when you are poor owning a reliable means of transportation is often beyond reach of that stretched paycheck. so...you learn to make do with what ya got.
like with the tugboat.
the tugboat, as my brother and i referred to it, was a 80-something chevy celebrity our mother bought from an aging relative. really the vehicle was in good shape, albeit, screamed old-lady-mobile.
for all of its unpleasant accoutrements (the radio only ever seemed to get in am stations), the tugboat was a reliable vehicle with low mileage. perfect for the poor.
my mother drove that vehicle for many years until in the natural order of things, it was time to hand it down to one of us. i was already driving my own piece crap, an aging, transmission-eating ford suck-o-saurus, so the honor instead went to my brother.
good thing, too. the tugboat was a heavy car. when someone would pull up in the driveway with the tugboat, we knew it before they arrive. the oceans wouldn't part but the heavy knocking and whirring of its engine would alert us to its coming. even after the engine was turned off the thing continued to knock and ping until it caught its breath.
the tugboat really got its name from the sound of its rusty doors creaking open and then slamming shut - wham! - with a dull metallic sound that can only be described as watching an old war movie as the ship dropped anchor:
chink, chink, chink, chink, chink, chink, THUD! a-chinka chink, a-chinka chink, chink, chink.
as with other older cars and their idiosyncracies, tugboat was no exception. after years of making right turns, ol' tug decided it didn't want to do that anymore. nope, it had enough of 'em.
my brother -- with all of his raw strength and size behind him -- barely made that steering wheel budge to the right. the man can benchpress me but ask him to turn right? impossible.
one day my brother was actually sideswiped by another car, an suv, that decided to change lanes without notice. when both drivers stopped, the other guy said, "i thought you were turning right?" to which my brother replied, "nope. i can't turn right. you turned right." before the abbott & costello routine and back and forth about tug's inability to slide to the right, they noticed a funny thing.
the other guy's bumper had some scraping but for whatever reason was adament that insurance companies weren't brought into the mix. my brother only agreed to it for one reason - tug, for all its unsightliness, for all its heavy, metallic, creaky joints and aches and pains - didn't have a mark on it.
that's when we realized the beauty of tug -- the strength of our captain would never put us in danger.
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