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Drag Racing Down Walker Mill Road

The old Buick had personality, we all agreed to that. Perhaps it was just our way of accepting the crack in the lower left corner of the windshield, the clicky whine on ignition, and the emergency brake that had to be disengaged with a hammer. Whatever. It was a car, and in 1961 very few teenagers had cars. Really. But Dad bought himself a Ford pickup and gave me the old Buick. I was 16 and could strut-my little band of artsy-fartsy intellectual outcasts from high school society had WHEELS. And the interior of that car could hold a lot of clowns. We were set. Sorta. If we didn't think about Mom.

Mom was not like Dad, and the concept of the attraction of opposites was too mild a theory to apply to that pair. We all agreed on that, too. To be my friend, you had to sign a sworn statement not to ask questions about my parents. Dad, the outgoing, hail-fellow-well-met, vocal, opinionated Irishman was balanced on the see-saw of life by Mom, a superstitious, reticent, thrifty German who would squeeze a buffalo nickel for fertilizer before spending it. It was her superstitious nature that drove Dad to drink-Southern Comfort with ginger ale. It drove us kids crazy. But when Dad gave us that car, we could drive ourselves anywhere we wanted, so Mom sorta faded into the background where she could flip tails-up pennies and avoid the neighbor's black cat all day. We loved her anyway, in a weird, eyes-to-heaven fashion.
Mom had serious objections to Dad's decision to give me the car. "The next thing you know," she had nagged as he took a swill of the Southern Comfort concoction and lopped a big piece of blue cheese off the wedge on the cheeseboard, "she'll have that car full of kids, drag racing down Walker Mill Road."
Mom was also suspicious, and I had often received some of my best ideas for summer activities from overhearing her telling Dad what she thought I would do. Drag racing down Walker Mill Road sounded good to me.
Walker Mill Road ran behind our property, separating it from the woods that featured a creek with clear, cold water flowing under a bridge on the road. Mom always thought terrible things would happen to kids in those woods and declared them, and Walker Mill Road, off limits, which is why we went there. I walked down to Linda's house (her mother wasn't afraid of walking under ladders or open umbrellas in the house), we went into the woods and followed

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