After reading my sister’s birthday tribute to our dad, I thought I’d chip in my own version of the four-wheeler invasion story as included in a piece I wrote back in 2001:

The day Mom hung up the phone and told me, “Daddy’s bringing home a surprise for you today,” was one long day. I tried to read the Hardy Boys, I tried to work on the bow and arrow I was making, I tried to build an addition to the clubhouse in the back yard, but all I could think about was the surprise.

I was nine. Ever since we’d moved out of town I’d desperately wanted a three-wheeler, a red one, a Honda 250, to ride out our driveway to the mailbox, to make trails in the woods, to go mud bogging, to drive over to Lynn T’s house and ask if she wanted to go for a ride. I dreamed for one, countless times. Someone gave us a pedal tractor and I promptly took the extra parts off of it so it looked like a rugged off-road vehicle. I bent my little brother’s tricycle’s handlebars practicing stunt maneuvers I knew I would someday do for real, on a real three-wheeler. My bicycle was usually covered with mud and was cleaned only on the warm afternoons when I decided to try to pedal through the swimming hole over by Jimmy D’s house.

My friend Jason had a three-wheeler, one just like the kind I wanted to get. I’d gotten to ride it once, when his dad was home to watch us. I’d opened up the throttle the whole way, leaning into the back-road curves, shifting gears as though my luck was running out. It was, actually; it turned out, Jason’s dad made him ride with me.

“You went too fast,” Jason told me.

Dad didn’t like off-road vehicles, including three-wheelers. He was a high school science teacher, a Mennonite hippie, someone who later built a composting toilet in our back porch and whose garden flourished in spite of the starved West Virginia soil. For him, hunting was an excuse to spend days on end in the woods. He didn’t like that his school was too far away to ride bike to every day. When he was a boy, his hobbies were raising pigeons and bird watching.

One June day, during lunch, we heard a noise, the loud rasping of engines whining and sputtering. I dropped my fork and ran out of the house, my bare feet barely feeling the dirt path leading to the swimming hole. My brother was right behind me, and we didn’t stop until we’d reached the spot where I’d once snagged a 10-inch rainbow trout.

My heart sped. “Look at that!” I yelled to my brother. “Awesome!” Four-wheelers, three-wheelers, motor bikes—they all drove full force into the swimming hole. One four-wheeler had stalled; its driver was working on the battery connection. An older man sat on his yellow three-wheeler, watching. Another three-wheeler, its wheels churning, floated past where we were standing. The roar was deafening; my brother and I stared.

But Dad hadn’t been far behind my brother and me. With the force of all those spinning wheels he ran into the water, hitting it with all his might.

“Damn machines! Get the hell out of here! You’re ruining this place!” He picked up a two-liter Pepsi bottle from the oiled water and tossed it to the side of the creek. “Get out of here!” I’d never heard my dad swear before. The engines coughed unapologetically and kept on. Dad walked out of the water to where Jimmy D was watching.

“You want me to get out my shotgun?” Jimmy asked. Dad shook his head. The old man on the yellow three-wheeler turned to leave, and the thrilling and damned machines drove off in a cloud of racket.

My prospects of getting my own three-wheeler weren’t so good, I knew, but I hoped for one anyway.

After I had put down the Hardy Boys, and had given up on working on the bow and arrow and the clubhouse, I shuffled to where my brother sat, playing in the sandbox.

“Here, I’ll pull you in the wagon,” I said. We tore off through the woods, his little hands holding on for dear life as I flew over little ditches, skidded into puddles, and bumped over downed tree branches. My thoughts pounded, I might be getting a three-wheeler! I could just see Dad driving our old Ford Granada down our driveway with a trailer holding a brand new, red Honda.

When our cow Ellen started bawling I knew Dad must be turning off the road, and my brother and I raced back to the house. I looked for a trailer. There was none. I looked for a truck—maybe someone else would be bringing the three-wheeler; of course, we didn’t have a hitch on our car. Dad got out of the car, his backpack in one hand and a glass jar of formaldehyde with a pig fetus inside in the other.

