While driving into work today I saw a vintage Mustang which reminded me of the times when I worked with my father
fixing cars on the weekend.
My father worked for the state and was always trying to find ways to supplement his income and one way he did so was
to purchase cars to rebuild, sell them and use the profits to buy more cars to do the same with. I can't say he made
much money doing this but it did supplement his salary and it kept me out of trouble.
On weekends, I sacrificed Saturdays to help my dad in order to earn money to buy my own car. For an entire year we went to a garage way out in the country owned by a friend of my dads named 'Mr Harve'.
Mr. Harve was a short stocky man with arms like Popeye. He was a self taught master mechanic who could fix anything and had retired from working as a mechanic for a police department.
He then opened his own shop in the country and had his own junkyard in a field beside his shop, there were cards scattered throughout the woods and fields and my job was to locate specific year cars and bring back the parts he and my dad requested. Once the part was located and approved I would then clean the part by washing it in a parts washer or stripping the paint with a wire brush and repainting it if neccessary.
This was a lot of fun for a young teenager! I would crawl over what seemed like miles of rusted out hulks and would
find lots of loose change which I eagerly dumped into Mr Harves drink machine. It always intrigued me that these
wrecks would contain change, books, and even small toys.
One day, Mr. Harve and my father were lying under the car they were rebuilding when Mr. Harve told me he needed me to go locate a brake line. He described in detail where the car was that he wanted me to retrieve the part from and off I went on my merry way!
I went out into the woods and found the vehicle when suddenly I felt an urgent call from nature. I knew I was not going to make it back to the garage so I went to a discrete location in the woods where another car was. This car could not be seen from the garage due to the thick woods and it was hidden by a large rusty truck. I had remembered this car from another scavenging trip and remembered it had a box of kleenex in it. I retrieved the kleened and then relieved myself behind the car. I then cleaned myself up and shoved the kleened under the car and put the box of unused kleenex back inside the car in case I needed it later.
Feeling clever, I retrieved the part and hustled back to the garage.
Mr. Harve inspected the brake line and decided it wasn't adequete, he crawled out from under the car and stretched and then told my Dad "lets go for a walk and see if we can find one!"
To my horror, they began walking in the direction of the car I had just visited! Mr. Harve walked past the car and my father walked straight to the back of the car when suddenly he looked down and yelled!
"Hey Harve! Come look at this!" my dad yelled as if he had just found a pot of gold or something.
"Wow!", Mr. Harve exclaimed, "There must be a wild animal out here or something"
At this point, both my dad and Mr. Harve bent over and examined their find closely and I almost wet my pants from laughter.
"You reckon it was a BEAR?" asked my Dad in wonder, "Hey [SP]! Did you see anything out here today?"
"No!" I managed to stammer
To this day, my dad tells the story about how he and his friend just missed seeing a bear in the woods. I have yet
to tell him what he really found...
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