Dreams

My father was colorblind, or so my Sainted Mother always said. He had another trait. He didn’t much give a rat’s ass about what other people thought of him. Oh yes, and finally, he regarded an automobile as a tool, that’s all. It was just something to get you back and forth. Like a real cowboy (not the movie ones) and his horse, a car was just a car. It wasn’t a best friend. It wasn’t a status symbol. It wasn’t something you talked to. It was useful only as long as it got you places.

Considering all the above, it didn’t come as a great surprise when he came home one day, when I was in about the 11^th grade or so, driving a purple-on-purple Pontiac sedan. He said, (no surprise) that he had gotten a “real good” deal on it.

We may have found ourselves embarrassed, but not surprised. But, there was a popular song out about that time called One Eyed One HornedFlying Purple People Eater. (Yes, children, mark the spot so you can respond the next time some old fart like me tells you that our music was better than yours.) It became quite a hit at our high school.

I don’t have to tell you what the kids named our car. At first, we were temped, Sis and I, to have someone drop us off a couple of blocks from where we were going. Then she started driving. I won’t say that she had Daddy’s same sense of indifference, but she was one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever known, so she just sailed past any embarrassment. Soon, the old “Purple People Eater” sort of became a celebrity, or at least I thought so. My pals thought it was neat as long as I would take them where they wanted to go in it. I graduated more from the attendant shame that I couldn’t be a football star or play the guitar like Duane Eddy than the fact I had driven the school’s oddest car.

Daddy had it painted green and white after I left home. I think Sainted Mother made him do it. They never talked about it. As for me, I never thought about it until years later, after college, after the war, after sea duty, and after I found out that military life might have been better than business life, and before I met Brenda, a funny thing happened.

I was walking home from work one day (I’ve reported before how my colleagues at the office couldn’t imagine someone walking to and from work) and met a girl I had adored from afar in high school and had thought of many times during lonely military watches. She was as beautiful as ever. I stopped her and reminded her who I was. After a long stare, it finally registered. She smiled, and my hopes soared like an eagle topping a snowy peak.

“Oh yes,” she said. “The thing I remember about you was that you drove a purple car.”

Such are the ways by which ephemeral thoughts crash headlong from mighty heights.