Yes, she was a real car. My dad bought her in the 60’s as a used car. But she was a hardtop, not a convertible. She was the car he drove to work every day in Belmond. We called it the “Pink and White Pumpkin”, my sisters and I, referring to the pumpkin in Cinderella which the fairy godmother changes into a coach. But it would only later become the car of my dreams.
You see, she was killed in the Belmond Tornado of 1966. Her windows were all broken out and her frame was twisted. So the pictures of her, though they look exactly like my memories of her, minus the rust spots, are not actual pictures of the car in question. Our next door neighbor, Stan the Truck Man, was a mechanic always on the lookout for salvage parts. He took her apart piece by piece while she sat in our driveway. We continued to sit in her and play in her until all that was left was the bare frame. My friend Werner told me for the first time about the facts of life and where babies really came from in the back seat while she was being gradually dismantled. Of course, I was nine at the time and didn’t really believe him. How could that grossness actually be true?
But she still lives, that old dream car… She is the reason that I objectify my imagination as a ship with pink sails. My daydreams, my creative fantasies, and those long, lingering plays in the theater of my imagination as I am drifting off to sleep all start in the three-masted sailing ship with pink sails. And that dream image was born from the Pink and White Pumpkin. I have sailed in her to many an exotic place… even other planets. And when I die, she will take me home again.
Sometimes all you want to do is doodle-bop!… To draw in pen and ink and post your derfiest doofenwacky doodles so you can just make your way through another danged day.
The View From My Little Town
An aerial view of Toonerville in Winter
As immigration officers round up school children and their families blocks from a school in North Carolina, Trump minion Flynn is being accused of violating the Logan Act over discussions with the Russians before Trump took office, and DeVos is being chased away from a Washington middle school by angry protesters who don’t want her sucking the intelligence out the students, I am reminded there are quieter places to go and get away from all the insane noise that is trying to kill us. Thus I head back to Toonerville, my HO scale model train town that has been packed away since we moved to Dallas in 2004. I have laid the downtown and part of the residential area out on a snowfield on the spare bed in my bedroom.
I am reminded, as I revisit Toonerville (with the Toonerville Trolley waiting down front from the train station), that I am a humor writer that writes about small town experiences and the teaching of children. I am imaginative and creative, and I have working strategies for dealing with the stress and insanity caused by all the political baboons doing the politically-charged things that political baboons do baboonishly every baboon day. There are places to go to get away from the Trump Circus’s endless monkey-house of horror.
In Toonerville, none of the clocks keep the correct time and none of them agree what time it is. Certain things are timeless. The village works together to solve its problems. What the wits and twits who chew Red Man tobacco down at Al’s General Store think about politics never leaves the checkerboards in front of the fire place. Mayor Moosewinkle at City Hall has no plans to run for State or Federal office. (Thank God for that, he’s a nut.) And officer Billy Bob Wortle, formerly from Texas, has never shot anybody of any color. The County Sheriff doesn’t even trust him to own bullets for that big old gun of his. As far as executive orders from Washington go, we mostly don’t give a damn.
Down at the Post Office, Mr. Murdoch the postman has never “gone postal” and wouldn’t hurt a fly. He loves to gossip, though. And Mr. Santucci, the hot-headed Italian owner-operator of the Farmer’s Market (who looks just like Santa Claus in the Coke ads, but is one very foul-mouthed Santa at Christmas time) secretly believes that it is the many differences between the various residents of town that keep life interesting. And old Ben Johnson, the town’s only black man, is his very best friend.
It’s a truly good feeling to live in a small town where all the people bicker and throw fits, but no one would every want to throw anyone out of town. People belong together, working for the common good. And it is a rather sad thing if the only place such a town can exist is inside my goofy old head. But if we bicker a little less and throw fits less often on the inside, won’t we be better people on the outside too?
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