Dreams

Mr. Bubba leaving church yesterday in the Bradfords’ 1946 Ford club coupe, what a dream. The car is showroom outside and in. With minor adjustments year to year, Ford made that body style for 1941, 1942, 1946, 1947 and 1948 before introducing the all new postwar 1949 Ford. Stirring cubicles of the brain, memories, dreams. 

Our neighbors had a 1946 Ford. Mr. Danley of Opp, Alabama, owner of Danley Furniture Company, gave one to Wm A Guy, manager of the local Danley’s store and our next door neighbor all my growing up years, a new 1946 Ford fordor (for long years, FoMoCo’s cutesy term along with tudor) sedan. Mr. Guy’s car was the same color as this car as I recall, replaced their maroon 1940 Ford tudor sedan, which had replaced their tan 1934 or ’35 Ford with the interesting trunk on the back. 

Mr. Guy’s next car was a brand new light turquoise 1949 Ford fordor V8 sedan that, not to gossip, caused screaming and shouting in the back yard as Mary B Guy wanted her husband to give her his new car, Mrs Guy’s mother Elizabeth Burgin, who lived with them and raised Bill, my age, taking part in the argument, Mrs Guy shouting for all the neighborhood, “Oh, mother, let him keep the damn thing,” and then a day or so later showing up in her own new 1949 Ford convertible. 

That red convertible was the car Mrs Guy owned when she dropped dead of a heart attack at home an evening in December 1949 at age 39. When Bill was in high school (Bay High class of 1954) it became Bill’s car, and that I've several times remembered having the use several weeks summer 1955 or 1956 when Bill was away in St Paul, Minnesota visiting his aunt and cousin the Pryor family. A summer of my dreams.

By the end of the nineteen-forties our family really, really wanted a station wagon, and could afford the new and coming American dream of being a two-car family. I remember totally dreaming after a traded-in like new dark blue1948 Ford station wagon sitting on the lot of a car dealer on Harrison Avenue.

We stopped and looked at it one Sunday afternoon, and my father said, “I think that car may have mechanical brakes, and that fabric top is not a good thing,” and that was soon the end of my first car lust - -

because in 1950 my father brought home the brown 1949 Plymouth station wagon that was a demonstrator at W&W Motors, the Dodge Plymouth dealer. “The station wagon” was our trademark car all through high school and on into college, the car my parents dropped me off at the Freshmen's Dorm "North Hall" a Sunday afternoon in September 1953 to begin University of Florida, and the car in which I several times came to Robert Frost’s Road Not Taken. Two or three years later when my mother got a 1954 Buick Century hardtop coupe, I was offered my choice of The Station Wagon or the green 1948 Dodge sedan (another story - - the Dodge had been my mother’s 36th birthday present, spring 1948 she and I went down to the train depot, walked up onto the ramp, and chose the green Dodge over the blue one as they waited to be unloaded from the boxcar). 

My late teens/early twenties summer, I chose the Dodge sedan over the Plymouth woodie, because I'd had personal experience over the years, every year or so sanding down and revarnishing the wood, and also at least once driving it without a door for several days while the driver door was in Ethridge's Cabinet Shop for rotted wood to be replaced. So my father got the station wagon until it was given to my brother. As for the red hot Buick V8, small Special body with Roadmaster engine, I begged it off my mother as often as I dared until summer 1957 when I graduated from UFlorida, and Linda and I were married, and we went away for twenty years in the U S Navy.   

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

One car from my growing up years stirs more dreams than I can bear, every one as dear and sharp as yesterday driving the 1946 Ford.   

DThos+ still farther downstream