The earliest car I can remember is our Woodland Green 1953 Chevrolet. It had a three speed transmission, with the shift lever on the steering column. This was called “three in the tree” back then. The only other transmission option was an automatic, and back then only women and lazy guys had those. It was a basic car, only used by my father to drive to and from work. It was equipped with the 108-h.p. Thrift-King engine and the standard Synchro-Mesh Transmission. It had no radio, or power steering, too expensive for a service man’s pay. I don’t believe there were any other options available for this car. Key-turn starting, heavier body and frame and one-piece windshield were new features for that year.

I remember when I was very young and we went to North Carolina to visit my grandmother, my mother’s mother. Her house, out in the country, was set back from the road what seemed to be a very long way. The house was very old, and had lost whatever paint it had originally had. It was set up on wooden pilings, possibly anticipating flooding from the nearby river, or some other purpose. I never thought about why it was up in the air, I just knew that being that way made a perfect play area for me.

On the last Saturday night of October, I set all my clocks back one hour. I changed the clock in the microwave, the clock on the kitchen wall, the clock in stove, the clock my wife’s mother gave her, the TV clock, the VCR clock, the DVD clock, the clock in my workshop, our office clocks and the two alarm clocks and phone in the bedroom. Our computers and TiVos took care of themselves, as did my cell phone, answering machine and the digital clock/calendar/with indoor-outdoor temperature display. The clock in car clock needed to be reset, as well as the little one by my recliner. The only clock that didn’t get reset was the one Lefty uses to guide his daily routine.

Grandma Corey’s house was built like a regular house, like my family lived in, rectangular, shingled, with the small end facing the road and a circular driveway looping around it. There were small concrete porches at the front and back doors, each with a rocker or two. The front porch mostly went unused, as visitors parked their cars around back, and even neighbors that walked over to visit came to the back door. The most interesting thing about this house was I saw it built, and even helped a little by bringing water for the workers, getting forgotten or misplaced tools that needed fetching, and mostly by staying out of the way and watching my father and the rest of the men work.