Cars today are so hard to work on because they’re so... the engine compartments, there’s no room to work in there. I can’t even change the spark plugs on my car, there’s no room to work. My wife had an old Dodge and when you opened the hood on that thing… I mean, I could almost climb in there and work, you know. It was easy then, you know. Dave Grace told me when he was a young guy he was on a trip – went on this long trip and bought a Willy. Remember those? Did he tell you that story? Seventy-five bucks at a used car lot. He said the thing was just a mess. He said it used more oil than gas. I remember he told me they were out somewhere and he hit a rock or something on the highway and it busted the steering. He said the car went off the road and hit a tree. He and his buddy were okay, but he said it was a miracle they hit that tree because they could have gone sliding all the way down the embankment. You wanna know one thing I was always afraid to try on my own? A brake job.
Easy, the old man said. And that was the first thing I’d heard him say. I don't even think he looked up. He just sat there staring at his coffee cup like he was talking to himself or something.
Easy?
Yeah, brakes are easy.
And there was more, but I didn’t catch it all. It can be a real pain in the ass, listening to someone else's conversation, especially when it doesn’t really matter all that much. Besides, I was drinking coffee and thinking about something else. I was sort of busy mulling over an email I sent to a girl at work the day before and feeling pretty good about it. It was this flirty email where I told her I had a dream about her. And then I told her not to worry because it wasn’t a sex dream – I said, don’t go getting a big head or anything because it wasn’t that kind of dream. I don’t usually dream, but for some reason I had this dream and she was in it. And for some reason I decided I should write her an email and tell her about it. I don’t know this girl all that well and she’s like ten years younger than me, so I wasn’t even sure I should tell her about it, but I was bored so I did. I’m always sort of bored at work. After like twenty minutes she sent me an email back. It was only two sentences long and that's what I was thinking about when I started hearing the conversation between the two old guys next to me. The older guy was wearing a red baseball cap and staring at his coffee cup. He had this metal walker leaning up against the wall and it had tennis balls on the feet – swear to god. This guy at work has the exact same walker – tennis balls and everything – it was given to him as a gag when he turned 40 about a year ago. Now it just sits around and people use it for a laugh every now and then. I started listening to the two guys, but the old guy in the baseball cap, he was hard to understand. He had a scratchy voice and he talked in some sort of whisper - that’s if he talked at all. The whole thing made him sound about dead. The best part about that guy was the way he drank his coffee with both hands. He picked up his cup like a kid or something. I swear, the hat and the way he drank his coffee really made him seem like an eight year old sitting there, but when he talked his voice was so old. I don’t know if the younger guy even noticed, he just kept going on about cars and engines and the good old days and pretty much anything he had on his mind. Talking to old people can be a real chore, but this guy was giving it his best shot. Every once in a while he’d run out of things to say and they’d just sit there looking out the window or at the ground or wherever before the young guy’d think of something and start in again. He’d look up and say something like, I think the longest trip I’ve taken in a car - we drove to North Dakota years ago. We took my wife’s dad, he’s from there. We drove up through Nebraska and South Dakota and saw a lot of stuff I’ve never seen. Like, we went to the Corn Palace. Have you heard of that place? It’s an old building - must be about 100 years old if I had to guess.
They went on and on like that, but I sort of went back to thinking about the email and those two sentences and how she must have made some sort of impression – that's one of the things she said in her email. She said, I must have made some sort of impression.
I really don’t dream all that often.
