Before Sunday’s Super Bowl, I took the motorbike out for a little exercise, about 150 miles’ worth.
My cousin Carol, who lives in Minnesota and is an antitrust attorney for 3M, is in Oregon on a business trip, so I rode up to Portland to visit her at my sister Deb’s house.
I think it’s safe to say Carol, a Harvard Law School graduate, inherited my share of the family’s intellect as well as her own. If memory serves, she turned in a perfect score on the LSAT or another key exam at some point in her educational career.
That right there illustrates the difference between her and me: She amasses key mental accomplishments, and I can’t even remember exactly what those accomplishments were. Oh well. Let’s see her compose a riveting blog post 365 days of the year.
Anyway, on the ride up Interstate 5, I noticed a car with a couple of mattresses strapped atop it and, speaking of intelligence, was smart enough to make sure I was not behind that vehicle.
Why? Because anytime anyone besides a professional moving company with an enclosed van hauls a mattress anywhere, it has at least a 50-50 shot at flying off. Trust me on this. At least the box spring I had to pick up off the shoulder sustained only minor scuffing damage.
Also, roughly 20 miles north of where I spotted the mattress car Sunday, I saw a mattress lying on the side of the freeway. Not from the vehicle I had seen earlier, because I had blown past it; its mishap would have to be witnessed by someone else.
In addition to the mattress gaffe I perpetrated while moving into my current home 19 years ago, I’ve had three other key transport screwups that I can remember:
– While driving down Conifer Boulevard on my way out of Corvallis following one of my years at OSU, the canopy door on my brother-in-law’s pickup flew open, leaving my album collection lying in the asphalt. Amazingly, every last recording by the Who, Jimi Hendrix, etc. survived.
– En route to the dump one afternoon a dozen or so years ago, roughly 1,000 sheets of office-type paperwork — old files from my father-in-law’s pharmacy business that he wanted not recycled but disposed of — somehow blew out of a box in the bed of my truck. That was a fun little cleanup effort; in retrospect, obviously, he or I should’ve just burned the papers.
– Still foundering in the aftermath of a rare bout of illness about a year and a half ago, I pulled away from a stoplight only to have a bunch of rolls of really heavy, awkward fencing slide road-ward slide out of my truck bed. You can read all about that sad tale here. Too painful for me to recount in detail a second time.
