Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (Part 3 of 3)

I found an old cardboard drum which would do for where the engine would go. I really wanted a nice new shiny garbage can, but we didn’t have one. I built benches to sit on and I also nailed some sticks on the side to act as the gear shift and break levers. I built my car in the carport and when it was done, I needed to lift it onto my wagon. I thought this part was going to be easy, but it wasn’t. The whole car probably weighed twice as much as I did, but I was determined to drive it around on my wagon so I devised a way to do it.
I threw a rope up and over the main roof beam of our house, which jutted out into the carport. I tied one end on to the front of Chitty and pulled the other end. The car started to go up. After I got it up about five feet off the ground, I tied the rope to one of the support beams of the carport so I was free to drive the wagon under my car. Then I let Chitty down. I poked the handle of the wagon up
through the floor of the car so I could use it for a steering wheel. My procedure worked pretty well. I would repeat the process several times when I needed to bring the car in for repairs. Once, however, the rope slipped and the front of the car came crashing down on my foot. I still have a scar from the nails that happened to be poking out from the front of my car. (There were about a thousand rusty nails protruding through the bottom.) Whenever I look at the scar, I don’t remember the pain. I just think about how incredibly neat my Chitty Chitty Bang Bang car was.
It was my goal to finish the car so I could drive it around town, not with a little red wagon underneath, but with a real engine and real tires. I was able to find some old bicycles rims and tires, but that was all. After the first few days, I took off these wheels anyway since they kept falling off.
I was quite a novelty in my neighborhood. My friends would push me around in the car and we would spend hours just hammering more nails into the floor, or fixing up the benches with old bedspreads to make them look nicer. It never did look like the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in the movie. It looked more like the Beverly Hillbillies’ truck. But I loved it.
Imagination is a wonderful aspect of the brain. Most of the time my car didn’t have wheels, it was made of wood with a little red wagon under it, and its gears shift was a stick nailed to the side. But when I played on my car, in the reality of my mind, it was a real, beautiful, and magical car.

This picture is of a replica of my original Chitty Chitty Bang Bang that I built a few years later. Notice it has a shiny new garbage can!


Coming Tomorrow: The Company Christmas Party