Elementary, My Dear Auto

Leroy has us on the move at last.

Some of you may remember that our car came to an untimely end last month. That prompted a lot of research for a new vehicle – price, mileage, and all the other crucial factors that go into acquiring a new family chariot. And once we finally made that fateful choice, all our friends wanted to know the same thing.

“So, what are you going to name it?”

Ooh. The big questions.

As I’ve mentioned before, naming a car is not an insignificant decision. We’ve known several in our life from the Battered Blue Buick – christened after a major Kansas hail storm – to the E-Z Bake Oven, which was seemingly designed to magnify heat. Mozart was a Sonata whose life ended too soon, while Harvey Dent was hit in the driveway on its third day with us, temporarily giving it a polished look on one side and a mix of torn metal and a shattered turn signal on the other.

So there’s a bit of history involved. Which is why, as with certain baby naming traditions, we took several days deciding.

It was Mom who put us on the right track, shortly after we’d clarified to a friend that the car was dark brown and not black.

“Well, all I can think of right now is Encyclopedia Brown references because of the color,” she said.

And that’s when it clicked.

Hello, Leroy.

Like all the best names, “Leroy Brown” has multiple meanings. In an odd way, it has a tie to when I first started driving in the early 1990s. One week, the local oldies station was even more predictable than usual, and would play Jim Croce’s “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” just after school let out, filling the speaker’s with that infectious rhythm.

But Leroy “Encyclopedia” Brown is a tie to my childhood. Some of the first books I ever got under the Christmas tree involved the mysteries of Idaville’s greatest boy detective and his friend Sally Kimball. The pattern was always the same – a setup that took five minutes or less, a break at the crucial moment to see if you’d spotted the error or inconsistency that would unravel the case, and then a quick flip to the back of the book to check your answer.

In retrospect, maybe that’s how the seeds of a journalist got planted in my head in the first place. All the key questions were there: did the facts as presented make sense? What was the person really saying? And why did anyone trust Bugs Meany after all this time? (OK, maybe not that last one.)

Call it curiosity. Or skepticism. Or just thinking things through instead of taking them at face value.

By any name, it’s an attitude we still need.

Plenty of dubious claims get made every day, and they’re easier to spread than ever. Most of them are about as transparent as one of Bugs Meany’s schemes – if you bother to take 30 seconds to check. But many people don’t.

Maybe it’s because the person saying it has an important title and a famous name.

Maybe it’s because it was bundled with a cute infographic and a provocative headline.

Maybe it’s just because it seems to confirm what the person already believes – why check what you “know” to be true?

Always check. Always confirm. Even when – no, especially when the claim seems to boost your own side. It’s frustrating when you’re wrong. But it’s downright embarrassing when you’ve committed to it, and a lot harder to pull back from.

If a rolling brown Hyundai helps me keep that in mind, so much the better.

Just as long as it doesn’t end up like the other Leroy Brown.  You know, the one that looked like “a jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces gone.”

Let’s stick to cracking cases – OK?

The Road Less Familiar

The pickup appeared without warning, moving past its stop sign and straight for the side of my car.

BOOM!

The doors took the shot. The air bags thumped into life. And everything came to a sudden, twisting stop.

“Are you all right?” a voice called from outside.

I was, mostly. My car, not so much. As I looked at the tears, scratches, and dents in the doors – including one chunk that was missing altogether – I realized two things:

1) I had been very lucky in my unluckiness.

2) I was going to be much later coming back from lunch than I thought.

***

Even when everyone walks away (thank heaven), something like that shapes your week. Phone calls, paperwork, Tylenol, and more become an unexpected part of the schedule, reminding you that what you planned and what you find can be two very different things.

Funny enough, what I had planned was to figure out a birthday present for my oldest niece, Ivy.

Ivy is turning 9 and has discovered epic fantasy. The bedtime reading for her and her younger brother Simon has lately included The Chronicles of Prydain, the Welsh-inspired adventures of an Assistant Pig-Keeper named Taran. One day, he chases after a panicking prophetic pig (say that five times fast) only to find himself in the middle of dread hunters, ancient magic, desperate rescues and – of course – the fate of the realm.

Did he expect any of it? Of course not. But a moment’s break in the routine transformed his entire life.

Fantasy is famous for that kind of thing. Bilbo Baggins finds 13 dwarves and a wizard on his doorstep, looking for a tea-break and for someone to rob a dragon. Lucy’s game of hide-and-seek finds a wardrobe that contains a lamppost, a Faun, and a kingdom bound in enchanted winter by the White Witch. In tale after tale, it only takes the slightest turn of a corner to turn a world upside down.

