing you write is ever complete unless it’s read”. Writing is as much a form of communication as anything else, and communication involves more than a single person.

Besides, by this time, my friends were visibly cringing every time I would walk up to one of them with a piece of paper.

So is it harder to write something when you know for a fact that there are people you don’t know reading it?

Maybe.

Its so much worse when you know no one will ever read a single word and that no matter how polished and tight your tale, no matter how much time you put into edits and rewrites, your narrative will never be finished.

So thank you for reading this.

I hope I have explained in some small (but wordy) way how much it means to me when you do.


-Dale