So , guys and their cars, right?  One night , lying in bed, Doug and I tried to name all the cars he had owned. Couldn’t do it.  Anyway, at  the very beginning, Doug owned a candy apple red, 1958 Corvette. Hard top convertible. Beautiful car.  He worked and saved his money and bought it himself.  Of course, it didn’t last long.  He totaled it one night, racing some other teenaged idiot, coming home from the Senator’s Club. Thank God, they weren’t killed!  By the time I started  dating Doug, the Corvette was a ball of scrap metal and he was on his second or third car by then. His older brother, Jim, had gone into the Air Force and he and Doug had traded cars.  Doug was driving a 1956 green and white Chevrolet 4 door Bel Air. Huge car! Straight shift, steering wheel so big, most tires today are smaller! So  this car (boat) was really good for one thing. Parking! It had a back seat more roomy than a double bed. **

**FYI – if you are reading this and you don’t know, or can’t figure out what “Parking” is, go ask your grandmother and stop reading my blog.  It is rated M!

So on weekends, wherever we went on a date, of course, later we would end up Parking. Here’s the problem. Once you shut this car (boat) down, it would not restart!  (Doug told me years later that it was some minor battery problem, but at the time, he didn’t have the money to repair it.) After Every date, Doug would end up pushing this car out of whatever spot we were in, with me at the steering wheel, ready to pop the clutch to get us started. This was a pain in the summer, but in the winter, it was horrible! One winter’s night, after trying unsuccessfully to get this friggin’ car (boat) started, we decided that we would have to walk to the nearest road to see if we could help or hitch a ride.

It was Freezing outside, so Doug threw the blanket (we had been “Parking”) over my head to keep me warm and we started walking. After quite a while, a car finally pulled over to offer us a ride. As it turned out, we actually knew the guy. His name was Bill.  He opened the passenger side door and yelled, “Climb on in here, Doug! I’ll give you a ride. Oh, and you can bring your Dog, too”.  I took the blanket off my head and he said, “Sorry, Marty!”

That’s okay. years later, I got Bill back! But that’s a whole different blog! Stay tuned.