If You Wanna Get To Heaven...You Gotta Raise a Big Caprice Classic

A member of our Backroads family is failing. Has become enfeebled in his prime. I don't want to mention his name, what with medical records and confidentiality issues. Let's just call him T-Hoe. I've been thinking about him all day. Especially during testing this morning, when all I had to do was maintain visual contact with the backs of students typing madly on computer lab keyboards, feverishly completing their state standardized tests. Yes, while enforcing the No Looking Off Your Neighbor Rule, I was consumed with concern for T-Hoe...

5% battery life. T-Hoe is languishing in the parking lot, draped over yellow lines and a concrete curb stopper parking block thingy, like a limp clock in a Salvador Dali painting. If only Hick had persistence of memory. The mental faculty. Not the Dali painting. Not-Heaven's Bells! He'd probably fix those pliable, gravity-challenged timepieces so they stood ramrod straight, and ran like clockwork.

Yes, if Hick could remember when it was time to change T-Hoe's oil, he wouldn't be in this condition. T-Hoe, that is. As far as I know, Hick is not draped across the school parking lot at this time.

Now T-Hoe has clogged arteries. He needs a transfusion. New blood. So he doesn't throw an oil clot and have a transmission attack. He needs some clean crude 10W30 coursing through his pipes. That would make him feel his RPMs. Put the spark back in his plugs. Enable him to jump those concrete curb stopper parking block thingies in a single bound.

They're not meant for that, you know. Those concrete curb stopper parking block thingies are actually meant to STOP the car. I'm surprised you didn't catch that in the name.

Tell that to my old college friend, Jerri. The Arkansas Flower. She wasn't really a bloomin' flower. No more a flower than comedian Brett Butler was an example of grace under fire. That's simply the nickname she used for herself. She drove a maroon 1970s model Caprice Classic four door that was not a thing of beauty. One particular Saturday evening in the fall of 19BLAHBLAHBLAH, The Arkansas Flower used that vehicle to purvey six girls across campus lanes to an Ozark Mountain Daredevils concert. It was a big deal, what with our university located in the very stomping grounds of OMD.

Never mind that the distance the Arkansas Flower had to park from the concert venue was equal to the distance from our dorm, although in the opposite direction. It is definitely not cool to walk to a concert. Getting there is half the fun. Like Arkansas Razorback tailgaters, the concertmate crew prepared for that Ozark Mountain Daredevils event all day. Perhaps, or perhaps not, with various and assorted inhalants, potables, and ingestibles.

The Arkansas Flower piloted that Caprice Classic into the parking space with six girls caterwauling OMD songs at the tops of their polluted lungs. She launched that behemoth over the yellow concrete curb stopper parking block thingy like a Saturn V rocket headed for the moon. Unintentionally. Six carefully coiffed heads slammed into the roof of the rolling party cruiser. Twelve eyes locked onto each other. Six hearts thumped in six throats as six semi-lucid concertgoers jumped out four doors to survey what the Arkansas Flower had wrought.

Did you know that ten girlish hands can lift the front end of a 1970s model Caprice Classic over a concrete curb stopper parking block thingy?

T-Hoe still needs oil.