Company Girls 042012

Greetings! Four hours until freedom...It has been a very long, very rocky spring, filled with hours and hours of overtime. The big push (but not the clean up) is done, and I am off from eleven today until next Wednesday. I have an unaccountable urge to channel Mel Gibson from Braveheart and yell "freedooooom!"

But I won't.

In today's small thing, Rachel Anne asks us to celebrate our history by finding an object around home that brings back a sweet memory.

For me, that object is a chunk of asphalt mounted on a paperweight.

The asphalt is a chunk of the racing surface of the Milwaukee Mile, dug up during the long-awaited resurfacing in 1995. The administration saved some of the chunks, glued them to paperweight bases along with a small plaque, "America's Legendary Oval - The Milwaukee Mile - 1995" to sell to raise money to fund the building of a small park. They vastly underestimated the market for the paperweights. I bought mine the first day of the sale; by the end of the week, all ten thousand were sold.

For almost twenty years, up until its dissolution in 2007, my mother and I were regulars at the ChampCar race at the Milwaukee Mile each June. ChampCars were the more sophisticated, faster, sleeker older brother of the rival IndyCar series. We'd spend all three days at the track, watching practices, going to driver autograph sessions, standing at the backfield fence feeling the wind as cars zipped past at better than 180 miles per hour.

At the end of the weekend, we'd go home from the race a bit sunburned, a bit gritty and smelling vaguely of burning rubber and methanol, but happy.