Rotting hulk

It used to be an old postal truck, but had been converted to some sort of other delivery vehicle. I'm not sure what posessed dad to purchase it other than the fact that he's often a very impulsive person and it was for sale. He had plans for it that I don't know if we ever understood and were never fully realized.

For a couple years it made itself useful as a camping vehicle, because no amount of shifting, forcing or abstract thought was needed to fit all of our camping supplies in the back. While it was not being used on a camping trip, it was often used as storage for camping gear so that no substantial packing was required to go, though in practice this was never the case.

One day mom had some assignments to hand in for her CGA designation and dad had taken the car to the airport to go to a conference, so we were left with the big white cube van. We cruised all the way into Vancouver on the freeway at a top speed of 65 kilometres per hour, parked, carried out our errands and then began the journey home.

Halfway home on the freeway, a car began to honk at us, and some very concerned people attempted to get us to pull over. "We didn't want to alarm you," they said, "but there is a cat on your roof." Mom got out and stood by the side of the van. "You can come down now," she said, and Frick flew down from the roof to land on the ground, where she froze. Mom picked her up and she melted.

That day a legend was born.



After that the van became a place for the storage of miscellaneous stuff, falling further and further into disrepair. At one point they tried to sell it to a very eager ex-cocaine addict who was trying to turn his life around. The man paid a $150 deposit for it and was never heard from again.

By the time we had to move it had long since given up the ghost and would not start. It was covered in a thick coat of algae slime. You can imagine my mother's joy when dad decided to get a truck to tow this rotting hulk of a van to our new house where it has sat in our yard ever since.

As is often the case, my father will not be convinced and must be given the chance to come to his own conclusions about these things. It took him quite some time before he fell out of attachment with the van, but once he had it didn't take mom all that long to close in on the kill.

Last weekend she and I opened the thing up so that we could empty it of its contents and get it ready to meet the auto wrecker. We found that it was filled with rat shit and decided that it was suddenly a next weekend job. We put out rat bait and shut the door.

This just happened to be next weekend, so we went at it encased in rubber gloves and trashy clothes. It will be nice to get it out of the yard.