And needs its owner to tell it
*
Two days ago, my partner Rebecca and I met 18 friends in a small town about 40 miles from home for two days of biking, kayaking, and dining.
Our friends traveled for five hours and booked rooms at the Stone Mill Hotel. We met them in the hotel’s breakfast room, just inside the two doors you see in the photo, early on the second day. We reserved space for the night because we’d be biking all day.
I noticed the yellow convertible when we pulled our red car into a parking space across the street from the hotel. What a funky little car, I thought. So, I snapped this picture.
Early the following day, before anyone else was up, I sat at a table next to the two windows to the right of the green doors with my MacBook Air, writing a Medium story. It’s about 6:30. I know coffee and breakfast fixings will be ready soon. I hear someone in the little preparation room I had noticed the day before.
I looked up from my Mac and outside and saw the little yellow car back in its slot. Maybe its owner was the breakfast guy I noticed the day before when I snuck a banana before mounting my bike. I had seen him quietly moving around the room while our group finished breakfast.
Sure enough, when I checked the coffee carafes, there he was. I followed him back into his cubicle and asked, “Is it your yellow car?” He looked over his left shoulder and said, “It’s an old guy trying to be young.”
When he returned with the decaf carafe, I offered that I also liked his personalized license plate. He looked at me, “Are you interested in a story.”
Bobby’s story
Twenty years ago, he had purchased his first Mazda Miata, another yellow convertible. This was a few years before his first wife was diagnosed with cancer. She didn’t like the car and wouldn’t ride in it until she got very sick.
It took the cancer five years to kill her. Bobby took care of her at home. When the pain permitted, she learned to like short trips around town in the little yellow car with the wind caressing her face.
Bobby drove the little car headlong into another car two years after she died. “It was neither driver’s fault, just a crazy intersection,” he said. “Our cars were totaled, but we walked away with cuts and bruises.”
Today, Bobby is retired, lives with his second wife, and manages the hotel breakfast room for two hours every morning.
A few years ago, he bought another little yellow Miata with a license plate that honors his first wife. His second wife of 15 years, whom he met online, also doesn’t like little cars.
In case you can’t read it, the quote by Robert Louis Stevenson off Bobby’s right shoulder reads:
To be what we are and to become what we are capable of becoming is the only end in life.
*
When our group filtered into the breakfast room, Bobby enlivened our pre-biking time with a constant chatter that was absent the day before.
Yellow is the least popular color for American cars. (source) Very few Americans own sports cars and even fewer convertibles, particularly in Iowa and Minnesota.
That’s why I noticed the little yellow car.
And the owner, with a story to tell.
