Hitchhiking Old Granny And Boy
🔞 TÜM BİLGİLER! BURAYA TIKLAYIN 👈🏻👈🏻👈🏻
Hitchhiking Old Granny And Boy
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May 31, 2010, 12:43 PM EDT | Updated Dec 6, 2017
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I hitchhiked. Once. I was in the seventh grade -- far too young to be exposing myself to the perilous adventures of road-and-thumb. And yet, young enough to believe that the open road could be thrilling, mind expanding, educational -- the way of, as Jack Kerouac said, the "crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way."
I wasn't as sop his ticated as Kerouac. I hadn't read On the Road yet. But I would have glamorized it as such. There had to be a little glamour. I felt the raw and the real and the dark, sometimes with excitement (sometimes with dread) so it was imperative to sprinkle fairy dust in there, somewhere -- even filthy fairy dust. There were too many dingy light bulbs in the world. One had to compensate.
Staring at a long road, cocking your head just the right way, the dirty and the shiny can attain a certain glow. You'll run into all kinds of broken, gorgeously cinematic sights -- like glimmering colors of shattered glass, curious looking rocks, abandoned cars, abandoned stuffed animals, or most recently for me, abandoned fun parks. My Torino overheating in the hot desert, I pulled my car next to a mysterious building. Spying a fence with a hole big enough to squeeze through I discovered a derelict go-cart/mini-put put golf course complete with a standing lighthouse, its roof perilously close to sliding off, piles of neglected go-carts, and tiny little houses with broken windmills.
Alas, I never saw such a thing when I hitchhiked as a kid. Just candy, creeps and critical elderly folks -- shaking their heads -- bad, stupid girls. I was camping with a friend's family, stuck somewhere in nowhere-land, Eastern Oregon and we were sick of roughing it. Her parents had us under tent, roasted hot dog, keep-the-watermelon-in-the-stream lockdown. We were itching for action -- innocent action. When we heard about a mini-mart five miles away, we hatched a plan. Not a terribly detailed plan, but a plan, nonetheless. We would walk.
Walking the distance for two 12- year-olds ain't nothing we figured. And besides, licorice, candy bars and an ice cold Coca Cola awaited. And more importantly, we could ditch her annoying parents.
But how to get back? And at night? "Let's thumb it," we said.
I knew it was a tricky predicament. I'd heard a few stories and rented a lot of movies. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hitcher were key don't-pick-up-the-drifter pictures. My older brother had regaled me with tales from the TV movie Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker the famed (in his eyes) warning of what happens when halter topped, Bundy bait extend their thumb. Through cinema, I understood the dangers of creepy "salesmen" driving from important "conferences," or thrill kill couples yearning for children, or men fond of goat cheese and slaughterhouses and setting instant photos on fire. They walked among us.
I discussed these various scenarios with my friend, and agreeing we didn't want to find ourselves next on the Green River Killer's roster of victims, we came up with some ground rules: No single men (I hadn't seen Two-Lane Blacktop so...), no young couples, and no groups of guys. We thought (I extended my hands in a cinematic gesture) two words: "Old people." And trucks. And even better, old people in trucks -- the safest scenario. We'd recline in the vehicle's bed, and if Ma Pa Kettle got any ideas, we'd jump out and head for the woods. But what I pictured looked like something Hank Snow would sing: "I was totin' my pack along the long dusty Winnemucca road, When along came a semi with a high an' canvas-covered load. 'If you're goin' to Winnemucca, Mack, with me you can ride.'"
So after many suspicious pull-overs, all of which we had foreseen (the creepily nice solo guy, the hootin' and hollerin' group of men looking for a party, the couples, who probably weren't all that bad...but I'd heard of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley...), we did indeed score a truck. A truck with not the quaint elderly couple, but an elderly man. A grumpy old man angered that we were hitchhiking in the first place. We sat in the back, munched our Hershey bars and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and let the wind blow through our hair. And laughed. It was all so hilarious. It was great fun. It was great dumb. We were probably lucky. For dramatic purposes, I'm sorry to say nothing bad happened save for the old guy's condemnation. But we felt like we were in a movie. The good hitchhiking movie. The positive hitchhiking picture.
And one of those good movies was a film I had seen and joked about on our road adventure. Frank Capra's 1934 s crewball It Happened One Night , wherein the sexy hitchhiking tradition of showing a little leg originated with the sassy Claudette Colbert and an amusingly frustrated Clark Gable. I so wanted to show a little leg but a 12-year-old shouldn't be doing such things. And most certainly when Clark Gable isn't by your side. Humbert Humbert should not be an option. And Humbert wouldn't have allowed it either.
But Capra's joyful, sexually charged and whip-smart depression-era movie was on my mind as I stared down the pine-tree lined highway (it should have been Five Easy Pieces ). A road movie that's pure Americana, from the wealthy heiress fleeing her father only to end up on a bus with wise-acre newspaperman Gable, to all the adventures they do and see on the road (charming camping areas, waving to hobos on trains, sleeping on bales of hay and again, hitchhiking) -- this was so beautiful to me. I wanted to crawl into those moments. And I wanted that hitchhiking scene.
I loved it. Gable attempts to teach Colbert the rules of the thumb, while she turns down eating a carrot. Sitting on a split rail fence on the side of a rural road, the classy Colbert allows Gable to pick a piece of hay out of her teeth with a penknife (the raw carrot and hay to penknife always feels so sexy to me), and while he chomps on his carrot, they swap hitchhiking techniques. Gable is full of hitcher braggadocio, even suggesting he intends to write a book entitled: "The Hitchhiker's Hail." To him there are three ways to hail a car: "It's all in that ol' thumb, see...that ol' thumb never fails. It's all a matter of how you do it, though." He attempts the varied techniques, but to no success. No one pulls over. "When you get to 100, wake me up," Colbert quips. After countless cars pass them, she takes charge: "I'll stop a car and I won't use my thumb."