That night we dissected the pig; it was one of my first biology lessons.

After M and I–joined for part of the time by my brother Z–sang our portion of the coffee shop gig we shared with another duo, we sat around listening to our friends sing as I drank my complimentary cappuccino that tasted like regular old coffee.

My nephew J and niece R, two of the best front-row audience members in these parts, had watched us sing from two armchairs we’d scooted off the stage, and had even given us a note during the performance to request a song (which we sang but only with much stumbling about, since I couldn’t remember how to play the guitar part).

As we sat around the table, J recycled the note paper, this time addressing it to Z: “Dear rich uncle. I am hungry. J.”

I should note that my sister and her husband have been on a spending freeze in recent weeks, and intent on not spending any money on anything unnecessary, and so the kids knew full well the futility of begging them for any of the delightful treats on display in the coffee shop.

So what could my brother do? He handed J his credit card, and he and R headed off to buy two chocolate chip scones, one for them and one for the rest of us to share.

The communal delight was overshadowed only by my sister’s elevated sense of glee when finally, a bit later, her husband broke their spending freeze and bought a strawberry smoothie to share with the kids.

“Now I can buy the cream cheese to use in this recipe,” she said as she finished copying it by hand from one of the shop’s magazines. “And go clothes shopping!”

“I can’t go into a place and not buy something,” my brother-in-law said. “It doesn’t seem right.”

And it’s not nearly so tasty, either.

With one or two of our many strokes of pen at closing today we may have moved up our moving date by thirty days.

Back when we signed the purchase agreement for our 1.731 acres and (perhaps) 1800’s-era farmhouse with Old Testament verses hanging under the mailbox, the owners asked if they could continue living in the house for sixty days beyond closing free of charge. That was okay with us, and so we wrote up a rental contract and for some reason of what origination I know nothing decided to allow them to stay for a daily fee for up to an additional month beyond the initial sixty days.

“Does this mean you need us out by May 28?” the man, the soon-to-be minister of a conservative congregation in our neighboring state and the proud father of a very recently born sixth child, emailed at one point. “We’re not sure where we’re going to move to; we may be building a house.”

“That’s right,” I replied. “We are providing the additional month to allow for your transition. We hope this is helpful.”

Even then I felt we were doing the world a favor both by giving them ample figuring out time as well as by practically forcing them to get a move on their moving; they seemed to be such mild people that without our gentle prodding their own initiative might have decided to sleep in until next autumn or spring, for all we knew.

Last night, though, I called him, genuinely concerned that maybe even letting them stay on as renters at all would be in some way violating the terms of our property insurance and bank loans, all of which were to be finalized today at closing.

“Would it be okay with you if we changed the contract from a ‘rental’ contract to an ‘extended stay’ contract?” I asked him. “It wouldn’t change substantively, but it might be more legally palatable.”

He was fine with that, so I ventured further and asked if they had any idea if they would be staying beyond the sixty days.

“We really don’t know, yet,” he said. “We have found some land we want to buy, and we have a builder, and I don’t know if we’ll be able to move in before it’s finished or what. There is a property that we might be able to rent for the time being, and I’m wondering if maybe I’m going to want to be living there so I can help with the house construction.”

“Whenever you decide to move out, we’ll move right in,” I told him. “We want to honor our commitment to you for the ninety days, but at the same time, we’re eager to move in.”

That was yesterday.

Today at closing, after the title company representative mostly successfully suppressed her surprised shock at their response to her explanation of one of the documents (“It means that you have been continuously married….Some people get divorced and then remarried, and that’s okay–” “Well, no, it’s not okay!” he interjected) and quietly accommodated their other concern (“Is this swearing? Can we just affirm?”) by crossing out the offensive language and handwriting in a correction, they took their necessary paperwork–including our “Extended Stay Contract”–and left.

