Flashes of Panic

When I lived in Pennsylvania, I had a roommate from Connecticut. At holidays, he would drive home, and I’d have him drop me off at Newark airport so I could fly up to Maine.

At some point, the heater core in his car started leaking. The heater core, at least in that car, is warmed by hot coolant fluid from the engine block, which is circulated through (coincidentally cooling in the process,) then piped back to the engine to suck up some more heat. When the heater core started leaking, his car reeked of antifreeze, so he took the in and out hoses of the core and short-circuited them so no fluid passed through the core. He also had no heat in the car, but that’s only a minor annoyance; I do recall getting in his car once and having him hand me a blanket.

After driving up to a wedding in New York one winter and having to scrape frost off the inside of his windshield, he finally decided to fix the heater core. Not two days later—and, I might add, the day before we were headed home for Thanksgiving—he discovered that there was a leak in his gas tank. Like many tanks, it was a stamped top and bottom welded together; it was coming apart (and leaking) at the seam. This was discovered by the town fire marshal during a fire drill at our office.

He deduced that as long as the gauge showed he had less than half a tank of gas, there were no leaks, so we had a tentative drive to the airport. But not before I had hauled out my book of Frost and recited “Fire and Ice” to him, of course.

With that in mind, consider the link “L’el” sent last night: If Robert Frost had been a software geek.

Now Playing: Riding on the Subway from The Fine Art Of Self Destruction by Jesse Malin