MAGAZINE

Mort's Shorts

Those black and white pictures in Drip Pan. That's Gabby Garrison, and the stovebolt is the car we featured in Hop Up 2001. We came across some of our own black and whites taken that day (Dain did the photography for the article in the book) and wanted to brag some more about the guy.

He did the Model T (above) as a clone of one he did as a teen. It's quintessential. Then he did the Chevy Touring, and before that he did a big swoopy metal roadster thing called the 'Bluebird', kinda in a 70's style reprising of the home made-customs of the thirties, forties and early fifties. He has apparently been in the shop every evening his whole life. Sound familiar, Boys?

Here is where you can end up. Gee. Think about it. In your eighties and still out in the shop. A life wasted out in the garage, doing craft, making metals merge then making them make noise, then making them do something for you.........like transporting you. Quickly. Quicker than they were intended to. And handsomer, too. The option may have been TV. Hmmmm. Some of that's OK, but the soul is best served accomplishing something...and that happens in the shop and not on the recliner.

But you can end up there, out in the damn shop, still doing what is apparently the same thing you were doing thirty years ago (now?) with the evolution...the growth......the improvement in you...... not showing ...not apparent.....to the unwashed. Gee, all over again.

'Seems that the improvement in you may just be in your head. Yeah. And if so? What's better than that? It's also at the ends of your fingers. And to some extent it may be in the iron that remains out there after finishing, using, redoing, restoring, selling, trading the stuff for 50 years. Maybe it's a collection...or one special car....or pictures of all of them on the walls of the room it all happened in.........with nothing but the tools left. That's OK too, if that's where the journey takes you. What you have here is a righteous, honorable pursuit that neighbors and some relatives may not get; it's the thing that has kept you out of their hair for 50 years, and it's the thing that has kept you from becoming an ax-murderer when the 'wheel' run off the road. That's because you have had it figured out. Part of having it figured out has been not worrying about figuring it out for the rest of them.

If you're lookin' for a way to put it in words (to yourself, 'cuz telling someone else would be braggin'- and that's a fraud-rodder deal) then consider that it's your ...individualism.

You'z an iconoclast, Bub. But don't worry about it goin' to your head.....your head won't be able to handle it....it won't have the capacity........ because it'll be too full of memories.

Hop Up Honor