Non-fiction: January 2009 Archives

I can't tell the difference between one car over another.

Everyone is driving around in a repulsively overweight SUV (present company included) or some sort of gray smallish car. How the hell am I supposed to know who you are? Get a God damn "I Heart Nixon" bumper sticker that'll allow me to recognize which idiot you are.

There is one car that I'll never forget. My Mother's orange Volkswagen Squareback. At the time, that orange automobile = Mom. As far as I was concerned, it was quintessential Mom, one of a kind. When I saw it parked around town, I knew she wasn't far away.

Recently I came across a VW Squareback, an orange one. It was parked on a side street in Brooklyn.

Who lives here and what the hell are they doing with my Mother's car?

I was tempted to knock on the front door to the house, but I thought it was better to enjoy it from afar. A flood of memories came back to me.

One day, Mom asked me to paint her car. PAINT-HER-CAR. Holy cow! That sounded...important. At the time, I don't think my age hit the double digits yet. I felt privileged about the thought, and exhausted at the same time.

Little did I know that it was magic paint. Mom put food coloring and water in a big bucket, and handed it to me with a brush. So off I went to re-paint the car, in good spirits the whole time. Of course, what ever color I painted it, it always stayed the same carroty colored vehicle.

I was a kernel of an employee on The Today Show at the time. He came on the show to promote a new film called MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE. I remember just gawking at him, as he casually spoke with the segment producer and sauntered around eating fistfuls of grapes and sipping coffee in the green room. I wondered why I thought this old guy was so freakin' cool. When the Executive Producer walked in to welcome him back, Newman placed his paper coffee cup between his teeth, firmly shook little Jeffrey Zucker's hand and winked. What just happened? Who can pull that off at seven in the morning?

After his segment was over, I walked him out to his car. I had the urge to say something else to him, anything. I needed to tell my siblings and my parents that I actually spoke with Paul Newman. He put on his sunglasses and headed toward the revolving exit door to the NBC building out to his black sedan, and I said, "Nice glasses." He looked at me with a slight wrinkle in his brow and said, "Kid, I've had these things for forty years." And with that, he was gone.