every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates
car maintenance
once upon a time I owned a 1952 Hudson Super Jet. no, it wasn't an airplane, it was a car, a car in need of maintenance. the year was 1960 or 1961, so the car was in some sense old. the first maintenance I did to it was to replace everything in the drivetrain behind the engine back to the rear axles. I did. why? because the hydramatic transmission needed work and I thought any real car ought to have a manual transmission anyway. but a manual transmission required a clutch assembly and a different driveshaft and a different universal joint and different axle assemblies, so a major reassembly. it was a very big-boy thing to do, especially while one was newly in college. and I did it. and it satisfied whatever need I had. I've been perfectly happy for real mechanics to do car maintenance for me ever since. for a long time I pretended that my experience had taught me what I needed to know about car maintenance. no, no, no! when I look under the hood now, I am amused to recognize the battery still and what is probably the engine. not even car engines today look like my old six-cylinder inline with a carburetor and exposed sparkplugs and sparkplug cables, a distributor and its timing, an oil filter, a fan belt and a cam-chain. everything in my old Hudson was crude compared to the magical devices that get us about today. so mechanics, play on! thank you for understanding what produces the magic, and thank you for keeping it running. live long and prosper.
This reminds me of my experiences as a teenager
ReplyDeleteCool! (how hard was that?)
Delete