Pretty As A Picture

Presently my days are proscribed by whether or not anyone can loan me their car, give me a ride, or if my destination is short enough to ride a bike to. Alas, my luck with cars continues to be unfortunate. This weekend I walked to the grocery store and loaded up a basket, and the bag-boy asked “do you need help with this out to your car?” This struck me as an unusual request, I was probably only a couple of years older than he was. Maybe it’s something they automatically have to ask when someone has more than two bags per hand. Oh well, I should have said “Yeah sure, I need help to the car, only it’s five or six blocks away.”

My part of town got hit with some heavy rain last week and flash flooding became an issue. Unfortunately my car became a victim. The cylinders filled up with water, and the starter doesn’t want to come back to life. So I can’t blame the car on this one, I can’t swim either.

So now the car has been sitting for almost a week drying out in the hot sun until help arrives this weekend to assist me with performing the repairs. I was able to change out all the fluids except for the transmission fluid. I don’t want to tackle the starter, the transmission fluid, or any of the electrical stuff on my own. I just don’t have the know-how on auto repair to go that far on my own, and I’d like to avoid bringing it into a shop as I’ve been ripped off by those places a few too many times.

So I’ve been driving Lizzie’s bubble to work every day, hoping it hits 50 mph before I get there. Oh I only kid the Kia, it has more get-up-and-go than my 87 LeBaron did. I’ll give it that. But the Grand Am definitely has more pep to it. And I miss it. It’s nice to have the ability to quickly accelerate into a spot in line in traffic which the car next to me always seems to want to refuse to let me into. My weapon for retaliation: the mean glare. Endorsed by old ladies everywhere.

But hey, I shouldn’t complain. It’s very nice of Lizzie to lend me her car and work around her schedule to accomodate my problems. Borrowing the Kia means bringing Lizzie to her work in the morning, and that of course means getting up at 4:30 am. It might be a good thing for me though, it gives me a longer day and more time to do things, meaning I can slow down the pace a little. But 4:30 am is pretty early for me. Oh well, I’ll live.

So apparently we get instant summer this year! It’s been in the mid-Seventies all week long, along with the familiar unbearable Minnesota humidity that I complain about every summer. At the beginning of this warm week I thought it wouldn’t last. I just knew it would be snowing again by Friday. It’s only mid-April! At this time in back in ‘97 I was in the middle of the nastiest blizzard I’d ever seen in my life. That was the same blizzard that resulted in the big floods in Grand Forks. Well, now it’s Thursday, and it’s only been getting warmer. It feels like July already. Odd, eh?

So with the warm weather and the broken car, I’ve been doing a little biking and walking around the past few days. It’s actually been quite good for me to get outside and soak in a little sun and breathe in the fresh air. It’s also given me time to do some thinking, which is good. When I get bottled up in my daily routine, the brain starts to not function as well. And when I’m working in a field that depends so much on creativity, that’s not such a good thing obviously.

So the other day I wondered what it would have been like to have lived back in a time when there were no pictures. The common phrase “pretty as a picture” implies that pictures are the standard to which the rest of the world must measure up, and I don’t necessarily think that’s the best way to view life.

Walking around, I arrived at this small lake and park and was in awe of the perfect landscape scene that I observed. The whole world looked as though it was shot in soft focus, lit by a master stage designer. For a second, I thought that this would make a good ad for life insurance, or something that sells warm moments of peace and comfort. This was the real thing, and if I don’t try to experience it more, I will only be seeing a copied version of it all captured by someone’s camera. Living in an age of pictures, television, computers, etc we see the fake more times a day than we see the real thing. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s a little disheartening. I think that the time for a major change in scenery needs to come soon for me.

Have a nice week. Cross your fingers on the car repairs for me, I really hope it’s just the starter that’s broken.