Of Cars, Friends, and Time...

I spent yesterday afternoon at my friend Dan's house. Dan's another "townie" (like me) who grew up in our sleepy little 'burb and never left, and I've known Dan since high school. His dad and my mom went to high school together, and his daughter and TheBoy have been in the same class in elementary school since Kindergarten. We go back, in other words. His daughter called and invited TheBoy over to go swimming, and we headed over shortly before lunch. I had intended to drop TheBoy off and then get some stuff done around the house, and wound up staying at Dan's until dinnertime...

Dan's a car guy from a family of car guys. His dad used to build hot rods back in the day, back in the 1950s and 60s when hotrodding was all the rage (not like it ever really went out of style, of course), and Dan followed in his father's footsteps - he's a Master Mechanic, factory-trained by one of the Big Three US automakers and works in the garage at a local dealership. He's one of those guys - like og or doubletrouble - that can build pretty much anything out of practically nothing. He's also one of the nicest guys I know - real salt-of-the-earth, give-you-the-shirt-off-his-back kind of guy.

Dan had recently pulled his old pickup out of the backwoods to get rid of it. This was the first vehicle he'd ever owned - he worked for years to save the money up to buy it new, and drove it for close to 20 years. He very reluctantly retired it to the back 40 about 5 years ago, and finally gave up all pretense of restoring it (it's too far gone, plus the frame is damaged). Funniest damn thing, though - he threw a battery in it and it fired right up, even after sitting untouched for five years (he put stabilizer in the gas tank, but other than that it's five year old gas, FWIW).

We puttered around the old girl for a while, reminiscing about old times long passed. Our group of friends has been flung far and wide in the twenty years since we were wild-haired kids running in a pack, and we talked about friends who had fallen off the face of the earth - and some who are now interred in earth. I joked about how he had lectured us on not sitting on the bed rails of the truck back in the day as we looked at the rotting fenders; we laughed at the cassette tapes littering the area under the bench seat; we reached back through time and remembered the annual summertime run out to the amusement park some two hours away, entire days lost to being young and free and having a whole day with no commitments other than having a good time.

We watched our kids play together, and ruminated on the world they were inheriting. We lamented how their lives are so much more structured, so much more rigid than the world we lived in as teens and young adults. Dan's house abuts conservation land, and he has a good sized pond out back with hornpout, frogs, and the occasional muskrat. I've got five acres of woods behind me, with deer, turkey, and even the occasional coyote or fox. We grew up in a time when a boy could take off for the whole day, get nice and dirty playing in the woods, and no one would think twice about it - yet if we let our kids disappear for more than five minutes other parents would start thinking of turning us in for neglect.

We basked in the glory of times long gone, playing '80s hits on the iPod (hey, there are certain concessions to the modern age) while cooking lunch for the kids - burgers and dogs on Dan's new grill, which happens to be exactly one model up from the one we just brought home! After lunch the kids went to swim in the pool, and Dan and I sat and jawed some more while washing our trucks. I commented how interesting it was - we had his current truck, my current truck, and the truck he owned when we first met all in the same driveway. We joked about what we were going to get our sons for their first vehicles, with "Brinks truck", dumptrucks, and 1970s era station wagons getting the clear nod for sheer size and accident-survivability (this was after we had a healthy discussion about the many places in town where a young man could "get air" if he approached the intersection at the appropriate velocity...)

It was an afternoon spent in the company of good friends. Explaining it to Mrs. G. later last night, it dawned on me that - other than washing my truck - I hadn't accomplished a hell of a lot for the afternoon. Oh, sure, the kids got to play outside and run around and torture experience nature; I guess that's something right there. And yeah, I got to spend some quality time with a good friend that I don't see as often as I'd like. So there's another something right there. True, I may not have gotten the grocery shopping done as I had originally intended; but what's the time-value of a beautiful day spent with an old pal remembering good times while our kids play happily in and around the pond?

It was a very good day, indeed.

That is all.