The top right hand drawer of my desk was jammed and wouldn’t slide open. You know the drawer I’m talking about, the convenient one you keep stuffing things into until something sticks up into the top of the desk.
I took out the drawer underneath and shook the top one while pulling on it and eventually it opened.
Now was a good opportunity to clean it out. The culprit was a plastic ruler that had been lying on some old magazines which, in turn, were tilted on a box of printer cartridges, (I’d wondered where the heck those things were) and the rest was pretty much just junk.
I emptied out the drawer and, stuck in the joint in the back, was an old 35 mm photo slide.
Those of you old enough will remember the carousel full of the small, positive pieces of film, held by rectangles of cardboard or plastic so that they end up as two-inch squares.
They were usually projected onto a screen.
They usually appeared when you were visiting someone who had just returned from a trip to the Prairies or Hawaii and provided hours of entertainment as your dinner host became your travel guide, often apologizing for the slides that had been inserted backwards or upside down.
I held this one up to the light and there I was, in 1970, 21 years old, sitting in my bright blue 1964 MG Midget.
There’s nothing like a flood of memories of those glory days when we were footloose and fancy free.
I had that car until my first child arrived.
There is no room in an MG Midget for a car seat. One year the two of us went camping to Penticton in the sports car.
The tent and sleeping bags were tied down to a rack on the trunk.
The cooler and bedding were squeezed into the trunk and clothes were jammed into the tiny space behind the seats.
It was an adventure for sure, but I can recall that the drive to Penticton is equivalent of traversing the British Isles and those cars were not made for long journeys.
On the next year’s trip to Penticton, we had a six-month-old baby boy. We made that trip in a four door sedan with a roof rack to hold all the camping gear, the trunk was jammed with two coolers, stroller, playpen and folding bassinet, and the back seat was jammed full of diaper bags and suitcases.
The glory days were gone.
Two years ago I was helping out at a car auction and I grabbed the keys to a 1966 Triumph Spitfire. I barely got into it and struggled to get out of it. You can’t go back.
But during that slide it was 50 years ago, driving through White Rock, top down, chrome spoke wheels spinning in the sun and wind in my hair.
We should all have at least one sports car in our life.
At least that’s what McGregor says.