Car pictures

So I found a recommended “app” for converting PDFs and tried it. It worked — BUT…

But it also completely altered my desktop and littered it with hot buttons for places like Amazon and Walmart and god knows what all. My familiar Chrome desktop was gone. Who asked them to do that??? I went ahead and tried a couple file photos and they worked. Then I killed the app to restore my desktop.

Which proved a pain in the ass — kept getting screens about what don’t you like about this app? Why are you leaving? The one that infuriated me most was a statement that I was REQUIRED to answer before they’d purge the damn thing. Screw ‘em.

Anyway, decided to see if I could import the two photos I converted to Medium. Got to looking at them and decided to write about them rather than delete the test.

(1) 1988 Ford Bronco Eddie Bauer model

Photo taken in the driveway of a home I occupied for almost 30 years, during a snowy winter. First of my Broncos, purchased in 1996, almost 100,000 on it but well-kept. I loved this truck. It never stuck me no matter how high the snow or slick the ice, whether in the mountains, or towing my duck boat to the wetlands or when the weather was so bad the snow plows stayed home and the interstate looked like the frozen tundra. My first rig with an engine heater, and devoted use kept the block warm, eliminated cold starts and probably had much to do with keeping the engine functional through another 150,000 miles with no troubles. Today it sits in my backyard essentially abandoned, though I know if I installed a battery and replaced the starter and cleaned the crud out of the gas tank it would fire right up. I’m too old and crippled up to do such things. (Its body is straight, the chrome bumpers are in better shape than the ones on my ’96 Bronco, but parts have been cannibalized by my son, who dropped it off last summer, bringing it down on his car trailer full of all my decoys he had stowed in his garage.) Guess I will have to call a wrecking yard to come haul it away. Silly to be sentimental about a Bronco, I guess.

(2) 1937 and 1949 Plymouths

The Kodak stamp on the side of the snapshot says ’54. That was the year we moved to Florida. The ’37 was my grandfather’s car, only the second he ever owned. The garage at the garage apartment we moved to after he retired from the Fire Department was almost too narrow even for the Plymouth. There was no other parking, so my uncle when he visited parked half on the lane in front of the house. The blue ’49 Plymouth was the car he drove after coming back from Korea until 1955, when he bought a brand-new ’55 Ford. First car I ever drove when I wasn’t much bigger than the beanpole kid visible in the photo. (The toddler was my first cousin; the leprechaun to the right my brother.)

Pure happenstance those were the photos I used to try the PDF conversion app. Looking at them created a surge of nostalgia. Nostalgia seems frequent as the year turns over and another decade begins. Probably my last decade on earth.