Tuesday, July 07, 2009
The Pudgy Guy on the Vespa
When I was a young and callow fellow, my great friend Ian had a house in Tinkerville, New Hampshire. Ian was, as you might say, rich (and handsome and funny) for all the good it did him.
The property was dubbed Uncle Veeny's Farm, named for Uncle Veeny's Road in Hyannis, Massachusetts, where Ian and I once found ourselves on one of our quests.
We would oftentimes sit on the front porch at Uncle Veeny's just up the road from Downtown Tnkerville, and regular as clockwork, we would see what we called the drag race, a souped-up pickup truck tearing up the road followed closely by a late-model sedan and then, five or six minutes later, a pudgy guy on a Vespa.
These must have been three young guys off to some teenage destination. Surely they weren't racing, given the disparity in horsepower, but you never know.
Now, forty years later, I'm the pudgy guy on the Vespa, but in a weird way, I'm a vision of the future.
I just rolled over 1,000 miles on my Sym Taiwanese scooter Camilla, at 100 miles per gallon, saving umpteen bazillion gallons of gas, even though it has rained almost every day this month.
And far from being a sacrifice, it has been a real pleasure, even in the rain. I can't see why anyone would choose to ride in an enclosed vehicle when they have the option of scooting.
I commute to work in South Deerfield, Massachusetts, and in South Deerfield, as in many communities in America, when people purchase a new vehicle, they calculate the horsepower needed to transport the weight of the people and the cargo they normally carry, and then they multiply by 320,000, just to be on the safe side.
Comparatively tiny people clamber up ladders to get into their giant pickup trucks.
But scooting is clearly the wave of the future. I can tell because so many people wave at me.
I'm sure a lot of people think, "Gee I could get to work on a scooter, but what if it rains?" Then I putter by in my yellow rainsuit with a big smile on my face. Camilla and I are indomitable.
We're the wave of the future. ¶ 8:58 PM
The property was dubbed Uncle Veeny's Farm, named for Uncle Veeny's Road in Hyannis, Massachusetts, where Ian and I once found ourselves on one of our quests.
We would oftentimes sit on the front porch at Uncle Veeny's just up the road from Downtown Tnkerville, and regular as clockwork, we would see what we called the drag race, a souped-up pickup truck tearing up the road followed closely by a late-model sedan and then, five or six minutes later, a pudgy guy on a Vespa.
These must have been three young guys off to some teenage destination. Surely they weren't racing, given the disparity in horsepower, but you never know.
Now, forty years later, I'm the pudgy guy on the Vespa, but in a weird way, I'm a vision of the future.
I just rolled over 1,000 miles on my Sym Taiwanese scooter Camilla, at 100 miles per gallon, saving umpteen bazillion gallons of gas, even though it has rained almost every day this month.
And far from being a sacrifice, it has been a real pleasure, even in the rain. I can't see why anyone would choose to ride in an enclosed vehicle when they have the option of scooting.
I commute to work in South Deerfield, Massachusetts, and in South Deerfield, as in many communities in America, when people purchase a new vehicle, they calculate the horsepower needed to transport the weight of the people and the cargo they normally carry, and then they multiply by 320,000, just to be on the safe side.
Comparatively tiny people clamber up ladders to get into their giant pickup trucks.
But scooting is clearly the wave of the future. I can tell because so many people wave at me.
I'm sure a lot of people think, "Gee I could get to work on a scooter, but what if it rains?" Then I putter by in my yellow rainsuit with a big smile on my face. Camilla and I are indomitable.
We're the wave of the future. ¶ 8:58 PM
