John is a good father. His kid, he told me one day, is in danger of turning into a homebody. Like his Dad, he confessed, alas. “When I say ‘we need to go to the hardware store’ I hear: ‘Again? we just went last week’. When I suggest that he go watch the swim meet at the pool he will say, ‘Nya, not really’. When I say ‘lets take the dog for a walk’ he will answer ‘Aww Dad, do we have to?’ And so it goes, no matter where we have to go or whatever I suggest, I have to drag him along. The kid I mean. The dog is not much better. I have to drag both of them along.”
But things are improving, I hear. Seems that a while ago John and his boy were on their way to ‘boring’ Costco when, on their right, they witnessed an illegal but fascinating private little car race. A pink Ferrari Enza, a McLaren, and what looked like a Lamborghini were chasing each other, deftly changing lanes ever so smoothly without, so it seemed, moving a wheel. It looked like magic as hey floated parallel to the line into the left lane, passed a car, and then slid back the same way.
That’s when the kid, the stoic one, burst out: “Wow, Dad, did you see that?” For a moment, John said, he thought he had not heard right. Such an enthusiastic “Wow” from a boy who formerly tended to restrict himself to a querulous “do we have to” or a grunt? Talk about the life changing effects of technological progress on the emotional well-being of the young.
Not long after this event the kid applied for admission to State Polytechnic. John told me the other day that he is now a junior and you cannot keep him from talking about fuel consumption, cylinder capacity, combustion and emission, or why speed matters in four wheel steering and how rear wheels that angle in can help the breaks.
All of us, meanwhile, have also grown a little older. John reports that he now finds himself in the kid’s position. Recently his wife suggested something and he found himself answering ‘Aww, do we have to?’ Yep, she answered, straighten up, we are going to! What scared him most, he said, is that the woman who never talked about cars suddenly has this fascination with the BMW 7 Series “with four wheel steering”, as the man in the commercial emphasizes. John shouldn’t complain, though. He is lucky it isn’t the Lamborghini Huaran Ragno, Edizione Esclusiva that caught her eye.
She couldn’t pronounce the name, I guess.
(c)2017 by Herbert H. Hoffman
Picture credit: racecarsdirect