Our family manufactured furniture and we had a showroom for our pretty items way down in North Carolina. In the early 70's my older brother Jet and I would drive a truck load of our mirrors and tables via a route that was then not interstate all the way through. There was a long flat rural stretch in Indiana and a couple of sections in North Carolina where we would wind our way up the mountain and down again, followed by another 30 miles of up the mountain and down.
Learned to drive a stick shift in a truck with a 28 foot box I did. First stop for a red light was in a little burg in Southern Michigan that had me at an upward incline, playing with the gas and clutch and praying that no fool was too close behind. We were not cuddled back then. "Don't drive a stick son? No better way than to learn on the fly with multiple gears while carrying a load of our expensive furniture."
Speaking of which my brother Jet was always interesting to drive with. Jet has an IQ that is MENSA level but some fine points understood instinctively by lesser mortals like myself sometimes takes him a little longer to grasp. We brought that same truck to Chicago one time and needed to back into the huge indoor freight docks at the Chicago Merchandise Mart. At least 30 semi loads could occupy that area at the same time.
As Jet was backing in I noticed from my shotgun position that the large mirror outside my window was going to soon encounter a beat up and faded yellow cement support and I advised my brother of the same. As he is explaining to me the dimensions of the mirror combined with it's angle and how it is impossible to hit said post with said mirror we get the crunch of glass against cement. Maybe I should have been taking notes.
One time we are in the mountains of North Carolina and Jet needs to find a rest room. We stop at a little general store and frankly I'm starting to get a little worried because Jet was kind of a radical in college and he was still wearing a pin that was a black and white hand shaking underneath the letters NAACP. Knowing that he wouldn't listen to advice from his younger brother I don't say anything about the pin but I'm worried. I'd seen movies of guys down South wearing sheets and this place looked like the backdrop to one of those movies.
In the store there were a half a dozen white men dressed in bib overalls sitting around a pot bellied stove. Some were actually whittling sticks with sharp looking knives. They were talking until we entered the front door and then became quite. Jet passed them by on the way to the can in the back and I stand about two feet from the front door, ready to combine my old track skills with my new found driving ability. Fortunately we were at the top of the mountain and it would be downhill for miles.
No one says a word, looks at us, or even moves a muscle the entire time we are there. As we are leaving and driving past the fleet of old cars with no rust sitting in a field I keep glancing back at my recently repaired outside mirror. It was a nice break from looking at the little post it notes that Jet has pasted for himself throughout the cab. "Slow down on curves." "Don't forget the turn signal." "Objects in the mirrors may be closer than you think." If only one would say, "Listen to your brother."
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