Revised

This is another one of those posts which changed from the original. I kept getting interrupted and I wasn't happy with what I wound up posting. So I copied to the hard drive and dumped it.

So, I'll write something else. Not sure what.

Gonna save this now to dump the original post. Then I'll revise.

It's a Daddy/Stephen day. I should draw upon something for one of them. Stephen.

When I was a senior in high school, I had my driver's license. I was also given an old Chevrolet Biscayne to drive. It had been Grandma Amy's, but she got herself a new car and gave the old one to Mother. Mother didn't need it, so it was parked. When I got my license, I was allowed to drive it to school, and to visit Stephen.

Stephen, meanwhile, also had a car. It was an old Ford Falcon which had belonged to my sister, Judayl. It had been parked on our yard for about a year. Reason? Well, I can still remember the noise as the car came down the road. We looked out the window and saw the Falcon struggling to make it to the yard. It barely did. Judayl got it about twenty feet onto the yard and it died. Daddy came outside, lifted the hood, and closed it, pronouncing the car dead. Judayl had to get a different car.

Stephen's dad worked at a Ford dealership in the parts department. Stephen had just got his license and he wanted a car. He purchased the Falcon for $25. He and his dad came and towed it back to his house, about five miles away. Then his dad would bring home parts and they rebuilt it. My understanding was that not all of the parts were paid for.

Anyway, neither car was worth much. The Biscayne got about ten miles per gallon and topped out at 57-miles-per-hour. The Falcon got nine miles per gallon, but topped out at 59-miles-per-hour. I know this because Stephen and I had a drag race. It lasted a little more than a mile. The Biscayne took off faster, but the Falcon passed it at the half-mile post - doing about forty. We didn't top out until a mile.

Anyway, Stephen wanted to take me to a movie, but he didn't want to drive to my house. That was out of the way. So I drove to his house. Once there, we decided I might as well drive to the movie. We got about half mile from his house and ran out of gas. (Oh. Only a few dials worked on the Biscayne. Fuel level was not one of them.) So we walked back to Stephen's house and got into the Falcon. We made it a mile before we ran out of gas that time. So we walked back to his house and asked his mother if we could borrow her car. After a shouting match (that was the perferred means of communication in Stephen's house), we were given the keys and told to put gas in it. So we left. We made it about a quarter of a mile and - yes - ran out of gas. So we called Mother.

Mother never yelled at me in front of Stephen. She liked Stephen. She came, delivered us to the gas station where we filled a five-gallon pail. Brought us back to Stephen's mother's car where we put some in that tank. Then to the Biscayne and then to the Falcon. After all the jockeying around, we finally got the cars to the gas station. But it was too late for the movie. So it was off to J's Pizza.

It's a cute story to me because I'm not aware of anyone else who can boast of not only running out of gas three times in the same day, but with three different vehicles. Stephen and I made quite a team.