Decal & Parking

Larry ordered a decal and letters for his big white baby, S. S. Tunafish. 

Weather is a thing of mystery in Colorado, all one has to do is wait a day for it to go from freezing to heat wave or vice versa.  On a mild winter’s day, he hoped into the bed of his green Ford F150 and applied the decal and letters. 

I ran into the house to grab my camera, this was his trip and I wanted to document it.  Who knows, we might start a blog. 

“Your shirt matches (the decal).” I exclaimed. 

He laughed.

She was now ready, inside and out. 

“Are you ready to practice driving her?”  He asked every few weeks when the weather was nice.

“Yeah, yeah, next week.”  I’d answer.

Next week came and went.  I was either painting a dead pet portrait or carving a linoleum tile, or ‘busy’ doing laundry, because driving practice didn’t sound appealing.

Larry caught me in-between projects. 

‘It’s now or never,’ I thought.

He showed me how to install the Andersen fifth wheel hitch inside the truck bed, then helped me hitch her up.  Larry drove her to the dirt parking lot at the Boulder County Fairgrounds.  Taking out a can of pink spray paint, my favorite color btw, he drew two parallel lines twelve feet apart as my parking space. 

I practiced driving, turning and backing up to park.  I was exhausted after several sloppy parking attempts, the campers duel wheels skipped and jumped as I turned.  I came close to smashing the back window with the front of the camper, our truck has a short-bed, five and a half feet.

“That’s a pretty good job on that last parking attempt.”  He said walking along the side of the truck to insure I didn’t take out the window.

“How am I going to park this when you’re out on the road, cycling?”  I asked.

“Don’t worry, you’ll get this down in no time.”  Larry said.

On day two, after my third attempt to back into the pink lined parking space, an elderly gentlemen whizzed across the parking lot in a golf cart and stopped to my right. 

“You can’t do that here,” he said matter of fact.  “If I allow you, then other people would do the same.  I can’t have that.”

Already frustrated at my inability to park the white monster, my face must have registered my annoyance.  My internal dialogue began, ‘What?  I brought all my children here to practice driving.  Who the hell are you anyway?’

But Larry spoke first, always able to diffuse tension, he asked, “Do you know or recommend another place we could go to?”

And the man said snidely, “NO.”  Then he zipped away, across the empty, expansive dirt parking lot toward the county building half a mile away. 

 “I guess that’s that.”  I said.

“Nah, we’ll try again another day.”  Larry said.