The Mercury Tracer

By Bobby Neal Winters

Those of you who are old like me will remember the days when there were Fords, Mercuries, and Lincolns.  They were in a continuum like that.  You started out with a Ford and as you climbed the ladder you would get a Mercury and when you had climbed to the top you would get a Lincoln. I don’t think I am going to use this as a metaphor in the rest of the column, I am just trying to jog your memories a bit because they don’t make Mercuries any more and I will need you to be thinking about Mercury automobiles.

Just before Jean and I got married, Jean’s mom Janet got a brand new Mercury Tracer.  A Mercury Tracer.  See, I said it twice, and you still didn’t recognize it as a type of car.  You might’ve thought it was some special kind of glowing ammunition.

Back in the day, the Tracer was Mercury’s version of the Ford Escort.  You need to further understand that in the 1980s, the Ford Escort was not the palace on wheels that it eventually came to be.  It was still quite small, and the Mercury Tracer was as well.  It was exactly like the Escort with a somewhat nicer trim.  I drove it from here to Tulsa once and had to rub my shoulders with vaseline to get it.   It is a four-on-the floor standard transmission with no AC. (I don’t think it has AC. You’d have to turn it on to know.)  It would go from 0 to 60 in...we will tell you when it happens.

It was Janet’s car until the day she died.  

The paint is faded by the sun, and it’s battery died this winter when the polar vortex hit, but I think of it as Janet’s new car.

We had Janet’s funeral yesterday as I write this.  She was not a person to force herself on anyone.  She was not one to force her opinions on anyone. She was a modest person, with modest needs, who took care of the people around her in a modest, steady way.

The human species is a strange thing.  While we--especially in our modern world--have a tendency toward individualism, we are in fact a social animal.  We talk like we are Paul Simon “I am a Rock, I am an Island,” in truth we are John Donne “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main...”.  Our individuality is played out as being part of the group.  

I went to Rotary President Elect Training a number of years back.  There you find yourself surrounded by what I’ve come to think of as “Main Street” type people.  These are fine people.  They come at the world through a different set of metaphors than I do, so sometimes it takes me years to understand them.  What they make of me, I can only guess.  Anyway, one of the speakers posed a means of evaluating members by the question: “Are they a work horse, or are they a show horse?”

After years of mediating on this simple question, I’ve come to realize this isn’t really a scale with one end high and the other end low.  It is a classification of necessary types.  The human race needs the show horses as well as the work horses. We need those gleaming people who are bright and shiny and can make us feel good just by smiling at us, just by deigning to notice us.

But they are really very expensive and very high-maintenance so we really can’t afford many of them.

We really need more of those people who will quietly get in and do the jobs no one else really wants to do.  We need those people who will be the first one in the field to work in the morning and the last one to leave in the evening and then cook a meal and do dishes before bedtime.   

The people who get a new Lincoln every year are fine.  I admire the ones for whom a Mercury Tracer every four decades is enough.

We will miss you Janet.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )