From A to B and back again

Ever notice how the more interesting life gets, the harder it is to find time to write it down? It's not for want of EVENTS that blogging has been sparse. Handlebars or not, the underlying theme remains: transporting ourselves, our loved ones, our animules, and our it-ems from A to B.

Upcoming stories:

• Trip to eastern Oregon results in increase in Portland’s cat population.
• Possible car death imminent, really this time.
• Research and shopping for foldable bike drawing to a close.
• Transit security censors bordello personnel riding on train.
  

A beautiful place.... for the Fiat and its many uses

In Italy, panorama viewing counted as a bonafide activity, as much as going to the theater or out to dinner. In fact, the question, "Vuoi andare a un bel posto?" -- Do you want to go to a beautiful place? -- was the Italian equivalent of the American boy's invitation to a drive-in movie.

No viewpoint was left unmobbed by groups of friends and pairs of lovers, especially on summer nights. Whereas the average American viewpoint might be surrounded by safety railings and interrupted with signs warning you not to get too close to the edge, and etched display boards narrating the view, the Italian scene featured clumps of viewers perched on a low parapet gesturing wildly while talking amongst themselves, and passionate couples on the verge of writhing themselves right over the wall.

On any night of the summer, the road up to a viewpoint was lined with cars. You had to park way down at the bottom of the hill and walk up. The first time I was walking up to one of these viewpoints with a group of friends past all the lined up Fiats, I noticed that many of the Fiats were wiggling. I mean visibly, unmistakably, hilariously wiggling. "Ragazzi. Ma queste macchine si muovono." (Hey look you guys. These cars are wiggling.)

Then I noticed that many of them had newspers taped over the windows. It turned out that even up here the scugnizzi had found a way to reel in a few lire. The scugnizzi (the gn is pronounced as in lasagne) were the street urchins of Naples, unschooled and uncorralled, running around everywhere fulfilling invented needs and holding out a dirty hand for coins. You could barely turn your head around Naples without seeing one. A tram would go by and there'd be one attached to the back of it like a tree frog, for a free ride. Out here on the hilltops they approached occupied parked cars with newspapers and tape in hand, selling the scarce commodity of privacy. In a culture where an apartment of one's own was hard to come by, people had to make do.

So those were the entrepreneurial scugnizzi. But then there were the bad scugnizzi -- doesn't every population have its rotten apples? A favorite stunt of the evil ones was to slink by in the darkness and light a match to the newspapers covering one of the wiggling Fiats -- causing the occupants, no doubt at the zenith of their wiggling, to come bursting out of their car in a semi-clothed panic to attack the flames with their cast off apparel or whatever was at hand.

Coming soon: Favorite Italian pastimes within the Fiat milieu

OK, the votes are in: We'll be staying in Italy and moving ahead with a combination of the first three choices.

My! For a bike blog, there sure is a lot of interest in what goes on inside of a car.

The Roads of Hell are lined with Moving Vans.

I've been somewhat involved in my sister's move out of Oregon. What little spare time I've had went to that instead of blogging. And I can assure you it wasn't a "bike move" as featured in my blog last summer [see archives August 13, 14, 15, 2006]. No, this move was highly motorized every step of the way -- and like most moves, a never ending nightmare.

I know one thing about hell -- it's a place where you have to pack up every possession you've ever acquired, and move it to another dwelling. When you get there, you have to unpack it all and set up house. The minute you finish that, you have to pack it all back up again and move to yet another destination..... and on and on, into eternity.

As the Flexcar slogan goes (I think): "Sometimes, you just need a car." Had I not finally given in and developed the skill of driving a car, I would've been no help at all this last week. In my teen years, unlike other kids who wanted nothing more than to learn to drive, I was determined to have nothing to do with it. Later on I'll explain what happens when you can't drive and your Tarzanesque jungle guide falls on his sword a million miles from civilization. But right now I'm going to bed.

Tinted side windows big safety problem

I’m seeing more and more of them, so I looked it up online, and it seems that tinted side-front car windows are legal in Oregon. How dumb is that? Tinted windows completely obliterate any hope of eye contact with a driver.

There are so many situations in which we need to know if someone is seeing us or not. You can save your own behind if you’re lucky enough to be able to see that a driver is looking the other way, yakking away on a cell phone, or just not paying attention.

Even without window tinting it’s hard enough to see the driver because of reflection on the glass. We can’t do anything about that, but why make it worse by allowing tinted windows? As pedestrians, cyclists, and even as drivers, we all benefit hugely from eye contact when it's possible.

Note to drivers: Don’t assume that anyone outside your car can see your gesturing. Chances are, the reflection is such that they can’t see through your window glass. While you’re gesturing wildly away, they many have no idea you’re even looking in their direction.

When I’m driving, I’ll often roll down windows that I’m looking through, to make it easier for other drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists to see me-the-driver rather than just me-the-car. A lot of communication can occur by eye contact alone.

Hey don’t make fun of my car, dude

If you recall, I’ve complained before about having to wash my car even though I rarely use it. It turns out that a car not kept in a garage will get dirtier from not driving it than from driving it. At least driving it blows the leaves off, and maybe the top layer of dust.

Saturday two guys came to our door and inquired about it -- said they were out looking for a car to buy for their sister.

It’s not a car, I told them. It’s a home for wayward spiders. And a stage for fey raccoons dancing the night away – as evidenced by their mud prints on the hood; on the roof; and on the trunk. (What was wrong with these guys? Couldn’t they see?)

I said their sister probably wouldn’t like the spontaneous-engine-kill feature. That’s the sort of thing that’s for experienced drivers only. But they like to work on cars and they thought they could fix that. Nice but foolish boys. Lucky but unlucky sister. I forgot to ask them if their sister drove a stick shift – that would have finished them off right there.

Hardly anyone drives a stick shift any more. I’ve heard they don’t even make them now, which means that if Lindi and I go through with our loony plan to ditch our old cars and update to a single new one, I’ll be doomed to drive a sissy automatic. Boo, hiss.

Car trunk mystery unfolds

Well, I’m back.

If you don’t take breaks from things, even things you love, one day you will wake up and find yourself totally sick of it and not be able to proceed a step further. That’s what happened to me. And I do take a break from blogging every weekend, but I guess I needed a major break. Anyway now I’m fully recovered and ready to roll.

Perhaps you’re wondering what decomposing former life form I found in the trunk of my car that weekend? The answer – good news for me but no doubt disappointing for you – is: nothing. I can only conclude that it is the car itself emitting signs of its last gasp. Instead of that “new car smell” you experience in a brand new vehicle, this must be the “dying car smell.”
Here is a photo of the trunk in question. My car’s 12 or 13 years old and a hundred little things are starting to break and go wrong. (It must be about my age in human years.) The things are little but expensive. Like the rubber strips around the doors starting to break up -- you wouldn’t believe how much it costs to replace that. The locks are loose in the doors. The driver-side window needs to be helped up with a firm hand.

Up till now I’ve always kept it in good repair. I’ve faithfully had body work done (for it and me) after every crash, and the upholstery is immaculate and has no holes or worn spots. People comment on what great shape my car’s in – for which I thank them politely. They’re not looking into the crooks and crannies to see the rotting rubber and the loose screws and the visor hinge popped out and the jiggly mirror and the missing radio knob.

I’m not willing to dish out the money it takes to attend to these details. If I had money to burn, I would, just to preserve a good car that’s done a great job for me. I believe in preserving things instead of just letting them go to ruin and end up in the landfills. So I feel bad but it’s not going to happen.

Lindi and I still haven’t decided what car we’re going to replace our two cars with, to become a one-car family. (For history on that, click here.) But we take long with these decisions. Been talking about getting cell phones for three years now....

More realities of car ownership

It looks like this weekend I’m going to have to engage in that odious all-American practice of “working on my car.” What I’m discovering, in this new life of biking, is that owning a car presents tedious maintenance chores even if you barely use it.

Among other things, it appears that some terribly organic entity has died a thousand deaths in my trunk. The weather's supposed to be nice, which is motivating since (1) I won’t have to stand out in the rain, and (2) any sun rays aimed at the car threaten to render the vehicle unapproachable if I wait any longer, by anyone except maybe a police homicide squad.

I’m praying for rotten food, as opposed to some animal that hopped in unnoticed while I was unloading the groceries. That exact thing happened once, to Lindi’s car. A cat jumped in -– and it was summer. We discovered it in time, but barely, and the poor thing staggered off before we could think to catch it and take it to a vet for rehydration. (Who knows what its owner thought -- Oh, look what the cat dragged in – its own self! Animals need to learn to speak English, that’s all there is to it.)

The last time something stunk in my trunk, I finally found a hardboiled painted Easter egg in a ski boot. This time smells worse than that.

84 year old Alzeimer’s patient receives driver’s license

The other day my mother was driving around doing errands. She took my father with her. She often does that, even though it makes her errands a lot harder, because my father really likes to go out for a ride in the car every day. My father has Alzeimers, and though he can remember lots of questions, he can’t remember the answers. So he keeps asking the questions. He'll get stuck on one or two questions for a couple of days, then move on to another one. That is one of several things he does which can drive you nuts if you’re around him for more than a few hours in a row. Which I rarely am, so I don’t mind it. My mother minds it.

One of the errands was to go get Pop a current ID card, so they went to the Department of Motor Vehicles. Mom handed them his old driver’s license which is many years out of date. The guy said, “You want this renewed?” My mother said, “No, he doesn’t drive any more and hasn’t driven for years. We just want an ID card instead.” So the man handed her a bunch of forms to fill out.

By this point, my mother had already been driving Pop around doing errands for quite some time. On top of that, they’d been waiting in the waiting room at the DMV, which sounds easy unless you’re in your third hour of answering the same question. So my mother, totally exhausted, said to the man, “Is there some way I can get out of here quickly without filling out a lot of forms?” And the man said, “Here, I’ll just renew it.” Renewing it costs more than getting an ID card, but it’s a lot quicker, and by this time all my mother cared about was quickness.

According to my mother’s description, they asked my father about three questions. Then they took him over to some kind of screen or viewing device and asked him whether he could see this or that. Then they took his picture, and in a few minutes he had his license.

Obviously, he’s not going to be driving. There’s no danger of that. Even if he did get a hold of the keys, it's unlikely he'd find his way to the garage. If he did, and even if he got into the driver’s seat, he wouldn’t be able to figure out what to do.

I just think it’s noteworthy that someone in this condition can end up with a driver’s license at all. Of course he wouldn’t have been able to without my mother taking him there, plus she knows he’s not going to end up in the driver’s seat of any car. The point is, what does this say about the way they check people out at the DMV?

Think of that when you’re out there riding your bike.