Here on the Moon Is a Car

Maybe it's a function of age (very little else about me seems to function at all) but I've started to have increasingly vivid and quite fanciful dreams in the course of the last few months that, when I struggle hard enough and remember the dream fragment, always seem to have a large long-ago memory component plus whatever other craziness was going on in and around my life before I closed my eyes. 

This is one of those dreams from the other night, offered more or less without comment because I have no idea what it means or what my subconscious (that's where our dream factories are located right?) is trying to tell me. When I awakened I was still overwhelmed with how real and true to life the dream had been to the reality.

Actually, I'm not all that clear where one stops and the other begins. But here's a postcard from the real part. This was mom's first car (her's was a nicer, and brighter, blue; I don't know how else to explain the color) and didn't have white walls.

Purchased new in (I think) 1968 from the same dealership in New Brunswick, New Jersey, a Chrysler-Plymouth-Dodge operation that had sold my father his 'Navy Blue" (always looked black to me) 1967 Chrysler Newport station wagon that was so large Mr. Zip, just getting started in those days, wanted to give it its own five number code, in retrospect it was hardly a car.

It had a water-cooled engine where the trunk would otherwise be (like the VW bug with whom I suspect Renault hoped to compete) no radio, and a heater with a very complicated set-up of sliders with colored dots that purported to direct air to the windshield and the passenger compartment but based on thousands of rides in the car, I think 'not so much.'

It was equipped with an automatic transmission with push-buttons, very much like this one.

My father's previous car, a Chrysler Newport sedan also had a push-button transmission which my brother, Kelly, to satisfy his intellectual curiosity I believe, managed to successfully simultaneously push ALL the buttons resulting in their falling to the floor on the driver's side of the car around the large brake pedal.  

The Renault transmission had electric brushes (typed like I know what that means; I didn't know then and almost half a century later, I still don't) that required a change of lubricating fluid every twelve thousand (or so) miles. Based on my father's mechanical aptitude (which I inherited), I assume someone at the dealership told him and he listened as well as he ever did about just about everything else.

I was a new driver at the time and Mom's car was the one I got to drive on infrequent occasion. On one of those, the transmission somehow knowing the mileage seized up and the car ground to a halt. Maybe I pushed it or someone came and towed it, I don't recall.

The only place on the East Coast to get the lubricant was some parts place in Englewood Cliffs and my father decided since I "broke" the transmission, I would the one to purchase the lubricant. For reasons I don't remember he also decided Kelly would accompany me on this errand. 

The parts department was filled with old(er) men, wise to the ways of the world, unlike the two of us or at least me. The man behind the counter was awful and mean and would arbitrarily decide to NOT help whoever was at the counter whom he felt crossed him. 

NOT only part of the dream: I can remember him telling the man in front of me "No!" after arguing with him for what felt like an eternity and when I reacted to his shout with a startled look he took to be sympathy for the hapless bastard, he told me "No!" as well.

We couldn't leave without the mechanical goop for Mom's car so I pleaded with him as only a half grown kid of seventeen years and some odd months could do with an angry adult all the while Kelly sat on a plastic hair slowly eating a pack of Chuckles candies one piece at a time that I'd bought for him from a vending machine which probably hadn't been restocked since Truman was President.

After an eternity or two, the counter-man relented and I counted out of the folded bills I'd brought with me, the dollars to buy the lubricant and we were on our way, I'm guessing in my father's double mattress of a car, as I think it was all we had.
 . 
In the dream, Kelly was just finishing the licorice Chuckle after which he picked up the plastic chair he'd been seated on and threw it across and over the counter at the man hitting him and knocking him and sprinted out the door, looking over his left shoulder and yelling 'Now!' so I took off, too. I'm pretty sure, based on his age, THAT was only real in the dream, I hope. 
- bill kenny