Nothing But Love :: golf blogger

Secondly, I worked for a spell as a material handler and shipping and receiving clerk at a manufacturing plant. In that capacity, I loaded and unloaded all kinds of trucks with cranes and lift trucks. They trusted me with the pneumatic nail gun to build wooden boxes in which to ship stuff (And that coffin-shaped box -- that really was necessary because of the shape of the thing we were shipping -- no joke. That's my story and I'm stickin' with it.). On that job, I became acquainted with fascinating fastening devices, like black rubber bungee cords, the kind with steel hooks on both ends, which were used to hold down wooden boxes of parts ... machine parts, shear blades, and things like that.

For years, I have noticed black, rubber bungee cords, some in one piece, some with one hook missing, some ripped in two, laying alongside and on our nation's roadways.

For a long time, I was silent. I didn't mention these sightings, and they were numerous. I made the mistake of mentioning the phenomenon of black, rubber bungee cords, actually asking the people riding in the van (this was in the days we had a van and little kids) with me if they had seen "the bungee cord in the middle of the road." I remember that day particularly clearly. The bungee cord was on the white stripe dividing the two lanes on I-90 going east. I brought the bungee cord to the attention of my passengers, none of whom claim to have seen it. Of course, why would anyone notice such a thing unless familiar with the object? It was just another piece of debris on the roadway to them.

I remember that day because a joke started to make its way around circles, of which I considered myself a part. This went on for three, four, five, eight, ten years. Someone, some aspiring engineering student to be exact, one winter, bought me bungee cords as a Christmas gift (the cloth-covered, little, skinny ones that people use on their trunk lids, the cheap kind, the wrong kind -- can't even get the joke right, but what do you want for that kind of mentality, all numbers and equations atrophying an otherwise good brain); nonethelass, I laughed because I can laugh at myself.

Nobody with whom I am acquainted, to this day, will admit the existence of roadside bungee cords, let alone admit to seeing one. I will admit, though, that crossing my mind this morning on my way back from Oberlin, contemplating my mortality and whether I should get another venti, two-pump, non-fat, no-whip, extra hot Caffe Mocha from Starbucks, was the thought that maybe I was really just imagining millions of dollars of bungee cords strewn across American highways and by-ways.

So, today it ends. I jammed on my brakes, testing the limits of German automotive ingenuity, slowed from 80 miles an hour, stopped the white VW Beetle with "The Who" sticker on the back bumper, jumped out, ran back the 100 yards or so, and picked one-and-a-half black, rubber bungee cords off the cold, gray-black asphalt of the high-speed lane of U.S. Route 2, dodging two pleasant women in a white Chrysler mini-van, who both gave me the finger, and three air-horn-blasting tractor-trailer rigs.