When I’m driving, I tend to entertain myself by reading passing road markers, advertisements, anything with letters, number or words, but especially license plates.
I play games with the numbers, I figure the prime factors, arrange the numbers chronologically and add or subtract one part of the number from the other. Sometimes I substitute letters for numbers. It’s a quiet game I play all by myself. It is kind of hard to start a conversation wit “Hey did you noticed tat one was divisible by 3, 9 and 12?” or “How interesting. If you divide the first three numbers by two, it gives the second three numbers.”
Because I am staring at the cars, people assume I see them. Sometimes I am asked, “Did you notice that neat hood ornament on that car?”
“Well, no, not exactly. I saw a license plate and a red sport car, fairly new the, umm, black wheels.”
Or “blue, bigger than our sardine can, but not as big as a funeral escort car.”
“A funeral escort car?”
“Uh hum. The boxy kind with a square front end and a roof that is part cloth and part bumpy plastic. They are painted in dark colors and the people are dressed in suits, like they are going to a funeral.”
I was informed that those were expensive cars and the people were going to work.
Oh.
I call’em as I see’em. Everybody does not see the same thing. As I looked over the church parking lot looking for someone, I met a friend.
“Did you happened to see the X’s or their car?”
She shook her head, “No. I don’t know what their car looks like, but my pre-schooler would know. He recognizes everybody’s car by the hubcaps.”
“The hubcaps?” I took a closer look.
By gum! They are different and right in a child’s line of vision.
I began to realize how unique cars look to some people when we lost our hubcaps. My husband checked for a match at a junk yard that had a long fence covered with hubcaps. “Should be one there,” I thought.
The junk yard owner didn’t even look at his vast collection before he began shaking his head, “Nope, don’t have one like that.”
“But he had so many! Why not?” I asked as we headed down the road.
I was given a lecture about all the items a car buyer must choose from when ordering a new car.
Oh, I didn’t know. I’ve never ordered a new car.
After that I decided to break my car viewing habits and learn to see the rest of the vehicle.
I tired. Small blue pickup. Big letters on the tailgate spelling out the company name. But why do most vehicles have a discreet little name hidden away on a fender somewhere? I can’t read it when I am going that fast. I tried to recognize differences in hood ornaments, but not all vehicles have them. To top it off, I discovered that different years have different looks.
Whatever happened to “you can have any kind of car you like as long as it is black and a Model T?
I’m going back to the numbers racket. It is less confusing to find the factors, least common denominators and do arithmetic configurations to find all the number from 1 to 10.