A Tendency Toward Making Do

David Antin is a poet who describes what he does this way: "I go to places ('have mind will travel') and I think in public." He tapes his talks, transcribes them, and edits them for publication. This excerpt is from a much longer piece called can we mean what we say. You can read the whole thing as it appears in Golden Handcuffs Review. (You can hear many of Antin's talk pieces on his Penn Sound page, and see some performed as well.)

back in the fifties i had a very eccentric car when i was living in 

in new york   i was living in greenwich village where things could

be stolen out from under your seat in a bus    and i had a car that was 

theft proof absolutely theft proof    it was an english four-seat 

convertible    also very aged    a sunbeam talbot    a very snappy little

car    but the mechanic who’d repaired it for the first time had installed 

the gearshift backwards so that when you shifted the car into first it 

went into reverse    only someone who knew the car would know this

so i figured anybody who tried to steal the car would be frightened 

to death    he would put the car into first and suddenly the car would

slam into the car parked in back of it and the car thief would panic and 

run away    and the car was never stolen and i never corrected the gear

shift    so you can see that my relationship to these machines was a

kind of respect for the idiosyncracies of age and a tendency toward 

             making do 

This part of the poem reminds me of the anything but theft-proof Datsun 210 wagon I had in Providence in the late 1980s and early 90s. It was stolen three times within one twelve-month period (always recovered). The first time, the thieves broke the ignition to start the car. I never bothered to get it fixed, just used a straight screwdriver, which I kept in the pocket on the driver's side door. Once, a friend and I headed out on a spring break drive to Tennessee. An hour from home, the Datsun dropped its entire exhaust system. We were lucky to find a muffler shop not too far away. As they finished each car, a mechanic would come out into the waiting room with the customer's keys. Sure enough, when the time came, the mechanic came out, held up the screwdriver, and asked, "Whose are these?"