From Monterey to Salvage - Episode 1 & 52

To celebrate one year of podcasting, Susanne is rebroadcasting her first podcast episode that was lost in a shuffle from podcasting hosts.

While out campaigning in the federal election, Susanne comes across a vivid reminder of the days when muscle cars were family cars and kids roamed the back seats like stalking tigers. 

Join her to discover what is important to salvage. 

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My website to join in our barn quilt painting experiences is www.crazy8barn.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the Happy to Be Canadian Podcast. I'm Suzanne Spence Wilkins, a writer who lives in rural southwestern Ontario, Canada. Each week I share an original, very short story that will have you laughing and reflecting on the simple moments of our lives. Now, on to today's episode. Happy to be Canadian, episode 52, which also happens to be a rebroadcast of my first episode one from Monterey to Salvage. It was the warmest, sunniest spring day in southwestern Ontario. I was walking in the town near my home. As I crossed a wide driveway, a man called out from the garage Are you selling or politicking? Politiking, I said. The property was well kept. A board and batten bungalow rose above the concrete sidewalk that glared in the sunshine. Two tart covered frames, those mainly used by car enthusiasts who have more motorized treasures than room, stood beside the garage. The open garage doors exposed a shaggin' wagon from the seventies in mid-restoration. The homeowner, I assumed, sat on a stool in the shade of the eve, and the two other men, one in a lawn chair and the other standing behind a metal counter, all had a beer in their hand. We spoke for a few minutes about the federal election, and then I turned to leave. And there it sat, one of the best memories of my childhood. A close to 60-year-old Mercury Monterey was parked on the edge of the driveway. Oh, my dream car! I exclaimed. That's not a dream car, one of the men said. The dream car is in the enclosure. I restored a fastback, the owner was saying. It's a shame, but I had to use this one for parts. I looked at the car. The car sat long and sleek. Its chrome was dull and pitted around the edges. The paint had lost its luster, and obvious to a keen eye, parts were missing. The worst sight, in my estimation, was a softball-sized hole smashed into the back window. It was like an unfortunate scar marring a beautiful face. That window, or rather one like it, was a big part of a charmed childhood memory. In the mid-1960s, my Spence grandparents owned a Mercury Monterey. At the time, they were younger than I am now. I think their monterey was black, like the one I was looking at, but it could have been beige. It was a breezeway edition, so named because the rear window was retractable. Back in the day, as we roared down the road, it was the time of the family muscle car, the front vent windows would be opened and the rear window powered down. The wind flowed through the car, creating a cool breeze in the days before vehicle air conditioning. What a delight for the grandkids sitting in the back. Of course, none of us wore seat belts back then. We would face backwards, sit up high on our knees, and wave our hands in the wind out that retracted window. Since we were all under ten years old, it was a freedom unknown to us before. In a smart design move, the window retraction control switch was located on the front dash, so only the driver could control it. If it had been nearer us kids in the back, we would have worn out the button and the window with continuous rolling up and down. Someone would have suffered an injury, I'm sure. At the end of a ride, my grandparents would call to us to get our arms in the car before the window was raised. They may have had to say it more than once. These thoughts made me swoon as I looked at the old monterey in the driveway. You could still restore it, I said as I walked by the car. I heard only a chorus of laughs behind me. When I got to the street, I looked back. The monterey sat low. I could see at least one headlight was missing, and I didn't know if there was an engine under the hood. I knew the back window had a big round hole in it, and the interior was trashed, most likely. Maybe this monterey's good times were gone, but I knew that at one time kids had kneeled backwards on the back seat, waved their arms out the window, and laughed. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Happy to Be Canadian. If you would like to receive an email each Saturday morning that features new short stories and more, you can sign up on my website, www.crazy8barn.com. If you would like to meet me in person and discover another way that we tell our rural stories, please join me at a Barn Quilt Painting Workshop at our beautiful eight-sided barn in Palmyra, Ontario, along the North Shore of Lake Erie. You can find me on Facebook and Instagram at Crazy8 Barn. If you are an Apple podcast listener and enjoyed this podcast, I would appreciate it if you could leave me a favorable review. And that lets Apple know that Happy to Be Canadian is a valuable podcast and it shares it with other potential listeners. I'm Suzanne Spence Wilkins, and I'm Happy to Be Canadian.