Antique & Classic Cars Blog

Got out the lawn mower today and began putting gas in it in the driveway. A man in his late 20s walked up to a small Pontiac (a Sunfire) and got in. Moments later, beautiful music boomed from the car. It was loud–as loud as a mid-priced home stereo can get without breaking up. And it sounded very good.

Don’t know what music it was but it had the same sort of crispness as, say, Kansas, on some of their slightly slower instrumental stuff. (Of course this kid has no idea there’s a group, as well as a state, with that name.)

Although most of the time the engine note of an old MG or Triumph is all you need to hear, my MG’s radio is an ’80s era “upgrade” that hardly works and sounds like crap…. I walked over to the young man’s car to learn whether that could possibly be the factory radio. If so, it would be a killer upgrade for an old car.

Apparently being a young man with a loud radio he latched firmly onto the misperception that I was going to reprimand him rather than praise the amazing sound coming out of that Pontiac. As I leaned into the window, he shouted “What the flapdoodle?!” (not an exact quote). I asked, “Is that the factory radio?” and as he peeled away, he shouted, “yeah!”

Cops sometimes like to play the nice-to-start game, where they strike up a chat for a while before chewing you out about something. I’d guess they do this because they want to study you a bit, figure out if there’s more bad to you than the thing they’ve come up about, so they give you some rope in the form of initial, low-key conversation.

I used to park my motorcycle in the wide hashmarked non-spot between handicapped spaces at my local bank when I was just running up to the cash machine. It’s so wide, I didn’t think it would impede anyone and I was trying to avoid taking a full-size spot for a narrow little motorcycle. A cop strolled out one day, talked to me at length about my bike and bikes he rode and mods he used to make to old Nortons all buddy-buddy, then as I was about to leave, he turned back into law enforcement and said, “don’t park there again.”

Guess this young man thought the same thing was coming.

Too bad. I wanted a closer look at that sweet sound system.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 30th, 2008 at 12:04 pm and is filed under Car stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.