Canoe? What Canoe? I Don't See Any Canoe!

I loved that little 1984 Honda station wagon. It got close to 40 MPG on the highway and it was easier for me to get the canoe on it than the VW Microbus that I bought back in 1972. The canoe had been blue when we boughtit in 1973 for our summer Grand Tour of the American West. About as far as we got was visiting Stephanie's folks in Las Vegas and Dick Kehrwald in Sheridan, Wyoming. We never did get to the Pacific.

The nice thing about a cartop canoe or boat is that it shades the car. It really does make it cooler! There were several reasons for the camo paint job. The blue fiberglass had become badly faded and chalky by 1984, I got a good buy on a bunch of cans of spray paint, and it just looked neat. I could keep the car under a tree, even on the highway!

Fishing For Pickerel, Catching Perch ~ 1965

That first year that Stephanie and I were married we discovered a lot of things about one another. We'd only met a few days before we got married on December fourth, 1964, mid winter in Boston. She didn't know that I had a passion for fishing and I had no idea that she'd never fished before. Came spring time and I gave her some basic casting lessons at the park.

Anybody who's ever done much fishing knows that all fish aren't trophy size and you don't always catch fish. Come opening day of the fishing season and Stephanie managed to land a 5 lb. 14 oz. largemouth bass, along with a mess of smaller ones and several yellow perch. A week later she caught a 5 lb. pickerel. They were all caught with a bucktail jig on 4 lb. test line. She'd caught the fever! We spent our weekends fishing!

I'd already I sold my Honda motorcycle and bought a '64 Volkswagen. We started looking for a boat. When we found this 12 foot Penn Yan we both fell in love with it. The canvas covering was bright red and the varnished cedar planking with ash ribs on the inside made it look like a piece of fine furniture. It cost us $120 and it lived atop the VW for several years.

Stephanie might have been the one to catch all the big fish but I kept trying. Here's a shot she took of me in the old New Bedford Resevoir with a white perch. See! I could catch fish! They were just a lot smaller than the ones that she caught. She was using our "fishing camera", an old Minolta Autocord that went on to photograph several hundred weddings before I sold it for more than I'd paid for it.

This Is Not Your Father's Motorcycle!

My title for the post is a take-off on a highly unsuccessful adveritizing campaign a few years ago. Oldsmobile was trying to appeal to a younger demographic group. It failed. Twenty-somethings just won't buy an "old man" image of a car.

At the other end of the spectrum a lot guys in my age group are wearing ratty looking jeans to the office, growing beards, and sporting ponytails half way down their backs. Not only are they dressing exactly like their mothers wouldn't let them dress when they were young, they're buying and riding motorcycles. They probably smile inside, remembering Mom's hysterical screaming. "NO! You can't buy a motorcycle! You'll KILL yourself!"

They might have once dreamed of bikes with names like Triumph, Ducati, Jawa, Harley Davidson, Indian, Moto Guzzi, all American or European machines that their dads before them had learned to love, often while stationed in Europe during and after WW-II. The Japanese invasion, the names Honda, Suzuki, Yamaha, and Kawasaki, were still off in the future back in those days. But the day came when my own mother got the opportunity to scream "You bought a WHAT? A motorcycle! You'll get killed! Mark my words. You're going to KILL yourself.

Well, I'm still here, although my best friend about 35 years ago killed himself on his brand new motorcycle.

I don't know who owned this machine. I don't know who made it or where it's from. It sure didn't look like the motorcycles of my younger days. I was intrigued by the styling, trying to compose absract patterns of the red and the black, both intense colors, against the pastels of yellow. blue, and pink. I had no desire to ride it.