The “fun car,” as TWWNCBUIP calls it (I just call it Silver, as in Hi Ho), has finally left the garage to get road-ready again. For years it sat quietly collecting dust while every shiny new car claimed the VIP parking space in our garage.
Now it is with JTMWCFA (Jeff, the Man Who Can Fix Anything) in his much bigger garage waiting to gear up for what comes next.
The first order of business will be the gas tank. Decades of stale fuel had turned to something less high-octane and more vinegar-adjacent, so off it went for a proper cleaning.
Next will be new tires because apparently twenty years is beyond Michelin’s warranty no matter how optimistic you are.
The garage itself, though, is what set all of this in motion. It started the way pulling a thread does. I nudged one thing out of the way, which led to shifting another, which led to opening a cupboard, which led to crawling in and out of cabinets, dragging boxes across the floor, hauling piles away to be shredded, and before I knew it the domino effect had swallowed three weeks of my life. Somewhere in that slow unraveling of dust and cardboard, Silver finally got noticed again.
That unraveling brought its share of surprises. A battalion of Hot Wheels rolled out first, then a squad of Star Wars action figures. Digging deeper, I uncovered a forgotten box of photos that once decorated our office.
After the 2018 burglary and ransacking, we had to take everything down and pack it all away so the walls could be repaired and repainted. In the tumult this one box was overlooked and never made it back.
Opening it now feels like finding a time capsule, one of those rare moments when the past taps you on the shoulder.
Inside were snapshots that brought back whole chapters oflife. One was from our Club Med days, and let’s all be grateful it wasn’t me in my Speedo.
Another showed the Astros players who were introduced to the Duck by our friend and pitcher Mark Portugal, the same Mark who invented the Duck’s number one selling sandwich.
Then I came across an autographed Kris Kristofferson photo. That one felt especially important. He has always been TWWNCBUIP’s favorite songwriter, which is saying something. And it was another reminder of how music has always been part of our lives.
At the bottom was a poster from a night we broadcast live from our hotel room during Folk Alliance in DC back in1996. That show featuredSara Hickman and Alejandro, Shake and Jack, Greg Trooper, Trish Murphy, Alaina Richardson and Anne Lockhart, and Hillary Arwen. We broadcast the show over a strange new thing called the Internet and sent it back to the Duck, where it was projected on a giant screen. We felt like digital pioneers. The City of Houston even gave us a grant for it. At the time it felt revolutionary. Today it feels quaint.
Meanwhile the cleanup continues, complete with an aching back, sweaty clothes, and the occasional acrobatic attempt to climb into cabinets clearly designed for much younger and bendier people. With the garage slowly coming back to order, the “fun car” and I are finally brushing off old memories and gearing up for what comes next.
