Personal Narrative: My Addiction To Aromatic Fuels

My first experience with transportation machines, like so many others, was a bicycle. Inexpensive, the only petroleum product required was lubricating oil for the chain. It was at my own peril that I neglect this small preventative action or the chain would become a useless mass of rusted junk. This lesson was hammered into my brain by my mother 's father, my boat-building grandfather. Fuel costs were a direct function of my ambition and willingness to break a sweat.

I was just twelve years old and short of crossing the rubicon into teenage life when my lifelong addiction to aromatic fuels began. The model airplanes I flew before my discovery of fuel were powered by rubber band motors wound into a quivering string of knots which turned a plastic, …show more content…
It wasn 't long before the novelty of walking behind a lawn mower, even one powered by gasoline, wore thin.

Creativity, manservant of my addiction to aromatic fuels, and his sidekick, Laziness, decided, with all the excess power available in gasoline, that I should ride rather than walk, so I figured out how to build a mower I could ride. Well, actually, I 'd figured out how to, ah, modify my dad 's mower so it would carry me and cut the grass, too.

I moved up the food chain of machines that consumed gasoline when a demented adult friend, who wanted it out of his garage and never expected me to get it running, gave me an old, broken-down, sun-faded, green Cushman Scooter. It was an ugly two-wheeled box with a simple chunk of foam covered by split and cracked black vinyl on top for a seat, two small diameter wheels, and flat tires. Inside the box was an oily chunk of rust my friend had told me was a single-cylinder air-cooled engine with a simple centrifugal clutch and chain drive. For the privilege of buying it right, free, he let me push it