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, gong out of your door, he used to say,” Frodo Baggins says in The Lord of the Rings, remembering his famous relative Bilbo. “You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

Maybe that’s why those tales of magic and adventure still hold so much power now. They remind us how quickly the ordinary can become extraordinary, how the dull and everyday has no obligation to stay that way.

Sometimes they’re moments that echo the rest of your life. My own was forever shaped by a conversation in a nearly-empty bookstore – a chat that led to (so far) 21 years of marriage. And again by an unexpected death on a quiet Friday that rocked me, Heather, and all our family. The best and the worst, with the same power to ambush.

They’re not the moments you choose. They’re  not the moments you expect. But they are the moments that re-set your choices and your expectations, that reframe your thinking and remake your life. The moments that can break your heart or make it powerful beyond imagining. Maybe both.

Those moments can be personal. They can be national. What they can’t be is easily dictated.

That’s not comfortable.

We want to write our own stories, to have full control of the plots. And when the twists come, it’s unsettling at best. You can’t see where the tale’s going. You can’t skip ahead. You just have to travel the road as best you can, with all its unexpected burdens and blessings.

And when each turn arrives, it forces us to think. To break out of the usual and look. To actually see the world around us, and not just a far-off destination. To learn what we value and what we’ve taken for granted.

That’s something I’ll try to remember on the road ahead.

Hopefully with a working set of wheels.

Household Name

Once upon a time, there was Harold, my sister-in-law’s alleged car.

Harold had four wheels, and he would get you where you were going … most of the time. During the exceptions, you couldn’t help wondering if Fred Flintstone’s leg-powered rockmobile wouldn’t have been a better bet. After all, you always knew that your two feet were going to work. The same couldn’t be said of Harold’s less-than-mighty engine.

And yet, despite this infamous standing – maybe even because of it –  Harold had a name. That was never in question. In fact, we had ourselves an unexpected laugh when a card game about apartment living turned up a card called “Harold the Hoopty Car” – a confirmation from the universe that yes, this was actually meant to be.

Some of you, I suspect, are nodding. You know what I’m talking about. You, or someone you know, has christened metal and steel and given it life, like a gasoline-powered Frankenstein.

Heck, we even have our own day.

That, at least, should come as no surprise. When you live in the United States, it seems like everything under the sun has its own day, week or even month. I’ve written about Banned Books Week (Sept. 25 – Oct. 1) and organized Longmont Power & Communications contests for Public Power Week (Oct. 2 – Oct. 8 – is your entry in yet?). Some I know, but keep forgetting about, like National Procrastination Week in March (I’ll get to it next year).

And every year, there’s some odd day that surprises me. Such a day is October 2 – National Name Your Car Day.

Yes, really.

I don’t know who created it. I really don’t know why. But I couldn’t be happier. After all, it’s an impulse I’ve surrendered to more than once myself.

Granted, my vehicle nomenclature hasn’t usually been as dramatic as Michael Knight’s Kitt Car, or even Herbie the Love Bug. Although there was my sister Leslie’s declaration of the Masterful Audi of Death, a used car my family had when we were teenagers. The MAD sounded ominous, but in truth, the death it pursued was mostly its own as it became caught in an ever-increasing spiral of repairs and maintenance needs. We learned a lot from that car – mostly about the need to get a vehicle at the right moment of its life cycle.

The Battered Blue Buick, more ordinary in name, was no less mythic in structure. It gained its name from a Garden City, Kansas hailstorm that produced a lot of cosmetic damage, a nice insurance check, and no impediment whatsoever to its vital functions. It would actually take a major elm tree branch to bring it down, courtesy of a Kansas ice storm.

And so it’s mostly been since. Some have been named for appearances, like my sister-in-law’s Goldfinger, others for a vital quality, like our old Chevy that a friend dubbed the E-Z Bake Oven after a hot summer’s drive. We’ve even occasionally extended the privilege to other products, like the Qosmio laptop that my wife Heather dubbed “Quasimodo.”

It’s an odd tendency. But it makes sense. What we name tends to have a story attached, or sometimes even what feels like a personality. It’s something we can argue with, complain to, even plead with. (“Come on, Harold, just one more mile.”) It gives us the feeling that we can somehow control this assemblage of glass and steel that our lives so often depend on.

And when we’ve moved on, that name means it sticks in the memory a little harder.

I like that. I like having more stories, more memories. They help us not just exist, but live, paying a little more attention to the world around us and how we move through it.

As I write this, it strikes me that Heather and I have never given the Sonata a name. Maybe Mozart would be fitting – brilliant, a host to much music, a little cracked – though in car years, it’s already outlived its namesake.

We could even honor my sister-in-law’s long-gone car. But I wouldn’t want to invoke its luck as well, on this vehicle or any to come.

Our auto that art in future, Harold be not thy name.