#75 Lead Foot...

Sep 16, 2024

Summer is winding down but it’s still road trip season.

I have a bit of a lead foot.

This is probably rooted in my formative years.

If I close my eyes and travel back to the age of six, my mother is bombing around the back roads of southwestern Michigan in a VW bus and I am “riding shotgun.”

I have since come to find out that most people use this phrase to describe riding in the front seat. In our household it meant standing up behind the passenger seat and holding onto a big handle thoughtfully provided by the engineers at Volkswagon.

I rather doubt that this was the intended purpose of said handle. I have no memory of seat belts on that middle seat so perhaps it was meant to help keep you from sliding the full length of the vinyl bench like a skittle top when rounding curves.

And slide you certainly would have because added to the equation was the fact that the average speed limit in the area was a cool 75 mph.

It was a moot point anyway because our middle seat had been taken out to make room for a playpen that contained my little brother.

There was nowhere to sit even if I’d wanted to.

I didn’t want to.

It was an adventure.

It was exhilarating.

Then came the energy crisis and almost overnight the top speed on any road in the nation dropped to a tortoise worthy 55 mph.

I don’t think my mother ever really adapted.

My dad was a boy scout – very good about staying within the law – but mom…..

She tried her best but you could feel that itch. That need to go at least 5-10 miles an hour over almost any posted limit.

When I got my license, it was clear who contributed more to my driving DNA.

Especially because my first car was a giant Dodge station wagon with a 440 engine and a speedometer that went up to 125 mph. (I’m afraid I DID test that speedometer on some corn lined county roads in Ohio.)

All that speeding nonsense stops in work zones.

I take the safety of road construction personnel very seriously.

My dad’s boy scout DNA kicks into high gear no matter how many miles the work stretches.

But after.

After.

My mom’s genes are back on the job.

VW Memories

After composing this post, I got curious to see how accurate my memory of the VW bus interior truly was.

Was it actually possible that I rode standing up behind, and slightly between, the two front seats like someone on an overcrowded subway car?

Was there really a handle where I remembered it?

Were there really no seat belts?

Was it possible to cram a playpen in the middle?

The answer turns out to be yes on all counts.

I went digging around the interweb and found a bus almost identical to ours - the biggest difference being that our bus did not have a panel separating the front seats from the middle. It was wide open just as I remembered. (As you can see in the last pic from a different bus.) There were seat belts but only on the front seats and only lap belts. (Ralph Nader had yet to make his giant contributions to auto safety laws.) And, not only was there a handle where I remembered it, but there were several other handles in addition to that one. VW drivers truly must have been careening all over the place because there were no less than four handles to grab for stabilization.

As you look through these pics please note the flimsy construction of that middle seat - I truly can’t believe this thing was street legal with that wire frame and those wimpy metal legs. Also note that there is even a handle on the dashboard. Oh, and what I believe is an ashtray mounted on the back of the middle seat :-)

My thanks to whoever was selling their bus and posted these photos and my apologies for the lack of photo credit:

They’re Coming For Us…

On Friday my husband informed me that our garden was harboring a zucchini the size of my calf.

I went out yesterday to take a peek.

He was wrong.

There are FOUR of them.

Should I run now or later?

Mark Your Calendars

I am pleased to be one of the performers at the upcoming Kenosha Performing Arts Festival! My show will be at the White Lilac on Sunday October 6. More details in the next couple of weeks.

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Anne The Passive Aggressive Poet

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