The Dodge Imprint, Part 1

Every bit this awful looking. And lavender to boot.

It’s easy to conclude from anecdotes I’ve shared before that my dad was cold, harsh, and unforgiving. Which he sometimes was. But this is a different story. Intended to set the record straight. Or at least less slanted, or slaunchways as we used to call it in Salem County.

From the age of twelve on, I was in the lawn mowing business. For five dollars I would cut your grass. Unless your grass belonged to my parents, who got their two acres done every week for free. But Grandma Laird paid to have me mow her two acres. Five dollars. But there were perks with her. She had an electric skillet, dairy butter, lamb chops, Strawberries and vanilla ice cream, and for all her famous lack of cuisinery, a true talent for the perfect frying of an egg. I’d do half the lawn, take a break, have a sumptuous breakfast-lunch-dessert interlude with Grandma, then back at it. 

Nobody else had two acres. Five dollars each. Wasn’t too good at math in those days. Nobody had a postage stamp lawn. Generally an acre. Five dollars. The good news? Even with the impending fortune my prep school and college tuitions were going to cost, I was not required to turn over my grass earnings to Mother and Dad. It wouldn’t have mattered to the grand total, and my parents were relieved they no longer had to pay me a quarter every week in allowance. I had my own money. (Have I mentioned Scottish blood? Right.)

Which brings me to the pic up top. When I was 14, my Grandpa Laird, known as Boppa, died quite suddenly. I was in prep school, at Mercersburg, and I already knew that I had lost the most important person I would ever have in my life. I was in denial. A confused fury of denial. I already could not remember what he looked like in that terrible 24 hours he was in the hospital before dying in the middle of the night, that shriveled, mumbling ruin I had seen alive and whole and smart as ever just a day before, why my parents had been right for once in insisting I notgo to the hospital, and I, stamping my adolescent foot, insisting I wouldn’t forgive them if I couldn’t see my Boppa. They relented, I regretted my choice, and it took me years to remember what was lying in that bed at the hospital.

So. As I said. In denial. What is the cure for everything if you’re a Jersey boy? Wheels. If I haven’t mentioned this before (me being arch now), I grew up in the country. Stathem’s Neck Road. My dad owned six acres, four of them leased to the neighboring farmer, who had about 500 acres of fields, woodland, a sad wife my sis and I visited, mostly to see little Beverly, who had startled eyes and hair like angry corn shocks. 

Where was I? Dirt roads. The farmer had miles of them. Where I did my first stick-shift driving (not counting Lillian’s ‘55 Chevy in the driveway described elsewhere), In a WWII vintage Jeep when I was just ten. Motörhead is not a label; it’s a way of life you’re born into. 

What I needed was a truck. There was a sorry-ass place at Carll’s Corner In Bridgeton called ‘Val’s Used Autos.’ We drove by it one day and I convinced my mother to stop. There was an old truck parked well away from the ones under the plastic ring-a-dings that make old cars look festive, slapping in the breeze as if they’re excited by all this wonderfully aged Detroit iron. The truck not so much. 1956 Dodge pickup. Dead on its feet. Obviously. And why was it lavender?

“Why are we here?” My mother had her direct moments.

“I like this truck.”

What can I tell you? Pickups in the Fifties had voluptuous fenders, suggestive up front and downright seductively bulbous at the back. Rust didn’t matter. No parts seemed to be missing. The windows weren’t broken, and the interior was inside, right where it was supposed to be.

And then Val was there. He was almost the same height as my mother, who was 5’2” on a tall day. Gray hair, seamed face. But he could spot a gaffed fish of any age. His darty eyes had already seen my mother’s car, her clothes, and he had me figured from the gitgo.

I was nobody’s fool though. “Does it run?”

“Like a champ. Old but still solid as a rock. You know. It’s a Dodge.”

“How much?”

My mother was appalled. Somehow she hadn’t seen this coming. 

“We have to go,” she announced.

“A hundred dollars,” Val said, smiling.

“You’ve got a deal,” I told him.

[Stay tuned for Part 2]