During the 70's my Mother made many treks to and from Elkhart Indiana and Mccreary County Kentucky. It was about an eight hour drive, provided we didn't veer off to Ohio or make more than one trip around Indianapolis.
I don't remember the details of each trip.... Instead I remember the collective feel. Vinyl bench seats I would slide around on when it was cold and stick to when it was hot. The rumble of a V8 Chevy with a bad muffler or the throaty growl of a Pontiac with bad shocks... rocking like a ship on gentle sea's.
I remember how rolling all the windows down in the summer heat turned the interior into a convection oven. And pressing my face against the cold glass in the winter... yearning to escape the never ending chain of smoldering Moor cigarettes hanging from my Mothers lips.
But one thing still bothers me.... My Brother and I had a pair of hard rubber dinosaurs... you know the type... no moving parts but flexible enough to let the limbs wiggle or the mouth nearly close. Well anyway we entertained ourselves for hours in the back seat... engaged in epic dinosaur battles... Until Kokomo...
We stopped at a little place called Sherrill's.... I'm not sure if its still there but there was an amusing sign out front that read... "Eat and get gas here." And like my kids today... my Brother and I had to use the bathroom everywhere we stopped. And against our Mothers instruction we took our dinosaurs into the bathroom with us.
We were miles down the road before we realized that my little Brother had left his dinosaur standing on the back of the toilet. We begged her to turn around but she was on a mission and it didn't involve rescuing a wayward T-Rex. He cried....we cried. I gave him my dinosaur but we were still a dinosaur short. The play was over... the battles had come to an end... forced out of our imaginations by the lost dinosaur.
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