Having Fun With Smart Car

              Associating with it may not make one smarter, but it will make one use a lot less gasoline.

The entire city of Birmingham, Alabama, was plumb out of rental cars for reasons I still don't understand. (Spring Break, everyone said: though what that has to do with rental cars I'm still not sure.)

But Enterprise, the nice people who will drop you off and pick you up, came through for me. Still, they were apologetic: it is the last rental car in Birmingham, they told me and pointed, with some dismay, to the white, 2009 Smart Car in the adjacent lot. It was not the electric version. It took real gasoline. Just like a car.

At the rental place, I met my first Smart Car.

I was delighted. I've wanted to test drive one of them since I saw all the cool Smart Car colors and designs being advertised in the SF Bay Area.

I had seen these cars in Europe in the 1990s. They were then called "Swatchmobiles" and had been developed at the instigation of the Swatch Watch founder. He was aiming at the car market that included the same, young, hip, energy conscious young people who were nuts for his watches. After a partnership with Volkswagen failed, he joined up with Daimler Benz.

If you want to attract attention: this is your car. Lots of people stopped me when I was getting into or out of the Smart Car and asked me about it. How much mileage does it get? Is it fun to drive? Why did I have it? A big truck driver stopped his truck and came over to the car and had my cousin roll down the window so he could ask about it.

The Smart Car visits the central park near the library in downtown Birmingham.

Mine had an option called "smartshift® transmission," which is similar to the tiptronic transmission I once saw in a Porsche. Under the left hand side of the steering wheel, you click a deal to shift down, and on the right hand side, you click to shift up.

Since lots of the other controls are also on the steering wheel and its environs, I got the windshield wipers going quite frequently when I meant to shift up into third. But otherwise, learning to drive the thing was a snap. (Uh oh, there goes the back windshield wiper, again.)

You could park one on a sidewalk, if the police would let you--they're that small.

Going up and down hills, I won't say the Smart Car exactly zipped along. Chugged might be more like it. But on the freeway, flat out, I had no trouble dashing in and out of traffic in fifth gear.

Its one liter, three cylinder, 71-horsepower engine doesn't have much heft to move around, thank goodness. The car only weighs about 1800 pounds: one of the lightest cars on the road. Mine had a good radio and air conditioning that would blast you out of the car--though using it probably didn't help me on those hills.

The dome-like roof gave me a little more sun than I like, but it does give the car great visibility. Which is good because the car is small enough that one wouldn't want to miss seeing another, larger, vehicle, and having to test the efficacy of the plethora of airbags the Smart Car contains.

I thought the car was a bit noisy inside. But that is probably being a little picky.

We did hit a pothole, at one point, and I was afraid I might lose the car in it. But that was the City of Birmingham's fault, not the fault of the Smart Car.

Though the brand is Daimler, Mitsubishi builds the engine. The car reportedly will get about 40 miles to the gallon, though I cannot swear by that figure, because I wasn't able to drive mine enough.

Even though it sounds a bit more like an Italian motor scooter than an automobile, I liked the little car. It isn't like every other boring car on the road today. And getting 50 miles to the gallon right now is an attractive prospect. Its maximum speed is 90-mph, and I haven't gone faster than that in at least, oh, a month or two.

Don't know if I'll buy one, but I wouldn't turn one down. And it was lots of fun to test drive this unique take on the car of the future.

Not that Porsche I always wanted ... but much more efficient, and German too.



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Missed it by That Much: Another Reprieve for Pop

I don't know if my angel friend the Patron Saint of Parking stepped in or what, but my father has made a miraculous recovery from his infection and yesterday was back on his feet. It appeared he had been to Lourdes, the difference was that great.

I didn't have the heart to okay his transfer to the nursing home when they called and said they had a space in a three-bed room. I asked them to put us on the wait list for a semi-private or a private room, and that's where we are today. He's still very rickety on his feet and is always one step away from disaster at every moment. But ...

... he missed Old People Jail by that much.

