Sic Semper Tyrannis

Pure, Simple Fantastic Part I.

Pure, Simple, Fantastic

I.

There is a certain “schlupping” sound that it makes.

The schlup and the sound of friction, like when you rub your fingers along the outside of a balloon. That strange hybrid is exactly the sound you get when you’re a little kid, say five or six years old, and your soft, white thigh flesh sticks to the vinyl seat as you’re moving around, getting fidgety from a long car ride.

But then, who’s to say it’s a long car ride? Kid-minutes are roughly seventy times as long as adult minutes. And is the fact that it’s a long car ride even important? Does the back of your thigh make the same sound when it slides across the seat during a short car ride? Of course. But it’s MY story and I thought it was an important detail, so back off.

Dateline: Savannah, GA- The early 80s

My hometown isn’t just a song by Springsteen. It’s also an actual place. You can point to it on a globe or map. I remember Savannah being a lot like hell in that people pretty much resigned themselves to being hot and sweaty all the time. I lived there from the womb until about eleven years of age, and it snowed a grand total of once in those years. And by “snowed,” I mean the grass had some frosting at the tips of the blades until the morning sun evaporated it. So, we wore shorts a lot. Thus the shluppy, farty sound my legs made when they stuck to those utilitarian, tan bench seats.

But Savannah was also a lot like heaven. For one thing we had a car.

The legend of that first family car looms large in my memory/ imagination; as transportation of the masses should. This poop-brown 1976 Chevelle station wagon was the wondrous device that shifted the Stutzman clan from one world, with its requisite culture and expectations, (namely our house), to strange, exotic new worlds where all bets were off, like Burger King. Or on really long days, we might ride clear across town to the Hobby Shop so my oldest brother Mark could get some glue or just the right paint for the intricate airplane models he would build. At the time I thought my eldest brother was some kind of magician. I never really got to see the process involving directions in both Japanese and English and time spent waiting for the glue on the plastic parts to dry. I only saw cool airplanes hanging from the ceiling in battle position, held in place by clear thread.

Anyway, that station wagon was something. (I mean that in the “folksy” sense. As in “Man, that station wagon was something,” not “that station wagon had physical presence.") The most radical feature for my little-kid brain to process was the rear seat. It faced backwards! Don’t let the awesomeness of that concept escape you, dear reader. If you’re reading this you’re probably old enough to have become jaded to the beautiful world of kid concepts and the pure, the simple, the fantastic.

There’s something so delightful about traveling -moving- but not really knowing where to. Riding in that back seat looking out the tailgate at where you were, with someone else worried about the logistics of driving and figuring out where to go and how to get there and all that rigamarole; that was just the best. (Not to mention making faces at the other drivers. Even at that age, I got a sense of how hard those adults were trying to ignore us, my brothers and I, with our fingers at the corners of our mouths, stretching them out. The default response was to stare ahead, as if terrified by a thought.) And I am still enthralled when I see the odd train or bus or people-mover or what have you that allows a passenger to disengage from what’s coming up ahead.

So, logically Mark and my other brother Todd and I would fight over that back seat. In one of the cruelest design flaws, the builders or architects or other scientific-type responsible for that seat forgot to make it big enough to fit all three of the Stutzman boys. In fact, it could really only seat one of us comfortably, and two of us rather uncomfortably. Three of us? Forget it.

My parents must have enjoyed opening that tailgate to find, not a dead body like you would see in a mob movie or James Bond film, but a big lump of giggling boyhood. I know that would make me happy these days.

But in all honesty I have to say I enjoyed the times when I had that rear seat to myself. Much like Edgar Allen Poe, I think I might have had a devil looking over me as a child, silently, calmly watching over my bed at night. How else do you explain a child who enjoys solitude?

Well, you could also explain it by saying: “When you’ve got two other loud boys living in the same house, demanding attention, you start to crave time alone.”

That explanation sounds less grotesque…

posted by Mike @ 3:38 PM