Out come the gams. Hopping off the fence, she casually walks to the side of the road and oh-so-sexily pulls up her skirt, exposing that famous shapely leg (with garter). Of course, the first approaching car screeches to a halt. While enjoying their ride, away from the dirt and dust, she gloats: "I proved once and for all that the limb is mightier than the thumb." To which he answers, "Why didn't you take off all your clothes? You could have stopped forty cars."
My friend and I didn't stop forty cars. But we stopped more than we should have. And though this wasn't depression-era Capra land, we loved the short adventure - an adventure that by then had already died out with rotary phones, communes, LSD movies and Charlene Tilton.
Hitchhiking -- I still yearn to try it again - though I'm sure I never will. But all those cars, all those personalities, all that candy, all those...Tom Neals. At 12, I hadn't yet seen the Edgar G. Ulmer noir masterpiece Detour , (starring a downtrodden, yet handsome Neal and the brilliant, hard-as-nails Ann Savage), but it would cut a deep impression on me later. Perhaps one of the most fatalist hitchhiking movies ever made (there's others, but I can't get to them all), had I viewed it that young, I would have pondered that experience. Tom Neal, a cheap hotel room, and a deadly phone cord. A ride.
I would have hitched with him. But I might not be here to talk about it. After all, as Neal wryly asks: "What kind of dames thumb rides? Sunday school teachers?" No, 12-year-olds. And, maybe, though doubtfully, one day again -- me. As long as Clark Gable's my Sal Paradise.
I was totin' my pack along the long dusty Winnemucca road...
Read more Kim Morgan at Sunset Gun .
A Driver Picks Up an Old Lady and Experiences a Ride He’ll Never Forget
A Driver Picks Up an Old Lady and Experiences a Ride He’ll Never Forget
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I often hear wise, elderly people say that time will come when all the things that used to be so important won’t be as important anymore and that only the simple pleasures in life matter. Someday we’ll learn how to value friends over schedules and love over material things.
It’s also sad to think that one day, we too will grow old and witness the ones we love die one by one. “It’s only a matter of who goes first”, some jokingly say. But for those who are left alone, I can only imagine how sad life might now be for them, especially when they had to give up things that meant so much and all that’s left to them are memories. Imagine the lives of the elderly living in nursing homes…
Kent Nerburn was once a cab driver who roamed New York City during nighttime. He’s used to hearing people’s confessions as soon as they climb into his taxi.
“We may not all live holy lives, but we live in a world alive with holy moments” -Kent Nerburn
But he was somehow enlightened about a powerful yet sad truth when he took an elderly woman as his last passenger one late night in August.
Nerburn arrived at the address where he was asked to pick up a passenger. He honked the horn and waited for the passenger to come out. When no one did, he thought whether he’d just leave or continue waiting in the cab. But he chose to park his car and knock on the apartment’s door instead.
Nerburn heard a sound from behind the closed door. It was like something heavy was being dragged on the floor. He then heard a frail voice answer, “just a minute.”
When the door opened, he saw an old woman who looked like she just came out of a 1940’s movie. He guessed she was maybe in her 80’s or 90’s. The old woman was wearing a print dress and a pillbox hat with a veil. The sound he heard came from the small, nylon suitcase she was dragging.
He scanned the apartment where the old lady came from. It looked like the place had been neglected for years. All the furniture were covered with white linen and cardboard boxes with glassware and photos were in stacked in one corner. There was nothing left hanging on the walls.
He carried the old woman’s luggage and assisted her into the cab. All the while, she kept on thanking him for his kind gesture.
“It’s nothing… I just treat my passengers the way I would want my mother to be treated”, he said.
“You’re such a good boy”, the old lady replied.
The elderly woman then gave him an address but asked to drive her through downtown instead. Puzzled by the longer route she preferred he said, “It’s not the shortest way.”
“Oh, I don’t mind. I’m in no hurry. I’m on my way to a hospice”, said the old lady.
Nerburn looked at his passenger through the rear mirror and noticed how the old lady’s eyes glistened. And in a very soft voice she added.
“I don’t have any family left. And the doctor says I don’t have very long.”
He quietly reached over the meter and shut it off. Then he asked her where she wanted to go.
She showed him places that meant dearly to her including where she used to work as an elevator operator and where she and her husband lived after they got married. The old lady also took him to the ballroom where she used to dance, but the place is now converted into a furniture shop.
He finally took her to the address she’d given him. It was a low building that resembled a convalescent home. He saw two orderlies in front as if they were already expecting her. They went up to them as soon as he pulled over. He got out and opened the trunk to get her luggage and saw that the old lady now sat on a wheelchair.
“How much do I owe you?”, she asked as she reached into her purse.
The old lady insisted, saying how he has to make a living. But Nerburn just said, “There are other passengers.”
“You gave an old woman a little moment of joy,” the old woman said. “Thank you.”
Without thinking, he bent down and gave the frail lady a tight hug. He then stood up and squeezed her hand before he turned his back and walked back towards the taxi.
She, on the other hand, was wheeled inside the hospice where she’d spend the remaining days of her life.
Nerburn did not take any other passenger during his shift. He drove aimlessly while contemplating on what could have happened if he chose to drive away that night? Or what if she had gotten an impatient driver?
It was a short bitter-sweet encounter that he’ll never forget- one that made him realize what’s important in life.
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