Another Week: Number 149

Twenty-three Novembers ago, my boss Steve Dahl hooked me up with Bill Jacobs Aurora after I mentioned shopping for a diesel Jetta wagon. The sun was setting as I drove it home to Wisconsin, and the dashboard lights were beautiful.

Amy loved the car’s manual transmission, its torque, and its tight turning radius. It took us to South Carolina the following June— and as Sen. Strom Thurmond‘s body was lying in state up the block, we were sitting in a VW dealership getting repairs on what would turn out to be a chronic problem with the exhaust system. Then we journeyed all around the Lowcountry during Tropical Storm Bill.

We drove that car to state parks, festivals, rib joints, small-town cycling races, and big-city music venues.  We used it (plus a rented van) to move from our apartment in Kenosha to our house in Racine. We visited family and friends in northern Wisconsin and Minnesota.

And we began ten years’ worth of trips to Froedtert Clinical Cancer Center in Milwaukee.

It was a fun little car, but it had problems. We were just outside the recall window, so the fender rust went uncorrected. The electrical system grew progressively random. The doors began to lock on their own. The air conditioning quit. The car leaked oil. A brake job left that function with an alarming flutter. About a year before Amy died, I suggested looking for something else, but she refused. “I love that car,” she insisted.

This past Monday morning., I surfed car-junking websites. On Tuesday, a truck came. The driver winched my VW up onto a flatbed, secured it with chains, and drove it away.

For now, I’m driving my mom’s old Buick Century.

I walked zero miles this week.

R.I.P. trick-or-treating

Friday was Halloween. All the little witches and princesses arriving at Mitchell School began to get to me, so I ran to Walmart later in the day and bought three bags of Snack-sized Hershey bars – a candy I would eat myself, in case of leftovers.

At 5 p.m., I turned on the light over my front door. Forty-five minutes later, a princess rang my bell. A few minutes after that, six kids appeared. With the two-hour event already halfway over, I gave each of them a generous handful. One guy said, “This is the good house, with the chocolate.”

All told, I had a dozen trick-or-treaters — down from 33 last year. We used to get a hundred-something.

When I was a kid, every house participated. We went door-to-door for many blocks and collected a grocery bag full of candy, coins, and a few religious tracts. After hours, teenagers smashed every pumpkin they could find, covering the street with pulp. It was a simple tradition, but a cool one — celebrating the creeping darkness and the dying vegetation with a sense of mystery and fantasy and danger that brought the neighborhood together.

Now, instead of one night, Halloween is more than a month long, and mostly involves front-yard displays of oversized commercial decorations. The trick-or-treat portion seems about dead. None of my neighbors had their lights on.

I stashed my leftover Hershey bars in the fridge in a gallon-sized Ziploc bag. They should last for a couple of months.

The Duke (2020)

Ahead of my dinner-and-a-movie night with my mom on Saturday, a list of the “10 Best Feel-Good Movies on Hulu” popped up in my Google search results, so I chose number five — The Duke — a museum heist comedy based on real events in England in 1961.

Jim Broadbent plays Kempton Bunton, a retired crank opposed to the UK’s television licence. Helen Mirren co-stars as his worn-out wife.

The story is quirky but inconsequential, and the humor is homespun. It’s a well-made movie, and Mirren is almost unrecognizable in her character — but I didn’t see why it rates 97% on the Tomatometer.

The thing that really got me was my 90-year-old mother and her attention to detail. As the museum heist itself went down, we were shown the thief’s feet, but never his face. Next, Mr. Bunton is with the stolen painting in his house.

“But we didn’t see him actually take it,” my mom contended.

I thought she was nitpicking — but she was absolutely right.