Yesterday I went to Staples. I love Staples! It is like a candy store for adults. Office supplies make me happy. I'm not sure why since offices make me break out in hives. But there you have it. I think it all stems from school supply shopping when I was a kid. I loved shopping for school supplies. There was nothing better than a new box of crayons. Of course, I always got the 16 count. While we were at the store I would eye that 64 count box. You know, the one with the sharpener on the back. I knew kids who always got that. What I wouldn't have done for a 64 count box of crayons......
The kids that got the 64 count box of crayons in 2nd grade are no doubt the same kids that got a brand new Mustang for their 16th birthday. I didn't get one of those either. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. I think things turned out pretty well for me. I didn't get a car of my own until after I graduated from high school and bought one myself. Until then, I drove my mom's old Ford Granada.
I commuted with a couple of friends to Wharton County Junior College everyday. We each took turns driving. It was about a 20 mile drive each way. It was fun driving with Drenda and Cassandra. After a semester or two of commuting with them, Drenda announced that she was selling her 1974 Mustang hatchback. I wanted a car of my own desperately and saw my chance. I asked her how much she wanted for it. She wasn't sure, but after checking with her dad we came to the price of $1,000. But I must say, she warned me off of the Mustang. She tried multiple times to tell me what a horrible car it was. I was having none of that. It was a car with four wheels and an engine and that was all I needed. Besides, my dad is a genius. He can fix anything so I was sure that in a few short days Dad would have it running like a top.
So, I bought the car. Dad wouldn't pay cash for it, he made me finance it through the credit union. I think this was an attempt to teach me about paying bills. My car payment was about $65 a month. Now that I think about it, I was probably paying nearly $65 a month for oil to keep the car running. I probably could have poured oil into the engine and put the same oil can under the car and caught it as it ran back out, but I wasn't fast enough.
The car was silver and it was cute. Those are the best two things I can say about it. Fortunately, when I got it, the national speed limit was still 55 mph. I say fortunately, because driving it any faster not only might have been fatal, but it would almost certainly have resulted in long stay in a rubber room. You see when you got the speed over 55 the hatchback would start to vibrate and make this constant squeaking noise that would drown out the radio so that I ended up blowing out all of the stereo speakers except the one in the passenger door. I think that one continued to work just to drive me really insane. It had an 8 track tape player in it that worked. Of course, this was in 1982, so by then 8 track tapes were becoming hard to find. But I did have a few. Someone broke the antenna off in the parking lot at Wharton not too long after I got it. So, I couldn't listen to the radio except the Bay City station and I was never that desperate. I mean, it wasn't like I could hear it anyway.
The speedometer never really worked right. It always showed that I was going about 10 mph faster than I actually was. So, Dad taught me to calculate my speed using the tachometer. I never got a ticket in it, so either my calculations were good or Dad had me snowed and I was driving all over the place doing 45 mph when I thought I was doing 55 mph. I'll never know. Each year when it was time to get the car inspected, I would drive all over town looking for the most disreputable looking gas station I could find hoping that they would just pass the car and put a sticker on it without looking at all of the stuff that didn't work. That worked out pretty well for me. The car got me where I wanted to go. I only got stuck on Matagorda beach in it once. That was my fault for getting in lose sand. The car did it's best. After I ran out of gas in it a few times, I discovered that the gas gauge didn't work. So I started keeping track on paper of how far I had gone since my last fill up.
When it was time to transfer from Wharton to SFA, the Mustang got me to Nacogdoches. Robbie had been there for a few years already. He also had a semi-dependable car. Between the two of us, we nearly had one good car. At first I lived in Martinsville with the Bailey's. They are great family friends and I loved living there except that it meant that the Mustang had to traverse Swift hill twice a day. To get up the hill in my Mustang, I would have to floor it for about a mile before I started climbing, that would get my speed up to about 70 (I think). Then as I climbed the hill, my speed would drop and drop and drop. By the time I reached the scenic overlook, I was doing about 35 or 40 mph. The worst was when there was a semi behind me. Those guys would get mad when I would slow down like that! Going up that hill was always the most stressful part of my day.
About midway through my first semester at SFA, Robbie introduced me to his girlfriend and her roommate who lived in a two bedroom apartment across from campus and were looking for a third roommate. I jumped at the chance and was living on University Dr. a week later which helped to alleviate the hill climbing concern. Another thing besides climbing hills that stressed me out when driving the Mustang was idling. Idling was never good. You see, if the car idled for more than a minute or two, it would start to overheat. I learned that if I turned the heater on when I had to idle that it would help to cool the engine and keep the car from overheating. So, I would sit in the drive thru at McDonald's with the heater running full blast while it was 95 degrees outside. The drivers window didn't work very good, it only rolled down a few inches, so I would have to open the door to pay for and pick up my 39 cent cheeseburger. When I opened the door and all of the heat came out of the car, the look on the persons face at McDonald's was always kind of priceless.
By winter the heater quit working. It had naturally started blowing cold air. It did blow hot air right up until it started to get really cold that winter. Just before Christmas, the car had given me more trouble than normal so it went into the shop for some work. I got it back a few days before Christmas eve. I was working at JCP at the time, so naturally, I had to work Christmas eve and the day after Christmas. But I did get Christmas day off. My family lived 5 and a half hours away in Bay City. So, the plan was to work on Christmas eve, then drive to Bay City after work. Robbie had left the day before. Then after Christmas, I didn't have to be at work until 5 p.m. on the day after, so I was going to drive back to Nac that morning.
Things were kind of slow at the store on Christmas eve and everybody was working, so the store manager let me leave early since I had so far to drive. I got away from work just after lunchtime. It was amazingly cold that Christmas. I went home to get my stuff and got in the car to leave and the car wouldn't start. I don't even remember what was wrong with it at that point. I was crying when I called home to tell my parents that my car wouldn't start. I was pretty sure I would be spending Christmas alone. Robbie called his roommates Larry Baize and Tom Martin and Larry came over and got my car running. He told me to drive over to his gas station so that he could do something to it over there. So I did. I'll never forget that day leaving Dyer's to drive to Bay City. The temperature was in the 20's and I was wearing my coat in the car. Tom asked if my heater worked and I told him it blew cold air and I wasn't able to turn it off. He took his gloves off and handed them to me just before I drove away.
I left Nacogdoches that afternoon with a case of oil in the backseat and all of my dirty laundry that I was taking home to wash. I had certain spots that I always stopped when driving between Bay City and Nacogdoches so that I could add oil to the engine. At one of the rest stops after adding my oil, I put on my robe and fuzzy slippers because they were really warm and wrapped myself up in my afghan that my grandma had made for me. I think the truck drivers probably thought I was a homeless crazy person.
When I finally got home, I pulled up in the driveway and I had to unwrap myself from the afghan to get out of the car so it took me a few minutes. While I was doing that, the family came outside because I was taking so long. So, they got to witness the layers coming off. I was never so happy to be in Bay City in my whole life. For Christmas, one of my gifts under the tree was a case of oil. That was the last Christmas I had the Mustang. When I came home for Spring Break that year, Dad said I wasn't allowed to go back to Nacogdoches until I had a new car. So, Mom and I went to Rosenburg and that is when I got the Toyota Starlett. I'll tell you all about that little jewel on another day. Let's just say it wasn't a 64 count box of crayons either.
Have a good Wednesday!
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