Sunday, August 23, 2020
"Lots of things happen in FreshCo on a Sunday night," I told the clerk, as Hamlet would have told Horatio that there are more things oi Heaven and Earth than dreamed of in his philosophy.
Then I paid for my Vitamin D3 and bicycled off into the sunset and home.
Not long before, a woman customer in the grocery store asked me if that fancy old car outside was mine.
"No, my bike is locked outside."
She walked away, perhaps to continue looking for who owned that black Mercury that looked from the late forties or early fifties.
As I rode home, I thought of Terry "the Toad." He's the nerd in American Graffiti, the 1973 film set in a 1962 United States city. That setting seemed ancient when I saw that new film when I was in junior high school in Edson, 700 kilometres northeast of here. Now the film, like junior high school, seems prehistoric. I saw it a few times since then, most notably at an outdoor screening during orientation week at the University of Alberta in Edmonton in September, 2012. Our daughter and I lived in Edmonton from September-March, to enhance her education and job prospects. I attended the U of A long before 2012.
Terry "the Toad" gets to use the car of the parents of Steve. Steve's a cooler high school kid. I had to look up his name on Wikipedia just now, implying that I identify more with the nerd than with the cool kid. Pretending it's his car, Terry picks up Debbie, who's ready for a good time. They cruise around all night while he tries to impress and romance her. Instead, Terry vomits from the liquor that an adult gets for him while robbing a liquor store, whose clerk runs out shooting at him. Terry backs into the car of the local high school gang, who punch him up a bit. They remind me of the Bronto Bunch from The Flintstones. Terry's drag-racing friend John happens by and fights them off. Before Terry and Debbie part at dawn, Debbie says she had a "bitchin' good time."
Freud aside, if possible, I think the driver of that hot car in the Williams Lake FreshCo parking lot might be more like Terry "the Toad" than I am. He, not I, had a chick magnet car. What young person has the loot to make such a jazzy car? Bicycles have always been enough for me. I didn't invite that shopping woman to cruise on my bicycle, but I was flattered that she asked me if the car was mine. I haven't doubled on a bicycle since childhood. I think the driver and I, like the shopping woman, are decades older now than Terry and Debbie were American Graffiti. The driver might have been a child of the car's owner, but would the owner of such a car trust it to offspring, or anyone? Perhaps a woman mechanic owned and drove the car in the FreshCo parking lot tonight. Perhaps the shopping woman asking me found her and they cruised around.
I saw but don't remember the sequel More American Graffiti. Is it time for the series to have another film, set here in Williams Lake? The film kids cruise on Elm Street. Williams Lake's main drag, Oliver Street, is only about nine blocks long; but Second Avenue is about 15 blocks long. Highway 20 goes 460 kilometres west to Bella Coola. That's on the Pacific Coast, like California, which I think is the setting for American Graffiti.
"Where were you in '62?" to quote the television advertisement for the film.
