The problem with spending all of one's time bingeing on national news is it squeezes out the time and mental focus to pay attention to local goings-on. I try to be connected to my little town, but I don't do a good job of it. I got a call around sundown instructing me to make my way over to Main Street, because tonight is one of the few nights of the year when they actually allow "cruising." There are signs up and down the street informing us that cruising is specifically not allowed. I'm not sure this is exactly what we used to do in small town Oklahoma, when we were "dragging" Main. It's close, though. Everyone who had a classic car or a hot rod brought it out, and those people who were trying to go someplace and use Main as an artery were caught in the choking traffic. People were lined up along the street, even as far north as where we live and farther, in lawn chairs along the sidewalks and hanging out of the hatchbacks of their cars in parking lots. Well, in parking lots where they were allowed to congregate. We (my foster daughter and I) made the mistake of pulling into the O'Reilly auto parts store, and parking in one of the open spaces just to the right of the doors. We turned around to look at the cars going past, and the store employee immediately ran out and bitched us out for parking there, because it was reserved for customers. We had not even cleared the back end of the car. How did he know we weren't coming in for parts, but looking at the hullabaloo on the street before we came in? How many customers did he expect late on a Saturday, when this was going on, when he had easily ten open spaces in front of the store? Regardless, my foster daughter moved the car, to the far end of the lot, closer to the sex shop, where a few other people were parked. (Not in the sex shop lot, though--someone parked a car across the entrance sideways, so no one could drive in there. Surprisingly inhospitable there too.) We walked ten feet toward the sidewalk, but not all the way to it, while I commented loudly enough for people sitting there to hear (I know because of how they looked at me), that the store employee lowered the likelihood that I would EVER shop there by 100%.
Once we had gotten into place, far fewer of the cool cars went by than we had seen when we first turned down Main and gotten into the flow of the cruise for a few blocks. I wasn't interested in spending the whole evening there, and I'm not feeling quite so social as to meet people in the blocks-long party. So we just watched for a few minutes for any cool cars to go by. (I think I took five pictures, and it was almost all of the neat ones that passed in that time.) Then we gave up and went home, chatting about my book issues I wrote about yesterday. I closed out the day making more notes about the things I thought up in the last 24 hours since last I had written at length. These hot rods were fun and all, and a pleasant momentary distraction, but I had work to do.
No comments:
Post a Comment