When I saw him yesterday, after two straight days of being unable to get out of a chair, he was standing in his underwear, getting ready for a shower! When he saw me peeking into his room, he took his hands off his walker and did a little dance. Later he was very funny and said; "You're my granddaughter and you should not see me nekked like that."

Well you weren't naked, I told him. Then later he told me, "Hey you're not my granddaughter. You're my daughter." Seems he's coming around in mind and body.

Also, today is his 65th wedding anniversary.

In the course of this latest crisis, I was feeling mighty low about putting him in the home (even though I still haven't done it), and, rooting through some old pictures of him, I found a baby picture taken in about 1920 in Birmingham, Alabama of my Dad as a toddler.



That big smile is so familiar, and now it is back again, for however long we have. Something else: my father is known for his big feet (which he managed to pass on to me) and I want you to take a look at that photo. Look at the size of that baby's shoe!

He's again walking around on those big feet, though it is more of a shuffle now than a walk. You have to give him a lot of credit for that. It is mostly his will to live that is keeping him upright. That and a very good-sized foundation.

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The Beauty of the Tangible

My father as a toddler, in a photo taken by the Boyett Studio, 2008 Second Avenue, Birmingham, Alabama, about 1920.

While my sister was here, she swept our mother off to run some errands and I had time to sift through a box of old family photos as my father sat nearby and talked and dozed. In his mind that day, he was back in Alabama, where he was raised, and the stash of photos I found confirmed to him that his old home on Palmetto Drive, in Homewood, Alabama, was near enough for us to visit.

He talked about sneaking under his new house, when he was eight years old and the house was being built, and finding a neighbor girl had sneaked in behind him. He kissed Loula May that day, he said, though he knew he wasn't supposed to. He held up an old photo, and told me about the funny shoes he had to wear the day the photo was taken. The present is fading for Dad, but the past is very clear.

The short pants and the not-so-favorite shoes.

I wonder if generations to come will have the pleasure of holding old photos in their hands? So many of them now are saved as digital files, which is very convenient. But you can't hold a digital file between your fingers nor enjoy the tangible clues that a photo on paper provides.

Details from paper photo frames, surrounding circa 1920s photos of my father.

The old photos of Dad as a child are beautifully set in old graphic paper frames, and there are a number of them that catalogue his youth. Baby pictures, pictures of him at about age five, and then the pictures that show the growing maturity of a lively young boy and then a gangly young man.

One of them was in a frame behind glass and touching it reminded me that my grandfather Chapman was a very heavy smoker. The picture seemed obscured behind a haze and when I took the photo out to clean the glass I found it coated in a sticky layer of nicotine. My grandfather died of heart disease at the age of 57, just a few years before I was born. My father never spoke of him, until recently. Now his father's death brings tears, as if he is mourning a death that just happened.

We don't have any of these studio portraits of my mother. Her family was having a tougher time in Spokane, Washington, surviving the Great Depression and there was no extra money to spend on studio portraits of the the four Latta children. Dad's father, on the other hand, was more prosperous. Though he himself had achieved only a high school graduation certificate, he was already planning to send both his son and daughter to Auburn University, from which they both graduated.

Another photo, is one my father had taken during World War II when he was on leave from Ascension Island, at an "R and R" station in Recife, Brazil. It is a photo that was printed, as they sometimes where in those days, on a postcard. It wasn't sent that way, though, because it was not written on or postmarked. Holding it, you see the stamp of the processor, written in Portuguese on the back: "Foto Lux."

My father, on leave during World War II, in a photo taken in Brazil.

Here you see a dutiful son, away from home in a terrible war, having his picture taken on leave to send to his parents. His letter arrived and they took the photo from its envelope, and held it like a treasure. They had not seen him in two years. Carefully, they put it behind glass in a frame, where his father could see it as he paced, and smoked, and worried, and prayed that his son would come home from war safe and well.

My father dozed. I held the photo. Taken sixty-five years ago, it was now a treasure to me; for, though I will one day go to him, he will not come back to me again.

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