Standard


No night person, when I drift off to sleep at six o’clock in the evening and Father Nature jumps up and down on my abdomen just after midnight, stirring me to pay homage, I often cannot go back to sleep, so rise and read, write, or study, with cup of black and square of dark, only to start my blogpost, doze off after an hour or so and, waking to find myself asleep and unable to continue, go back to bed. - - -


that’s what happened at two-thirty, back into bed until a late-rising five-thirty. 

Dude, nobody’s interested in the sleep eccentricities of an old man, go somewhere else.
Okay, but it was my last time crashing in that king-size bed that overflows the Beck bedroom, as Ray’s supposed to come over and get it this morning so Sleep Center can deliver a suitable size sleep thing Tuesday, making the room more usable. 

Du-u-uude. 

Okay, this is where I started off to in the first place.

A friend who has an old car collection has just added a new car I’m dying to drive: a 1935 Chevrolet Standard.


1935 was the model year GM introduced their new Fisher Body all steel Turret-Top on Chevrolet Master Deluxe, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, LaSalle, and Fisher-Body but not Fleetwood-Body Cadillac, and not Buick (Buick had a budget problem and couldn’t afford the changeover). That one year model only, the Turret-Top cars also had forward-opening front doors, a style Mama told me posed a tight squeeze in close space for getting in and out, especially for back seat passengers. 

Not the Master Deluxe two door Town Sedan with built in trunk,


my parents bought a new 1935 Chevrolet Master Deluxe two door Coach, which instead of trunk had the spare tire on the back 


the car they had when I was born and in which I happily grew up to school age noticing and learning to love cars.

The car that my friend recently acquired, and that I so want to drive, is a 1935 Chevrolet Standard sedan. 


He had it at church for me to see last Sunday, but I didn’t realize that, and so after church went rushing out to make a hospital call. Maybe again soon.


The 1935 Chevrolet Standard was Chevy's last year of that old design with the one-piece flat windshield and the top with fabric insert. 



Told here before, a late parishioner and sometime friend W.F., a few years older than I, connected with me online after I retired from parish ministry, to tell me that he also had a 1935 Chevrolet. W.F. said his was a Standard, and he said he loved the car, not least because the fabric roof insert developed a leak (they were prone to that) at the forward right-hand corner, which in rainstorms dripped on his girlffriend and motivated her to slide over close to him.

As a teenage driver, my modus for getting the girl to slide over close was to take a right corner at some speed in our Plymouth station wagon with smooth leather seats. In those days, the front seats of automobiles were one piece bench seats, none of that front bucket seat nonsense with the console dividing them, doubtless designed by a doting father of teenage girls who had forgotten, or more likely remembered, the schemes of his own youth. 

Ray should be texting me to open the gate.

DThos+