#2,120 The Old Pontiac.
You know about our old red Pontiac, don’t you? I’ve talked about it a million times on this blog I’m sure, but this time of year is when Ben washes the dust off the hood, tunes it up, and we take it to Cruisin’ the Coast and around town when the weather feels nice. This week, I’m feeling especially tenderhearted toward it for some reason. On our way to the coast, I was thinking of all the hours my grandfather spent behind the wheel, of the places it took my grandparents in the 1960s, of my parents’ first date with my daddy, a young football star, behind the wheel, of leaving our wedding that cold night in Oxford with ribbons waving from the trunk, and now at 51 years old, it still carries us safely, smoothly, wherever we want to go and with more style and beauty than any of these plastic cars on the road. Old things are loved and better things. Last night after I had written my post for the day, she ran out of gas when we were about a mile away from the gas station.
Well, this is Randy.
He and his daughter pulled in right behind us as we sputtered out on fumes. He helped push the car out of the road, gave us a ride to the gas station, then insisted he drive us back and make sure we got the car cranked. There are still plenty of good people in the world. My heart felt like it could bust!
We finally made it home safely and this morning after church we gave these bums a ride home.
Then we had Sunday dinner out at my parents’ with Mammaw, whom we gave a ride home afterward. And I wonder about her memories in this car. It made me happy to ride in it with her. It canceled out the decades between us, all the history that’s occured since she was my age, riding passenger with her husband at the wheel. Today, time was fluid. We were in James Rasberry’s car with his wife, riding to town. It’s a special feeling that makes old cars and old houses the closest thing we have to a time machine.
And then, I spent the afternoon doing a house portrait that made me fall in love with masking fluid all over again. I don’t know how you could paint bricks without it!