When I was 8 or 9, my friend Chris and I hauled a battery from his place to our barn, where my family’s first car ever, a 1948 Chev Fleetmaster in its original battleship grey, was moldering away in the stall where a tractor had once lived, and draught horses before that. The engine was all clapped out and the car had been retired. My father imagined that someone in our subterranean-conflict-ridden little Scotch-Irish/French Catholic village in the Ottawa Valley had put sugar in the gas tank (as OHCOddball points out below, that would not have harmed it — it was probably just worn out). My mother was both British and Jewish, and Chris’ mother was a French Catholic; we were more or less the only obvious choice of friends for each other. We installed the battery, a nearly dead one from a skidoo, and got the lights to turn on, but the car would not crank (fortunately!). I later dreamed and sketched fantasies of replacing that non-functioning engine with something mechanical that I could (sort of) understand, a steam engine. My parents’ marriage crumbled in 1972 under the mock-sophisticated, selfish and ultimately naïve constellation that was supposed to be the Age of Aquarius, and our childhood idyll vanished, along with that Chev. I wanted a 1948 Chev very badly for a long time but like the author’s nephew could never find one I could afford to buy or to fix. Mainly I wanted that earlier, easier time back. Here’s hoping your nephew either finds or figures out what it is he really wants, and gets it if it is worth having!
