Sorrelly part 1

I have the feeling I've told some of these stories before on my blog.  I can't remember and don't feel like searching back to check.  I repeat myself in real life too...

Today I will tell you about a car.  A car named Sorrelly.  My dad names stuff, particularly cars.  Sorrelly was a pinkish brown color, like a sorrel horse.  Sorrelly belonged to a cowboy named Blackie.  (His real name was Bill Black but everyone called him Blackie.)  Blackie, as the story goes, went into town in Sorrelly and the police were after him (for reasons unknown to me).  Blackie drove the car home and had the cook paint the car the sorrel color so he could be incognito.  Is this a true story?  I don't know.  But why else would a cowboy paint his car pink?

Sorrelly was a '69 Chevy Impala.  Big.  Also, Sorrelly wasn't working.  It had broken down in the Owyhee desert on the Nevada-Idaho border.  My dad, who is good with cars, made a trade with Blackie.  He offered him a pair of old spurs and a stitching horse in exchange for the car.  The deal was also made that if Blackie could get the car started, my dad would throw in a pair of shotgun chaps too, as long as my dad got everything in the trunk.

My dad would have traded for just the stuff in the trunk it turned out but he got the car too.

He drove it awhile and then parked it.  Years later, when Marianne was 16 and had her license, she drove Sorrelly.  I, of course, was the co-pilot, shotgun, by her side.  The radio didn't work so we sang.  A lot.  Marianne had dozens and dozens of songs memorized from the country radio station that we got at home (it was the only radio station we could get).  She taught Olivia and me the songs.  We also practiced memorizing scriptures for seminary and we quizzed each other on our homework.  Marianne would apply her make-up while she drove, having me grab the wheel when she did the mascara.  Because you know, safety first.

It was the farthest thing from a "cool" car that we could have.  On the upside, we could fit four girls across the front bench seat and it must be said, it was a fast car.

This was meant to be a picture of the sunset and Sorrelly happened to be in the shot.  Photo bombing before it was a thing...

We had a few crashes in the car (one killing the goldfish) while Marianne was driving (more on that tomorrow).  When Marianne went to college it was my turn to drive Sorrelly.  I drove my cousins Jake and Catherine to seminary and once, on the first snowy day of the winter, I slid off the road.  I went barreling through a barbed wire fence which scraped the vinyl roof and when I hit a fence post, knocked the side mirror off, but that was all.  My dad repaired the fence and reattached the mirror.

My high school best friend Marie and me with Sorrelly parked at the school. 

The worst part about Sorrelly was that it broke down.  If I was home, I'd park over by my dad's shop and tell him there was a suspicious sound.  At school, I would call and report something and he'd tell me helpful things like, "Wait until football practice is over and get one of the boys to blah-blah-blah.  He would say something in the foreign language of car repair and I'd try to remember so I could get a boy to help me.  In our little town, most all the boys could speak the car repair language.  On really bad days I'd have to go to Big A Auto Parts to get a part for the car.  My dad would call the school and have me call him back.  (Those days of antiquity, pre-cell phones...)  He would ask me to go to Big A.  I would protest like I was being given a prison sentence.  He'd say, "Don't worry.  I called.  They are expecting you.  They know what part it is."

They never did.

They would hem and haw and scratch their heads and call back and forth.  "Did Mark Dahl talk to you?"

"Nope, did he talk to you?"

"Nope."

More head scratching.

Finally they would track down the person that had talked to my dad.  Then there would be a series of questions back and forth and head scratching and wandering up and down aisles in the store while they tried to decipher what my dad had requested.

It was pure torture.

My physics teacher called Sorrelly Dino, as in Dino the Dinosaur.  He'd teach us about things like leverage and then we'd all troop outside.  He have one of the boys get a rope from his truck (the boys mostly had trucks and ropes in the trucks). Then he had us tie the rope to Sorrelly, wrap the rope around the flagpole and then pull in different directions to make Sorrelly move.  My teacher teased me about the big old car but I didn't really mind.  For one thing, it was a car so I wasn't complaining.  For another thing, with our proclivity for crashing, it was a nice safe car too.  Sturdy.

Mostly, it was this that made me love the car:  I would give Olivia and her friends, twins Sonia and Georgia rides home from school.

We'd sing all the songs Marianne taught us. 

It was the sister car.  I wouldn't trade anything for the hours I spent in Sorrelly with my sisters.  I'm not sure we would have had as much fun in a newer sleek little car.