Topical Guide 366
Mark Dorset
Businesses: Service Stations
Work versus Play
Bert took on a second job, working evenings and Saturdays at Speedy’s Reliable Service, the garage across from the police station, on Main Street, the spot where Herb and Lorna had stopped to ask directions on the rainy night when they first arrived in Babbington more than twenty years before. This garage is, in my memory, a trim, exciting, happy place. It was the place where my mother and father and I spent our Saturdays.
It’s obvious, but I feel compelled to point it out: Speedy’s Reliable Service is a place for play in Peter’s childhood world, but a place for work in the adult world that Speedy’s employees—including Bert—inhabit. MD
Workin’ in the fillin’ station, too many tasks
Wipe the windows, check the tires, check the oil, dollar gas
Uh-uh, too much monkey business, too much monkey business
I don’t want your botheration, go away, leave me beChuck Berry, “Too Much Monkey Business”
Gadgets: Mechanical: Vending Machines
My mother would buy bottles of Coca-Cola from a machine that resembled a squat red refrigerator, and sometimes she would let me buy a scant handful of nuts or a gumball nearly too large for my mouth, from machines that stood side by side on steel poles. My mother called these machines Mr. Nuts and Miss Gumball, because they looked like a pair of busts, one male, one female. Mr. Nuts seemed strong, hard-working, and opinionated. He had a thick neck, a head of cubic stolidity, and a gaping rectangular mouth. He wore a cast-metal cap that resembled the ones workingmen wore in those days. Miss Gumball was smaller. She had a slender neck, a spherical head, and a mouth shaped in an O of surprise. Her head was filled with a riot of colored balls. If they’d been able to speak, he would have groused and grumbled, and she would have been light-hearted and witty.
See aslo: Gadgets, Electronic TG 83; TG 84
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