The Loose Wheel Poem by Alexandre Nodopaka

The first time I rode in a Ford Model T
or at least I think it was, was in 1947.
I never forgot the experience.

I was seven and our corpulent landlord,
Nikolai Gavrilovich, had one of those cars
he kept immaculate.

Nearly every other day he polished it the way
I did my inamoratas a bit more than a decade
later.

I always remember him with a chamois cloth.
All he allowed me to do was brush the hub caps.
He often took me on rides to visit

Alexander Alexandrovich Something who was
an ex-colonel in the army of the last Tsar.
I wasn't impressed by that but was by him always

looking sharp in his spit shined knee high black
boots and khaki uniform. He used to click his heels
another thing I learned from him, when shaking

my hand. So there was this time on the way there
we were driving maybe 25 miles an hour when
the front right wheel on the passenger side

came off loose. We knew it because it rolled faster
ahead of us. Nikolai, without batting an eye,
I think, told me not to move an inch until he

brought the car to a gentle stop. It goes to say that
his corpulence came in handy when it came to
balancing the gravity of the situation and shifting it

to the driver's side. From that point on I became
addicted to science and the laws of physics.
Especially to the laws of relativity though Einstein

was still totally unknown to me.