GREASE MONKEYS, RED LOBSTERS, & MARRIAGE [T, 6-8-21]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

GREASE MONKEYS, RED LOBSTERS, & MARRIAGE [T, 6-8-21]

 

One morning last week, in just under an hour, I went to CVS and picked up Helen’s prescript, plus the vitamin C gummies she likes, then went to Grease Monkey and got Joe and Luke to air up the tires and take off the “Change Oil Now or Die a Miserable Death” message on the dash board, and gave them marriage advice [they are 19 and 20], and then drove clear across town to Red Lobster to take Mel the rest of her tip from yesterday. More driving in one day than I did in the just-past pandemic entire year, which is the reason I didn’t need the “Change Oil Now” message. Even 1950 Chevrolets didn’t have to change oil that often.

That was our first family car, that gun-metal gray Chevrolet. We bought it half-way through my junior year in high school. I changed its oil and greased all the lube points, with a hand-held grease gun, even before I became a grease monkey myself at Moe’s, a combination grocery store and service station. I figured I was in grease monkey heaven at Moe’s, for he had a hydraulic lift to put a car up above my head, making it easy to get at the oil pan and lube nipples. On the farm, I just wiggled under the Chevy on the ground in the barn lot and accessed the oil pan and grease nipples from there. You really had to have the wiggle skills of a monkey for that.

That wasn’t where the term “grease monkey” originated, though. My father was one of the first grease monkeys, in Indianapolis, when service stations were just starting. Hydraulic hoists big enough to lift cars were just coming into being. The stations just had a hole in the ground, concrete block sides, and the mechanics drove the cars over the hole, then scrambled like monkeys down into the hole and back up to lube the car and drain the oil for the change. Thus, “grease monkeys.”

The car didn’t need an oil change, but I really needed the tires aired up, before making the long trek to Red Lobster, which was necessary because of the well-vaccinated but still-masked Mel, our waitress at Red Lobster, the day before, when we went into a restaurant to eat for the first time in 15 months, because it was our 62^nd wedding anniversary. When Mel heard that, she blurted out, “How did you stand each other for 62 years?!?” And she doesn’t even know me!

It wasn’t because of that, though, that I gave her only a 25 cent tip. We had to pay at an electronic doo-hickey on our table. We’ve never done that before. It was complicated enough even before we pulled out the gift card daughter Mary Beth gave us. Mel tried to show us how to use it, and she was so nice, and because Helen told me to over-tip her, I tried to give her a 25% tip. Only when we got home did I realize I had given her not a 25 per cent tip, but a 25 cent tip! So, I called the manager and told him to tell Mel I would be in the next day with the rest of the tip, which I ran into the building and handed to the manager and ran out again so I would not have to face Mel. I wanted her to remember me not as the electronics dummkopf, but as the suave guy who knew to marry the right woman… That’s what Helen told her when she asked how we had managed it for 62 years… “Marry the right person.” So that’s what I told Luke and Joe, too.

John Robert McFarland