The Garymobile.


















This is a linocut I'm working on for Printmaking class.  Story after the jump.

Even though the print is technically incomplete, I really like it how it is.  The imperfections of line add character, just like the car my design is immortalizing.  When I was maybe 11, we had a nineteen-eighty-something Toyota Tercel just like this.  It was named "The Garymobile" after the previous owner, a family friend.  It too had its flaws: a dented bumper from when Gary backed into a snowbank, a penchant for choking the backseat inhabitants on the dusty backroads around Telkwa, and vinyl seats that either burned or froze you.  To quote the old Audio Adrenaline song, "0 to 60, sometimes."  And good luck starting it on a cold day.

But this car has become legendary in my mind, enough to dedicate several hours' work to carving its likeness out of a block of linoleum.  And that's not ONLY because I had no other ideas for the class project.  What The Garymobile had was coolness.  Riding in it was a memorable experience.  It had a manual transmission that made me feel like I was riding in a racecar as dad went through the gears.  Sometimes mom would even do little fishtails in the gravel, which would make my day.  At eleven years old, that'll make any boy's day.

As I write this, I don't even know what happened to it.  I think that car came to an unceremonious end when the cost of replacing the starter turned out to be more than the value of the whole car.  I'm probably getting it mixed up with one of our other lemons.  But the point is that the "imperfections" were what gave The Garymobile character.  

You can apply that theory to people, too.  Every person is unique, and a lot of my closest friends are slightly more unique than what you might think of as average.  (As if you could determine what an average personality would be like.)  Anyway, I'm learning that our differences are what we all have in common.

Right, that's enough hippie talk.  Anybody looking to sell a late-eighties Toyota?