A dreary, sodden day of wind and rain, with more of the same threatened, so here is something to bring a little cheer. It's an anecdote from Joseph Epstein's Never Say You've Had a Lucky Life. Especially If You've Had a Lucky Life, which is still my bedtime reading, slow reader that I am. This made me laugh out loud...
[At this point Epstein, a man who has had many jobs in his life, is in Arkansas working for the North Little Rock Urban Renewal Agency, where all his colleagues are Southerners.]
'One among them, a genial man named Harold Russell, was currently building his own house on weekends. When I happened to mention to him that I needed to replace something called a "throwout bearing" in my used Corvair – the car, by the way, featured for its flaws in Ralph Nader's book Unsafe at Any Speed – Harold told me that replacing it presented no real problem. "All you have to do is lift the engine and screw in the bearing underneath." Lift the engine? He told me that here all I needed was to get a #197 pulley, park the car between two strong trees, and with the aid of a the pulley lift up the engine and screw in the bearing. Simple enough, no? Had I attempted it, I could imagine the next day's headline in the Arkansas Gazette: "Jewish man found dead under Corvair Engine, Car Parked Between Two Trees in North Little Rock."
For a few years afterward, whenever I brought one of my cars in for repair, I would casually mention that I had just installed a throwout bearing in it, suggesting that I had done it myself and thus was not a man for any mechanic to attempt to cheat. Much later I learned that only cars with manual transmissions, or clutches, had throwout bearings. Gotcha, Schmuckowitz! those various mechanics must have thought.'
Which led me to read up about throwout bearings on the internet. Such is life.
And from tomorrow I'll most likely be out of action on the blog front for a few days, on family business in rain-lashed Worthing, then walking in rain-lashed Milton Keynes, or rather touring the historic villages that make up that much maligned New Town.
A high school classmate of my wife's ended up in Arkansas. This man, an engineer, had agreed with his wife that he would work while she attended law school, then he would have some time to do what he wanted once she was a member of the bar. What he wanted was to work on old cars, and when another classmate visited them, he had several VW Bugs under repair. That night at dinner the engineer offered a riddle: Q. How do you tell a rich man in Arkansas? A. He has three cars up on blocks in his yard. The wife then left the table, and the other classmate was not surprised to hear that the marriage fell apart not long after.
ReplyDeleteThe classmates were all from central Pennsylvania, for what that's worth.
Thanks, George. Sounds like car repair's a bit of a preoccupation in Arkansas.
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