Tigger was a black 1947 Ford pickup with cream colored trim that my father bought used when we bought the place on the Rio Grande. It had a flathead six cylinder engine that probably put out about 100 horsepower. My sister Ellen named it
Tigger after the tiger in Winnie the Poo because it bounced. Tigger the truck was tightly sprung and did not have shock absorbers. Aside from popping out of second gear at inconvenient times it was a good truck. The Mercury was a light
gray 1949 V8 with overdrive which had about 110 HP. It was our family car, and so had four doors, not cool like the one that James Dean had. When I went away to college at the University of New Mexico this was my car for sophomore and junior years.
Not cool.
This story is important to my sisters Ellen and Carolyn and to me. My father, who we called daddy was a strict disciplinarian who never made mistakes, (at least not that he or anyone else admitted). We had about 15 – 20 apple
and apricot trees on the property, which required pruning every winter. This resulted in a fairly large amount of small branches to dispose of. We loaded them into Tigger’s bed to take them to the dump. Daddy had moved the Mercury out
of the way so we could drag the prunings to the truck, so the Mercury was off to the side of our driveway. Prunings don’t weigh much so we really loaded the truck with them such that the load was higher than the cab and extended a few feet off
both sides of the bed. After this was done and the load tied down daddy got into the truck and proceeded to back it into the side of the Mercury. He had no backwards visibility, but he had parked the car there and should have looked before
backing up. No one said a word, not then or ever! The result was a big gash in the door because the truck had an angle iron bracket that had been installed to strengthen the bed. The angle iron really did a number on the door. He tried
to fix it with bondo, but the result was a mess so he ended taking the car to a body shop to have it fixed professionally. And no one ever said a word about the incident except us kids who talked about it privately for years; in fact, we still do.