Saturday night oval track racing is a lot like running away to join the carnival or circus, and you get to do it every Saturday night. It has the three basic things that cavemen crave... hanging around with other cavemen, large-breasted women, and getting to spit on the ground during serious conversations.

As a kid in Pennsylvania, I'd gotten hooked on race cars just like a New York kid would get hooked on the Yankees. I always hoped some day I'd get to do it. Now, for a few summers, here I was, racing against these really young guys who were sure they couldn't die, no matter how high over the grandstand they sailed. As a pack of 24 of us would hurtle into the first turn, I, on the other hand, found myself thinking about that thermos of hot tea my wife had packed for the evening.

Buying a race car and racing was one thing. Going fast was a whole other matter. My first season, I pretty much got in everybody's way, but would find myself miraculously up front running with the leaders once in a blue moon. For me, anyway, because of all the noise and chaos and everything happening so fast, all my thinking during a race was done out loud... sort of like those people who move their lips when they read. And I remember being up there with the front runners, and yelling in my helmet, "Holy shit, these guys are going fast!"

Racing is probably the most discouraging and, at the same time, most rewarding thing I've ever done. I rolled over and hit the concrete head on going really fast during the first race of my second season, just about totalling the car. But when they finally got me out of the car, the crowd gave me a standing applause. All those years of X-Acto cuts and spilled ink... no crowd had ever given me a standing ovation.

I struggled through the summer, but on the very last race in October, I just about won it, leading all but the last five laps and ending up sixth. They stopped the race in the middle to clean up a pretty bad wreck, and while I was sitting there in the car on the backstretch, some of the guys were cheering me on through the safety fence. I lifted my visor and yelled back, "It must be the tea!"

Life is all choices, as they say, and just when I was getting the hang of the racing thing, my wife and I felt this now-or-never irresistible urge to move to sunny California. So, I sold the race car and the trailer and everything else that went with it, and California has worked out just great.

But I'm haunted by all those wonderful characters from the "carnival." How they pull me back! And, after all, the automobile is the state bird of California, and I can hear it twittering to me from right across those hills over there.