Florida Pest Control is coming round next week, reminded by their commercial just now on WMBB Channel 13, which caught my eye because of their 1948 Ford pickup. Theirs is white and may be a year either side of ’48, but it brings it all back.
In those days, the ice plant on Beck Avenue in St. Andrews that was where Captain’s Table parking lot is now, had a red one, a flathead V8 that I severely lusted after. The ice plant delivered ice around the corner to us when I didn’t drive over there and pick it up in one of our trucks or the Pontiac
a 1936 business coupe that my father worked over for use as a pickup. He cut out the trunk (or it may have been a rumble seat) and built a wooden platform there instead, with a length of angle iron for the edge.
I loved driving the Pontiac except for the huge amount of play in the steering wheel. To make a right turn you had to start a moment early by spinning the wheel to the right until it caught. Same for a left turn: a fraction of a second before you meant to turn, spin the steering wheel to the left until it catches. One of my memories is of hearing the Pontiac speeding around Massalina Drive the day mama called and told our father that the oil heater in the downstairs hall was going crazy and heating up glowing red hot. I had solved the problem before he arrived from the fishhouse in St. Andrews, by going outside and turning off the fuel supply at the oil tank.
The other thing about the Pontiac was that riding in it was an embarrassment to my sister -- who also decades later told me how she had felt when mama would use it, for example to haul garden supplies. Gina said that she and Walt had to sit in the back, but I always sat inside with mama. People remember different things about life, including things like that that seemed perfectly natural and right to me, the oldest, but slights and hurtful memories to my sister, and perhaps to my brother as well. They must have known great relief when I went away to college in 1953.
One morning in spring or early summer 2011, during mama’s last month or two when I had her in Community for rehab after she had fallen again, and where she died, Gina and I had visited at the same time and had a long talk outside the front door as we were leaving. I found out, that day in that conversation, many things that I had never known, never realized, about sibling feelings and relationships as we grew up in the family together. I found out that morning that we had very different mothers, very different relationships with our mother, and even grew up in completely different families and memories and feelings. My place and being as the oldest and male, from the perspective of others, wasn’t all good news to me. I think, like to believe, that if I had known then what I learned that 2011 morning, I would have been a very different older brother instead of the shy loner that I saw in the mirror and mama’s pet that my siblings saw.
For the stream of consciousness blogpost this morning, I apologize. It began with my watching a black bear segment on WMBB and thinking to recall my own black bear experiences; but then Florida Pest Control came on with their classic Ford pickup and looking at that old truck stole my attention and my heart away.
W
