Whipped Cream Difficulties

I’ve been threatening to tell this one for a while now. What pushed me over the edge was this (because, hey, Christmas story), and a conversation with my mother about the first “Star Wars”, which filled me with nostalgia. (Or that may have been indigestion from a combination of three cup chicken and the pills I’m taking; sometimes, I can’t tell the difference.)

(We were trying to reconstruct the circumstances around seeing “Star Wars”. My father took my sister and I to the theater at Greenspoint Mall in Houston (which was the closest good one) to see it first run. My younger brother didn’t go with us, because he was roughly 2 1/2. So the questions that came up were: what did we do with him, and when did he first see it? I always thought my dad took us as just a nice gesture, while my mother thinks she had a Tupperware party going on that night and wanted to get us out of the house.)

End of introductory digression.

One year, over the Christmas break from school, I decided I wanted to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I’m pretty sure I was in middle school at the time, and to this day I can’t explain what motivated this: perhaps I thought it had a cool title, and I may have read about it elsewhere.

Anyway, I checked it out of the school library and brought it home with me.

My father noticed I was reading it and began a somewhat vigorous interrogation. “Where did you get that? Why are you reading that?” and such. This came as something of a surprise to me; my parents were rather proud of the fact that they never restricted my reading. Indeed, my mother still brings that up to this day, and it is about 99% true¹. I couldn’t figure out why he reacted like this; I thought maybe he saw a conflict between Zen and our Christian beliefs, but he didn’t stop me from reading it.

The whole exchange just felt odd.

Here’s what I didn’t know at the time:

Back in these days, Sears, Roebuck & Company was a going concern, with stores in all the major malls. They also had what I recall as “surplus” stores, where they sold freight damaged/surplus/discontinued items. And the surplus stores used to run separate ads in the newspaper, which was also a going concern at the time.

One day leading up to Christmas, my dad saw one of those advertisements; the surplus store was selling mopeds at what he thought was a reasonable price. They weren’t exactly like this one, but the resemblance is very close.

So Dad (and I think Mom) went down to the surplus store. Where they found several other people who had also come for the advertised mopeds, and that the store had sold out of all the mopeds they had in stock.

I believe there may have been a frank and open exchange of views, possibly involving words like “bait and switch” and other consumer protection type issues. (My parents were not the kind of people who are nice to others but rude to the waitress, as Dave Barry says. However, they were also not the kind of people who let themselves be screwed over.) Dad left with a promise that the manager would see what he could do, and would give him a call. As a matter of fact, I believe the manager called while Dad was driving home, and I took the message; this also sort of nonplussed my dad, though the manager didn’t give anything away.

The end result was: the mopeds in the advertisement were at the lower end of the discontinued Sears moped line. The manager was able to get some at the top end of the line, and sold one to my Dad for the advertised price. (I’m thinking this was around $300 in late 1970’s dollars: that’s $980 in 2015 dollars.)

(And these were good mopeds. As the link above notes, they were made by Puch in Austria. You know the “German engineering” joke, right?)

Don’t ask me what I had done to deserve this, as in retrospect, even at the discontinued price, it seems extravagant for my family for Christmas at the time.

So Christmas morning comes, and I start opening my presents. I get a nice leather jacket. Well, nothing wrong with that; I could always use a nice warm jacket.

Then I get a motorcycle helmet. This time, I’m the one who is a little nonplussed, but as Robert Ruark once said about his grandfather in a different context, “he was a curious cuss and a kind of devious mover”.

(While my parents did emphasize bicycle safety, and wouldn’t let us ride to school until we could pass their safety test, we never wore bicycle helmets. When it came to the moped, though: helmet, always.)

Finally, everything under the tree is unwrapped, and Dad says there’s one more thing…and takes me out to the garage, where the moped is parked.

I don’t remember if it was then, or later, that he explained to me why he reacted the way he did when he saw me reading Zen: basically, he thought his Christmas surprise might have been spoiled, and that I was reading up on motorcycle maintenance in anticipation.

(Dad wasn’t familiar with the book, either. As Pirsig says in the front matter, “it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It’s not very factual on motorcycles, either.”)

I rode the crap out of that moped, and spent a lot of my free time reading motorcycle magazines, pretending I was Peter Egan or that I was competing in the Isle of Man TT, trying to write school assignments like Peter Egan when I wasn’t trying to write them like P. J. O’Rourke in Car and Driver (“…then he stamped on the accelerator with an expensive loafer and redlined the 308 up through the gears to a hundred miles an hour past the potato fields and abandoned burger stands…”), and just generally roaming around the neighborhood. I even hacked cafe-racer style rear-view mirrors on to it at one point. (I also got the first traffic tickets of my life, for riding an uninspected, unregistered moped without a driver’s license on the public roads. I had to to go to defensive driving, pay $50, and pick up the garbage.)

(Dad also rode the crap out of my moped for a short while. But he wanted a little more performance and bought a used 100cc Honda not too much later.)

I wish I still had it. Sadly, it was stolen out of the parking lot of my apartment and vandalized beyond repair when I moved to Austin for college.

But that is still one of the best Christmas presents ever. Next time, maybe I’ll tell the story of the K-1000.

Family members are welcome to add their two cents worth in the comments. So are former Sears moped owners.

[1] I say “99% true” so I can tell another, shorter Christmas story: my father gave me a copy of Catch-22 as a stocking stuffer one year, because he knew I was interested in WWII. My mother politely suggested to him that, perhaps, I was just a wee bit young to appreciate the book; so he put it up on a high shelf and told me if I wanted to read it, I could, and we could talk about it afterwards.
I didn’t read it until I was in my 30s.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 24th, 2015 at 3:06 pm and is filed under Books, Christmas, Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.