Tilting at Windmills

Yet another automobile fad has been established over the last couple years. It is reminiscent of the "Baby on Board" craze and the more recent trend to put all abbreviations in an oval decal to mimic the European country of origin stickers. Right now, the cool thing to have on your SUV is a bunch of stickers representing your family and pets to share a little bit of who you are with the world. Well, we all assume that's what's going on. It may be that the soccer/hockey mom behind the wheel is just keeping track of her kills. You know, the way Pappy Boyington had rising sun stickers on his plane to keep track of the Japanese Zeros he shot down. It puts those stickers in a different light, especially when all the cartoonish characters look pretty happy. And there are the ones where everyone has on Mickey Mouse ears... pretty upsetting. Even more upsetting is that one of the kids in the picture below is called "Boogers."
Twenty years or so ago, our church youth club built a raft to race in the Roanoke River during the Festival in the Park festivities. A couple of the older guys were big into Rush at the time and felt compelled to name it the Rocinante from Cygnus X-1 (an expectedly over-elaborate two part science-fiction progressive rock musical miniseries). They could have been referencing Cervantes or Steinbeck, but they weren't. I guess they were referencing a reference, which works too. The "raft" was a pretty elaborate setup requiring a lot of welding. The vessel was a double-hulled monstrosity fabricated out of four or six 50 gallon drums and a bunch of angle iron. I remember it being spray painted a deep red. It was way, way, way, way too heavy. There may have been a paddlewheel involved. As they were painting the name on it I suggested they paint some small windmills on the side of Rocinante to commemorate our victories. I think they painted seven and a half on there.

The announcer for the race could not pronounce Rocinante, much to our dismay. As I recall, the boat performed pretty poorly. If it did indeed have a paddlewheel, it quickly failed to function soon after the race began - the crew members were left trying to paddle with their hands to keep it going. It may have, in fact, sunk. (I think the winning boat was made from a bunch of glued-together milk cartons.) Some of my memories are vivid, others are quite muddled and unreliable, which makes an honest telling of the story difficult and disjointed (if you hadn't already noticed). Somewhere Rocinante is rusting away. One such place, apparently, is in my mind.