Choke Point

I was planning to write another story about the Buick, but I soon realized I already had written it and published it—on December 29, 2012. The title was Cars and Carbs. So no point in writing it again. If you’ve been following the Durward and Charles saga, that story is relevant. And if you have not been following Durward and Charles, it is still a good story.

But while I’m on the topic, let me say this: It seems like my life has been filled with far too many of these kinds of situations, and I’m talking about what happened in the story about Cars and Carbs. On cars I have owned, I’ve had the throttle stick in the full-throttle position three times. I had a muffler explode! I’ve had a number of flat tires including one that occurred while my Jeep was parked in my garage and which required two jacks—a floor jack and a scissor jack—to remove the wheel. I had a flat tire in which one of the five lug nuts absolutely would not loosen and I had to cut it off with a cold chisel and hammer at the side of the road. I had a parking brake get stuck on while I was stopped on a country road—which may not sound too bad until I explain I had to crawl under the car with the tranny in neutral, and work on the brake to release it. I even had a friend’s horse eat part of my car's seatback. And how many people have had to rebuild a 4-barrel carburetor beside a busy highway while dressed for, and on the way to, a funeral? I’ve had so many situations like these. I even had a car save my life. It was a Studebaker.

I was a little kid at the time, maybe five years old. I was standing in the living room of my grandparents’ house, which is where my family lived for the first five years of my life. I remember standing in front of my grandfather as he gave me a dime coin. He put it in the palm of my hand with the admonition, “Don’t put it in your mouth.”

Now, it would not have occurred to me to put the coin in my mouth, but when he told me not to do it, instantly I was seized by an irresistible urge to put the dime in my mouth. So I did. The dime promptly slid down my throat into a location that prevented me from breathing. My dad saw me struggling to breathe, and my granddad told him I was choking on a dime. My dad took me outside to the front porch and called for help from the neighbor (we lived in a duplex—which, at the time, was called a “double tenement”). The two men lifted me by my legs and shook me upside down, bouncing my head off the porch floor (which explains a lot, I’ve been told), in an effort to make the dime come up the way it had gone down, but they had no luck. So dad threw me into the back seat of his Studebaker, and off we went to—somewhere, the hospital perhaps—on the rough, bumpy, pothole-filled streets of our neighborhood.

Durward wasted no time and gave the car plenty of gas. As the Studebaker plowed forward over the bumps and potholes, I bounced up and down on the seat with such force that the dime in my throat jiggled loose and went on down. I could breathe again. Which was good, because my parents were ill-prepared to pay for a funeral.

I had a good idea where the coin was, and I looked for it for a day or two but never saw it again. I was left with a memory and material for a blog post I would write decades later.

(Remember: Cars and Carbs.)