Note that I had misremembered the situation with the truck bed. You can see the red top rail is still there; only the fenders rusted out, and they weren't replaced with ones from another truck—my grandfather built the replacement ones out of wood. Why he decided to paint them green, I have no idea.

(I know they look black in this photo, but trust me, they were green. As was my grandparents' old Nova, there. Also, oh hey, my grandparents' old Nova.)

While we're here, could my old man have been any more '70s? I guess he could've been wearing flares instead of boot-cut jeans, but seriously, that hair, the brown cowboy boots...

This was taken in my grandparents' driveway back at the old Oxbow Lodge. Note the garage-conversion barn, the little playhouse out back, and the smaller garage-type structure off to the left. In my day, that was my grandfather's fur shed, where he kept his trapping supplies and equipment, but back in the '60s it was where my father used to work on his aforementioned selection of hoopties. One day, while he was adjusting a balky carburetor, he accidentally introduced enough aerosolized gasoline into the enclosed space to create a decent fuel-air explosive. When the car he was working on finally fired, the resulting explosion relieved him of his eyebrows and blew the one-piece garage door into the middle of the driveway. My grandmother was reportedly very displeased.

There are so many occasions in his recollections when my own existence, by rights, should have been prevented. It really makes a man wonder at the vagaries of existence.

I'm not sure, but I think the vehicle lurking just out of sight behind the corner of the garage there is my grandfather's '76 Chevy pickup, which would have been fairly new at the time of this pic, and which he and I once spent an afternoon repainting, some years later. Its original white paint had turned all chalky and gross, as happened to automobile paints of the '70s and '80s sometimes, and we refinished it in Sears Weatherbeater Off-White. Yes, house paint. With brushes. I was... maybe eight or nine? It was a special time.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.