Hand Me the Mitt Before You Touch That Wheel

My niece reached for the steering wheel in a Burnet Road parking lot last Saturday, and I slapped her hand away like it was 1987 and she was going for the good china.

"Mitt," I said.

She gave me the look people give you when they've lived in Austin four years and think that's a while. Then I opened the door pocket and handed her the red quilted oven mitt that has lived in my truck since roughly the second Bush administration. It has a scorch mark shaped like Florida, a cuff stiff with old Big Red, and it fits the left hand only. That's all you need. The right hand is for the gearshift, and the gearshift has its own problems.

She put it on. She drove. She did not lose a layer of palm. That afternoon I realized nobody hands this stuff down anymore, so here it is, written out. This is the August kit, the equipment you carry from roughly the Fourth of July until the first cold front, which in my experience shows up somewhere between mid-October and never.

1. The Mitt

I bought it for a quarter at a church rummage sale on Manor Road, back when church rummage sales had a card table of kitchen orphans and a lady in a visor who'd take a nickel off if you looked sad. Nobody has ever baked anything with it. It came to me already retired from the oven, and it has spent the last twenty-odd years in a truck cab doing the hardest job in Travis County.

You can buy a steering wheel cover. I've seen them, the stretchy ones with leopard print and the ones that promise to "regulate grip temperature." Those covers get as hot as the wheel and then hold the heat like a grudge. The mitt goes on, the mitt comes off, and the mitt does not pretend to be a lifestyle.

It never comes inside, and you don't wash it. Washing it would be like retuning an old guitar. It's been worn into the shape of my hand on a hot wheel, and that's the whole value.

2. The Seat Towel

This is a faded beach towel from a Port Aransas trip, with a cartoon pelican in sunglasses who has seen things. It goes across the driver's seat every time I get out, because in August the seat is not upholstery. It's a griddle.

Anybody who grew up here in shorts on a vinyl bench seat knows the noise your thighs make leaving it. Picture a Velcro strip that also screams. My generation learned to sit down in stages, like lowering ourselves into Hippie Hollow in March, except the water's on fire.

The new trucks have ventilated seats, which blow air through little holes. That's lovely, and it comes as part of a package that costs more than the first car I ever owned. I priced it once. The dealer said "comfort tier" with a straight face. The towel cost nothing, and the pelican throws in emotional support for free.

3. The Windshield Shade

Mine is a silver accordion that folds into a disk you twist with both hands like you're wringing out a sheep. It's torn along one fold and held up by both visors and pure spite. It has outlived two windshields and one marriage, and I won't say whose.

These days you can get a custom-fit shade cut to your exact make and model for about ninety bucks. They come in a sleeve. One I saw in a lot off South Lamar had a brewery logo on it. That means a person paid money to put an ad for a company on the inside of their own car, facing out, to advertise beer to a parking garage.

Mine advertises nothing. The sun hits it and gives up, mostly.

4. Buckle Technique

This isn't equipment, it's training. In August, the metal part of the seatbelt is a branding iron. You learn this once, on the soft inside of your forearm, and you carry a small rectangular scar the rest of your life like a historical marker nobody approved.

Before you leave the truck, tuck the buckle under the towel or into the shade's shadow. When you get back in, don't grab it by the metal. Pull the strap, guide it in, and click. It's the same principle as handling a cast iron skillet, a live wire, or a city council budget amendment introduced after 10 p.m.

5. The Frozen Gallon

This is a plastic milk jug filled with tap water and frozen overnight, riding in the passenger footwell. By noon it's ice water. By three it's warm water. By five it's soup you could steep tea in, and you drink it anyway, because you're an adult who made choices.

I bring it up because the current state of the art is a forty-five-dollar insulated tumbler in a color with a name like "Desert Sage" or "Coastal Fog," and the color matters to people. There's apparently a collector culture. People line up. I've watched grown professionals in a Domain parking lot treat a cup like a concert ticket. Meanwhile the jug in my footwell was free, came with milk, and has never once required a limited drop.

To be fair, the tumbler keeps ice for a day and a half. The jug keeps ice until Oltorf. Different philosophies.

6. The Tree Instinct

You can't buy this one, and they're working hard to make sure you can't use it either.

Every Austin driver over a certain age walks into a parking lot and scans for shade before scanning for a space. One live oak at the edge of a lot is worth a hundred-yard walk. I've seen men in their seventies sprint, okay, hurry, to beat a minivan to the one patch of dapple behind a dry cleaner on Airport Boulevard. That's not rudeness. That's ecology.

The trouble is that the shade keeps disappearing on purpose. A new complex goes up, the old pecans come down, and the replacement "landscape amenity" is a row of crepe myrtle saplings tied to stakes, each one throwing enough shade for a single grackle with a good attitude. Then the leasing office offers "covered parking," which is a sheet of corrugated metal over the spaces where the trees used to be, at seventy-five dollars a month. They cut down the shade and rented it back to you.

That's the whole development model in one carport.

7. The Half-Inch Crack

Leave the windows down half an inch on every side so the cab can breathe. Any more than that and you're inviting a summer thunderstorm, which will come out of a clear sky for nine minutes, soak exactly your truck, and leave. Any less and the dashboard starts making little popping sounds. I'm told those are normal. I choose to believe they're the plastic slowly confessing.

8. Things That Do Not Ride Along

Crayons. Chocolate. Lip balm, which turns into a yellow puddle shaped like the cup holder. Cassette tapes, back when it mattered, because a Joe Ely tape left on the dash in August came out sounding like it had been recorded underwater in a church. Prescription bottles. Any candle you ever liked. Canned soda, unless you want to clean Dr Pepper off a headliner, which nobody does twice.

The Handoff

My niece kept the mitt on the whole drive home, even after the wheel cooled. Either she gets it or she forgot. When she parked, she put up the shade, laid down the towel, tucked the buckle, and cracked the windows half an inch without being told.

The city keeps adding heat, and people keep adding gear. Nobody at a podium ever announced this kit. It got passed down truck to truck, a quarter mitt and a free jug at a time, by people who figured out August the way you figure out a landlord: you can't change it, so you work around it.

I told her the mitt's hers when I'm done with it. She said thanks, and then she asked if she could get a cuter one.

Absolutely not.