This was a video I had posted before I started the blog, but had put in "Unlisted" mode because I thought I was going to write a more detailed version. I never got around to it.
Because I could only record about 30 seconds of audio on the phone I had at the time, I had to do an abbreviated version to post on YouTube. In essence, here is the fuller story:
It happened on more than one occasion that Mom and Dad would leave us alone in the car while they took care of some unspecified business in Downtown Artesia. They would tell us they would be back in just a few minutes and under no circumstances were we to leave the car. That few minutes turned into a full hour. During that time, Loyd and I would get in the front seat and start going through the glove compartment. Once, I started playing with the levers and buttons on the steering wheel and turned on the emergency flashers. But the button got stuck and I couldn't pull it out. I tried, but it wouldn't budge. I quickly got out the owner's manual and it said that to stop the lights from flashing, I had to step on the brake. I did that and the lights did stop flashing. However, they were stopped in the "on" position. No matter how I timed it, I couldn't get the lights to stop when they were "off." (I didn't know this at the time, but the brake lights were going to stay on no matter what when I stepped on the brake.)
Like I said, this was in Downtown Artesia, where there's a lot of foot traffic. Loyd and I were afraid people would see the flashing lights and wonder what was going on. I know that the son of a teacher walked by at one point and we didn't want him to see us. He actually didn't. I'm surprised that no one seemed to notice that something unusual was going on.
Finally, Mom and Dad came back to the car. My foot had been on that brake for about 15 minutes. We told Dad we couldn't turn off the emergency flashers. He reached in and was able to pull the button out and turn them off. Mom and Dad got really mad at us for not staying in the back seat.
In recent years, Mom has apologized for leaving us in the car like that and that they should have come out to check on us once it was apparent that the business they were conducting was not going to take five minutes. She says that today, parents wouldn't do something like that. But also today, kids have video games, cell phones and tablets to keep them entertained and out of trouble. We didn't even have any comic books to read. However, an hour is definitely too long to leave a couple of kids in a car all by themselves.
But this is what gets me: To this day, I have no idea what it was they were doing. (Mom and Dad don't remember, either.) Whatever it was, it was so important that it required both of them to be there, children were not allowed, and once they were inside, neither parent was permitted to leave.
Maybe they were looking into a timeshare.
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