Purpose, Built

“Gene, right?”  In the dream, Jack Sullivan is nine and asking if I’m Gene.  “No. Craig”, I reply.  It’s 3:48 AM, and the internal alarm clock goes off right after my reply.  The dream was something about the night mom’s cancer had eaten through her skin and dad woke me to take her to the hospital.  He held her innards in in the back seat as I drove to the hospital.

It was 1976, so I would have been 14 years old.  We took the Supra, because it was fastest.  Dad didn’t have to ask if I could drive the car.  He knew I could.  Far smoother and much faster than any ambulance, we covered the twelve miles to Condell Hospital in just over eight minutes.  Later that morning, I went to school.  And after school, work.  Fourteen can be a wierd time for anyone, but it was a nightmare (recurring, apparently) for me.      

Jack Sullivan is 19 or 20 these days, attending the University of Iowa.  He lived down the block in Davenport and was a baseball teammate of Colin’s for a few years.  I last saw him at O’Hare, last year.  But in the dream this morning, Jack was nine or ten.  And, in that weird way dreams don’t make sense, he was awaiting mom and dad and me in that Supra smelling of overheated brakes from 1976, at the present day Hy-Vee grocery store in Davenport.  And this tidbit?  My father’s name was Gene.  Put that in the analyzer o’tron.  If you come up with anything better than something about mortality awareness, send a nice note.   

The internal alarm clock drives Marcia a little crazy.  If I have to wake up early in the morning, I tend not to sleep well and wake before the alarm goes off.  Of course, Marcia’s two thousand miles away, so that’s a problem I didn’t have today.  In the twelve minutes before the 4:00 AM actual alarm clock goes off, and Colin wakes for our drive to the San Jose airport for his flight back, I scroll the early morning headlines.  The pre-dawn drive up to San Jose is mostly quiet and completely dark, and somewhere near Gilroy I quip I didn’t think the eclipse was gonna last this long.  It’s the last dad joke of the week.  We hiked.  We National Parked.  We pho togged.  We whale watched.  We Twitter-followed the Cubs as they swept the Jays.  We made each other laugh, from start to finish.  We car-gazed, because Car Week round these parts is off the scale of dreams.

There was swoonage.  The Concorso Italiano is held on Seaside’s golf course.  It’s billed as the largest collection of Italian sports cars on the planet.  I went last year and was disappointed.  They had a dozen Lamborghini Miuras, which are widely considered one of if not the most beautiful car ever made, but not one of my favorite car since first I saw it - also Italian and designed by the same guy (Marcello Gandini) who penned the Miura (below) and Countach among other Lambos, as well as the spritely Fiat X19 and swanktastic Maserati Khamsin (below that). 

The car is the Lancia Stratos (below, doing what it does).  It’s a tasty little wedge of beauty and fury, built by a once great car company so determined to be on the leading edge of innovation (and thus ahead of the market) they were fated to die.  They’ve been swallowed up in the corporate concentration ruining most everything these days and only produce one pathetic little car today, and no car they’ve made has been sold in America for more than two decades. 

I’ll argue the Stratos was their pinnacle.  Built not to sell to consumers, but to win the World Rally Championship in the early/mid 1970s, it’s a twitchy, rear-drive tour de-force of passion and shed engineering, cobbled together with some cast-off Ferrari V-6s, left over from the Dino’s demise, wailing right behind your ears.  It has zero cup holders but two helmet holders inside.  They were supposed to make 500 of them to sell as road-going cars to be legal to race but they never quite made it to 500 as they won the WRC in 1974, 1975 and 1976.  There’s only a handful of them in America, and I never saw one in its Patrick Nagel sharp flesh until Saturday.  There was much swoonage.  So pretty.  So severe.  So purposeful.  For a kid who walked around high school with Formula 1 and WRC baseball caps instead of the normal stuff, to finally see the Stratos was dream-like. 

As was Sunday.  The billionaires wandering the Pebble Beach grounds had nothing on me and Colin, as we cranked up the Thwack Factory to make a bat, and then headed over to Seaside High School for some batting practice.  I throw.  He hits.  We watch the balls fly and tell jokes.  How many tens of thousands of balls has it been over the years?  The L-screen wasn’t out so there’s quite a bit of trust involved as that handsome, severe and terrifyingly purposeful swing we’ve crafted sends balls hurtling toward the edge of the continent.  It’s been a year since we’ve been able to throw and hit, and it was wonderful to do so in Seaside, where I added a ball to my desk this morning as a reminder.  The hitting has never really been about the hitting, over the long-haul.  It’s been about the work, and the craft, and the mastery of a purpose-built part of life, as an entrée to making a life of purpose.    

Work beckons as it does, and I led off the department head discussion this morning with the short (?) story version of my at long last satiated desire for the Stratos in Seaside on Saturday, and how its design and existence as a purpose-built object - without regard to commerce or convention - is the ideal.  There’s the customary bewilderment (my fault, as always, for an abstraction) until I reinforce that we collectively have the exceptional gift of purpose-building a future for Seaside.  What’s our purpose?  What kind of place are we here to build?  And for who?  It's an on-going discussion and effort.    

Which is another way to view the question Jack asked, this dream morning.