The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Google cars came out with some statistics recently. Driverless cars don’t have accidents really … and the few they do have are cars with drivers running into them. Some of the boyz in the Flatheads, our vintage car club, were flabbergasted. They’re old school guyz who revel in memories of souped up engines, backroad drag races, cue ball shifter knobs and dangling dice on the rearview. They love their rods, they love their memories and they go apoplectic to imagine a future of robot automobiles they can sit in the backseat and read a paper. They have fond memories of other uses for that backseat.

“The Age of the Automobile is coming to an end,” I made the mistake of saying to Two Toke Tom at the Diner where it was overheard by half the Flatheads at the breakfast pow-wow where they’d pushed half the tables together to make room for about a dozen car enthusiasts. Their Packards and Chargers and 88’s were lined up outside the plate glass like an outdoor Museum for Testosterone, right next to Tom’s beater with the cracked windshield and the missing front quarter panel, all gleaming with fresh wax and loving care. I might have been wiser announcing we ought to confiscate guns in an NRA meeting.

Freddie, the head honcho Flathead, jerked his head in the direction of my blasphemy. “What are you drinking, man???” he practically shouted. Brenda spilled coffee on Harry’s hand, missing his cup by a quarter mile. “Yeoww!” he hollered in pain. The whole café was now on Alert. “I only mean the day is coming when cars will drive themselves. They don’t have accidents, Fred, and if they don’t have accidents, guess what the insurance companies are going to demand? You want to drive your big Dodge, fine, but guess what they’ll charge your Charger for the privilege?”

“Over my dead fender, Skeeter.” Two Toke raised his cup. “Amen, brother Fred, Amen.”

“All I’m saying, Fred, is half the folks out there on the road these days aren’t driving anyway. They’re text messaging, they’re talking on the phone, they’re wobbling over the center line and they’re drifting onto the shoulder. They go from 60 mph to 30 mph. I don’t know what all they’re doing behind the wheel, but it sure isn’t driving. Might be okay with me if they let the computer do that for em so they can pay attention to their smartphone.”

Fred snorted and the assembled Flatheads snorted in agreement. Brenda mopped up Harry’s table and dried his hand. Harry would live, Two Toke would get a good laugh on me later and the Flatheads would all drive down Memory Lane with rumbling mufflers, KaHooga horns, mohaired upholstery, big fins and whitewall tires like mastodons crossing back over the Bering Strait to a garage somewhere in the Pleistocene.

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