And we got busy with the loan officer. My signatures and initials looked worse and worse each time I splayed them; I couldn’t help but sigh occasionally, not out of boredom but from the sheer enormity of documentation–which we soon learned included a statement that we intend to move into the property within sixty days.

I saw a ray of shining hope not lost on M, either. “The sellers would be concerned enough about this sort of thing,” M said, meaning the letter of the law, “that they will probably move out so that we can honor this requirement.”

I called the man as soon as we got home, and he promised to….er….maybe just said they would….keep that in consideration as they made their decisions.

I don’t mind that circumstances seem to favor a sooner moving date, which I very, very, very, very much want. I also don’t think that a quick move to near their building site is a bad idea for them.

But I wouldn’t be too surprised if they suspect us of being manipulative schemers–when in fact we’re not even playing a closed hand.

Yesterday shopping, we saw the most bizarre pickup–if that’s what it was–ever.

I was opening our trunk in the no parking zone right outside of the posh grocery store in a glitzy strip mall when from behind me into my periphery vision came what I at first thought was a shiny black roll-back tow truck hauling a shiny black pickup truck. I soon realized that it was all one vehicle, on top a pickup truck, on the bottom a row of big-rig fuel tanks. It circled the parking lot and again rumbled past us as I whooped and hollered for M to look. Its face was a semi tractor’s huge grill; its posterior was a head-height tailgate.

Its every move defied the economic recession.

M wondered, “What are the people in that thing thinking? That they’re really cool?”

Probably, I thought. If it were me, I would feel on top of the world.

Which I’m not, right now, feeling. My district’s superintendent has taken to emailing cautionary messages to her employees, assuring us of her concern for each and every one of us but warning of necessary salary, benefits, and even staff cuts.

And we close on our new house on Tuesday!

I try to make myself feel better by noting profound pieces of wisdom, like, “Whenever one door closes, another opens,” or, “The light you see at the end of the tunnel is the headlamp of a fast-approaching train.” You can see why I’m not really soaring these days.

Hoping to spark a socialist revolution here on the home front, I responded to the superintendent’s invitation for input from teachers about how the district can save money by writing to her:

“I’m sure you’ve been receiving countless suggestions about dealing with the budget; please accept my humble contribution to the fray! In a wage-cutting scenario, it makes most equitable sense to me not to make a flat percentage cut for everyone, but instead to make graduated cuts. For example, a person earning $10,000 could receive just a 1% cut, while a person earning $50,000 could receive a 5% cut. The ‘fairness logic’ behind this is that in a flat wage cut scenario of, say, 2%, it is more difficult for a person earning $10,000 to lose $200 (leaving $9,800) than it is for a person earning $50,000 to lose $1,000 (since they still are left with $49,000). Graduated wage cuts allow earners of lesser salaries a little more breathing room for basic necessities without stifling that same breathing room for higher earners.”

Now, you might think that my previous attempts at attracting Obama’s attention through this blog, roughly the equivalent of peeing into a networked toilet in hopes of shifting the tides of both of the U.S.’s adjacent oceans, would have taught me that my advice is best dispensed in a more fruitful manner than direction towards public leaders. I would be better off, say, just emptying my composting toilet’s contents into a corn patch on the old home place. Nevertheless, I eagerly emailed my wage cutting suggestion to the superintendent, who wrote back rather quickly and without full comprehension of run-on sentences:

“Thanks for your thoughts, C, we are working diligently to impact people as little as possible. At this time, we await the real numbers for our revenue from the state to be able to put our budget together. Have a good day.”

A good day full of worry, perhaps, about vague possibilities and hypothetical run-throughs and trying to convince myself that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

On our shopping trip yesterday, less than an hour before we saw the ludicrous truck, N did some of her own cruising around her parking lot of clothing store shiny floors, jarring to a halt whenever she approached the reflections of lights, momentarily afraid of falling through the apparently vanished tile.

But only momentarily.

Cool.