Fairlane vs milk truck - Fate Fairies - book version
This entry was posted on 10/25/2011 1:45 AM and is filed under Fate Fairies:Fate Fairies - book version.
During high school, Dad let me use the old 1966 Ford Fairlane 500. Too bad it was a four-door. It had the reliable 289 cubic inch engine the Mustangs of the era also were equiped with. It must have been the fall of 1972. I remember talking about the incident to a fellow football player the evening of the crash. In dairy regions there is a thing called the "milk truck." No, not the kind in the old black-and-white movies that brings the bottles of milk to your door. The milk produced on a dairy farm must be hauled to the processing plant. This is facilitated be a guy or nowadays perhaps a gal, that comes and picks up the bulk milk out of your holding tank "milk cooler" and loads it on a tanker-truck. The milk truck.
At some point Ol' Bud the milk truck driver started backing into the driveway. I don't know, maybe it was a Department of Transportation thing. He used to pull in and then turn around by the barn and milk house (a place were the milk holding tank was), but at some point he started backing in from the road. Ol' Bud was the brother of my Mom's, sister's husband. In other words, the brother of my-uncle-by-marriage. Confused, that's ok - it is a rural thing. Bud and family lived down the way a bit on the same rural road we did. Anyway, Bud was an easy going guy and always whistled while he pumped the milk into his truck. He came and went every day without fanfare. He never pontificated much - he always moved on to the next farm. He stuck to business, but he whistled anyway. The milk could not wait.
One day I backed the Fairlane out of the dirt-floor garage across from the house as I always did to head off to high school in Whitewater. Once you got your driver's license it was not cool to ride the school bus any more. Anyway, I had to back across the driveway at a 90 degree angle.
Blam!
The car was being pushed sideways down the driveway. I got my bearings, I realized there was a huge silver bumper inches from my face stuck in the driver's window. The side of the old Fairlane slowly caved in as I continued my side journey down the driveway. My Fairlane fit quite nicely across the back of the milk truck. Bud finally stopped. It took a few seconds because he had a lumbering old powerful tanker.
Had the bumper been an inch or so up or down, I might have lost my head and never knew what hit me. I rode around for a few weeks with the side of my car pushed in - I had to crawl in the passenger side. As it turned out, Dad and Bud went to the junk yard a month or so later and split the cost of two replacement doors for the Fairlane. The three of us pushed the frame of the car out again with some hydraulic jacks and cribbing (wood blocks). Every one seemed to want to share the responsibility for the mishap. As it turned out, I only suffered a bruised ego and a stiff neck. The stiff neck got worked out in football practice; the ego took one for the team.
Note: This blog "Fate Fairies" - book version Category is a work in progress. The original vignettes are being edited for book form. Go to the Cooldadiomedia Web site and the Fate Fairies Page for an ordered chronology of the book vignettes (chapters).
