A pleasant walk about the neighborhood of a summer night’s wee hours is often a salutary endeavor, accompanied or solo.

On this night, amid a quiet unnatural for a city, I spied the winking eye of Mars gazing across the fruited plains of Capitol Hill. I found some scrap wood, half-inch plywood, that is just what I needed to mount a nice keyboard shelf I picked up elewhere, also as scrap because it lacked the needed mounting hardware.

On my return loop, what should I spy but a lovingly-cared-for Pontiac Tempest, the first family car I can recall. Ours was a ’67 convertible in an ice-blue flake. This was an aquamarine hardtop with what I’m assuming is a restoration job on the upholstery in cream leather.

Ours had navy-and-ice-blue vinyl upholstery that stank to high heaven of complex, probably highly toxic vynil gasses under the summer sun, something which seriously undercut the otherwise impeccable beauty of this particluar crossbreed of land yacht and muscle car.

It was an interesting sense-memory to feel the door handles and the interior window-lining brushes.

Although very similar to the car I recall, this car featured an older-looking commercial script logo; the body style was otherwise nearly identical, which means, I suspect, that the car I saw in the night was a ’65 or ’67.