It has to do with Love

There are many kinds of love. A love for a person, or a love in a marriage. Love can come from all forms, to cherish something or the love of it, love has no categories. It could be involved almost anywhere, any place any time. A lot of people or a person has a great love for a pet it could be an animal or a bird in a cage. They care for the pet as long as they have it and if it was gone from their home or out of their sight they would miss it.

Some people have a love for a career. They work trying to secure a future and along the way they overcome many obstacles. The lists of reasons why a person loves at different times I think are boundless. Love has no boundaries.

People who have homes which they live in and bring up their children in love their home for the amount of sacrifice and work they put into making a home a happy home, and this eventually they get to like it over the years. There is also love fore sports which is big these days, and sometimes a huge amount of money and time is involved for the individuals. The list of love for something or someone goes on and on. Love can be found on a street, in a park, in an arena, or in a vehicle. It has no restrictions.

The love that I am going to choose to write about may be a little different than the usual kind of love. But to me it meant quite a lot and I got a bit of satisfaction for one thing from it.

As I exited the bus from Hastings street turnoff in the downtown area of town, I was walking along and suddenly I picked up a fresh scent that filled my nostrils. The sent reminded me of a long time ago in the early 1960’s when my brother had purchased a new car. The scent from the interior of the new car upholstery plus a deodorizing scent tag on the mirror was the reminiscence. I quickly came to my senses, (which was a good thing, otherwise I would have gotten run over) and thought that the car, a 1962 Chevrolet Impala, was quite a car.  

The reason I liked the car so much was that I had the opportunity to drive it from time to time, and that was a lot of times.

When my oldest brother arrived from the mainland of Canada in 1962 with this new car, he had driven across the country, probably 2500 miles or so, because he had working holidays coming to him so he took the car home to Newfoundland. I must remind you that a lot of the Trans Canada highway in Newfoundland was unpaved, so you had to get used to fixing flat tires due to the sharp crushed stone the highways department used to cover the roads.  

I was still going to school in grade 10 and had my driver’s license. My brother and I would have a good time telling about past experiences in our lives, as he drove along the highway telling us “this is the way it is.” In order for us to have a good car or money to spend, you’ve got to work at it, maintaining it. Get good grades, and go to technical trade school to learn a trade or job. His career happened to be a wireless radio operator on a aeradio station. His company could send him any where in Canada or on a coast guard ship at sea or an ice observer observing ice flows in a Aurora aircraft or out over the Labrador sea.  

While at home, he used to tell me often to go for a ride in the car. I used to take my time at the wheel, and was very particular in the way I used to drive, as I was driving a new car for the first time. And that’s what I enjoyed, the freedom you get from the satisfaction as you drive along. The colour of the car was greyish blue or sort of egg blue, the colour of a robin’s egg. The colour on the inside of the car was greyish blue and it had plaid blue coloured seat covers. It had steel and aluminum plating on the outside. Sometimes I would pick up my brother’s girlfriend, who lived in a settlement a few miles from where we did. She would have new fancy clothes and a new hairdo each time she arrived at the house. My brother and I used to listen to his tape recorder machine he had with all the tapes of music he had of the 1950’s and early 1960s. He would continually play hit after hit. It mostly was rock and roll music with a lot of instrumental music.  

My other brothers were younger at the time and weren’t very old. Sometimes, we would take a lot of them for a ride. Whether it would be a short or long ride, they would enjoy every minute of it. The car had a limousine type style, kind of long. We used to pick up people we knew from around the settlement for a chat. By this type about everyone knew someone at our house was at home with a new car. And it took only a short time to figure out who the person was once the word got around. From the ordinary short drives, occasionally we would go to the city of St. John’s, which was 40 miles away. That was kind of interesting, shopping in the city.  

One time my father was working at a crown lands survey camp, that is he was working for the government at the time. My brother and I plus a couple of friends he had known from the community, drove on a Sunday summer afternoon to my father’s camp as they were camped near the Trans Canada highway and that was where they were working. They were delighted to see all of us and we had some supper and they told us lots of stories before we left to go back home. We would not be hungry for a long time after leaving their camp as they gave us lots of home-cooked food.  

After the month was over, my brother had to go back to his job on the mainland, I missed the car very much and had to manage till the next year when another brother had managed to drive home another new car on his holidays.  

This time the car was quite a heavy type of car and was built for luxury. It was a 1963 Ford Galaxy 500 XL and the colour was reddish-brown, maroon was the colour. This car was more for power, and I got to like it even more than the Chevrolet Impala 1962. We were all over the place in it in 1963 and even when he returned to the mainland in it, I visited him and got a lot of rides in it also. Of course we would stay in hotels as we drove across the country. The car was the forerunner of the cars that were built for power.

I really had a love for those two cars, especially in that era of time in the 1960’s when there was a lot going on around the world. Both in the entertainment field, and also in government, and more money was becoming available financially on the national scene. It was like the saying in the song “love is all around.” At a time when people didn’t have much money and felt poor and knew the value of money, it felt sort of nice to be riding around in two new cars at different times and to be in something that was considered luxury.