Distraction

Distraction

A person needs a distraction to take the mind off whatever is eating, grieving on it, sometimes more than others, heavy today. Mine this morning is online news alerts from New York Times and Washington Post, Romney Romney Romney Romney Santorum Santorum Romney Gingrich. New York Times online. GoComics. Super Tuesday is mercifully history but not really; there are miles to go before we sleep, not to mention promises to break, and thank you very much, Robert Frost. Perfect:

NYT online theater page is sometimes perfect distraction. Death of a Salesman is up again so I’ll go there this morning. For some reason but not surprising given my obsessions, Willy Loman’s car sticks in my mind. Photographer Alan M. Pavlik has a website entitled just that, but Pavlik has the wrong car, a 1949 Studebaker Champion business coupe that he spotted on a backstreet just north of LAX. 

It’s perfect but untimely.

Willy’s era was about 1930 to 1940, maybe? In my mind Willy’s car could only have been a 1937 Plymouth business coupe, black with bald tires, dusty, dented and scratched, and showing a hundred forty thousand miles of mediocrity.

This Plymouth is showroom, but put a hundred thousand miles of futile sales calls on it, park it in front of a seedy depression era hotel and visualize a balding failure in a room upstairs with a trashy woman smoking a Camel while the faithful wife at home uses the insurance premium to have the refrigerator fixed, and there you go.

The mind is a bit heavy this morning, but can be distracted easily and intentionally with another car image or two. Linda’s stepfather J. W. Graham was a salesman too, opposite to Willy Loman, and Jim drove Pontiacs. His last car was a silver gray 1987 Pontiac Bonneville 

that by the time Jim died in his nineties, nearly blind but driving all the same and scaring all of us to death as he sped up the mountain to The Club, then left the car to me, had dents and scratches and paint samples from every bridge railing in north Alabama. I loved the car but we had five or six cars around here at the time and no place to park them all, cars gathering in the front yard and across the street even. We gave it anonymously to HNES for presentation to an employee, who promptly totaled it one night in a drunken stupor.

The mind is still grieving, Norman. It will take time and more distractions, but that's my problem. You are standing round the throne, praising. Now and always, God rest ye, dear friend.

Tom