Tables, Times

Some people scream.  I’ve never found anything beyond an ebullient and brief “wooo!” much help at all.  Raising your voice is for people with either a shortage of context and / or an abundance of self-importance.  Children.  Political candidates.  People on the flight who go with “ohh noo!” and “aaaahhhh!!!!” as the pilot aborts the landing.  If the plane’s crashing, please keep it down.  Your tenuous grasp on your importance in this maneuver is distracting.  Let’s just enjoy the ride.

The pilot pulls the plane up, because the ground is hard and the sky is merely bumpy.  Apparently, it still rains - thunderstorm-style - in some parts of the country.  We go round again, and the second time is less fun, but more purposeful.  The screamer two seats over is complaining the pilot didn’t say why the landing was aborted until we we turning around for the second try.  Sure, because that’s his job.  To keep you, in seat 8C, up to the second on flying this thing.  How bout you pipe down and let him do his job.

Back in Davenport to the best jobs I’ve ever scammed; husband and father.  The last born is back for his sophomore year at UW, and there’s plenty o work to be done.  Garage sorting.  Furniture building.  U-Haul piloting.  Box Sherpa-ing.  Speaker wire hunting / gathering. 

It begins with taking at number at Scott County.  In the battle of nature versus nurture, both are winning.  Doing the moving thing with the first born in Phoenix a few weeks ago, the planet was saved a little with a Prius acquisition.  Eminently practical, a Prius V to be exact.  Computers, buttons and touch screens, it’s a rolling badge of enviro-cred.  Good for her.  Smart, practical and kind to everyone including the planet, she ignored the goofs of the house trying to steer her toward more carbon-intensive (and fun-intensive, we argued) vehicles.  Her nature, and her nuture, won.

But, back to Scott County.  I have to register the other new … well, new to the household … vehicle.  Which is, I’ll argue, equally environmentally conscious in the way of reduce-reuse-recycle.  A 1972 Triumph TR6 which, until just a few weeks ago, was the only handsome thing left in Waterloo, Iowa.  Top Gear’s James May labeled it the “blokiest of bloke’s cars”.  Seeing as though one of the three reasons the last born bears the first name he does is because “Beyond Jennifer and Jason” had Colin listed under “Jaunty RAF Names”, a blokey English roadster seems perfect.  Smart, slightly (sometimes more) impractical and fun.  Nature, and nuture, and name.

The Scott County lady is terrific.  Prompt, polite and professional, the TR-6 rejoins Iowa roads as a legal vehicle.  Godspeed, and try to park it over the drip pans which now adorn the garage floor.  One for the engine and tranny.  One for the diff.  Ah, the joys of English roadsters. 

The joys of the gig dot the landscape on the way downtown to Scott County.  New stuff built, old stuff re-made, nasty stuff (well, except that one thing) gone, the drive down to take a number and get new license plates is one of those my life passed before me sequences you hear about.  I give the customary one finger salute to the Quad City Times as I pass, and am still laughing as I pass City Hall.  If I had more time or inclination, I’d stop in to say hello, but I don’t.  I have a college apartment custom coffee table to make. 

But I am curious about how the Central Fire Station addition / rehab is going, and it’s across the street from Scott County, so I just wander in like I own the place.  Still paying property taxes in Davenport, so I do, in a sense. 

I also own the defense of the design.  Visited by some well-meaning traditionalists who I have great respect for, I fought off the impetus to try to make the new fire station look like it was a hundred years old.  The remaining Central Fire Station, with a historically sympathetic rehab now underway, will serve to honor the history of DFD quite well.  The new addition was meant / is meant to honor the future of DFD.  The Galante Architecture Studio, of Cambridge, did a fine job with both history and future.  The oldest active fire station west of the Mississippi is poised to have another inspiring century.   

What’s obvious as I walk through is you can’t get from history to the future without the present.  Chief Washburn and the guys welcome me warmly as I walk through the last hundred years and peek into the next hundred.  I’m quite studious (I’ve never written that much less thought it before) to position myself firmly in the past as the friendly chit-chat passes from room to room.  By the third or fourth time someone says they miss me, I’ve figured out how to just sheepishly smile and mumble something about having a new city family now.  I mumble it, rather than scream it, because you can’t walk through generations of public service already completed and yet to come without a shortage of self-importance and an abundance of context. 

Godspeed, DFD and Davenport.  Feel free to stop by, anytime.  

Enjoy the ride.