The other day I bought myself a 1966 Chevy pickup. I can see how this truck, paired with my cowgirl boots and recently purchased Stetson hat, might suggest me a poseur. Now I live at a ranch (technically not a ranch since I don’t own livestock), and so perhaps I feel some sudden need to acquire related accoutrements to present a curated image, an illusion. It’s a fair enough argument I suppose, but really each of these ranch-related things holds deeper meaning for me, the truck in particular.
I have written endlessly of my father, a man who was physically present in my life but emotionally absent. Or, more accurately, emotionally terrifying at every turn. His absence of love has been perhaps the biggest presence in my life. I have wrestled with it ceaselessly, still wrestle with it today. And so some more stories now about that man, to explain my new truck, Big Red Junior, how it came into my life, why it is so much more than a hay-hauling device and photo-op for couples who marry at the ranch.
My father’s legacy is vast and at times all-consuming, though a combination of factors-- my getting older, his dying, endless therapy, a bazillion hours of meditation-- has tamed the beast enough that I no longer hate myself. Still, round and round I often go with the things I never fully released, which never fully released me. The worst of the legacy includes PTSD, which is with me always, leaving me hyper vigilant, anticipatory, a slave to OCD, and prone to exaggerated startle response. It also includes having wasted more years than I can count on an array of men who were far meaner to me than I realised when I was with them, coupled with a frenetic dance on my part to try to make them love me, to soften them, to prove to them I was worthy.
Too, there is my temper, a direct descendent of his temper, the thing I feared the most, and yet carried with me. I have worked so hard to temper my temper. I have made some headway. Still, I shrink in sadness and regret at the too many times I unleashed my anger on the undeserving and the deserving alike. (Though let the record reflect I still stand by some of these outbursts, so I guess I need to keep working on it.)
And then there is the mental illness, a lifetime of cyclical depression which took me down again and again and again. Did I inherit his bad brain chemistry? Are my inner battles purely a result of the external force of his rage? Does it matter?
My dedicated meditation practice has kept the depression at bay now since 2012. I still have my dark moments, but not the despair that once felled me regularly. The one time of the year that is always hardest still is December where, try as I might, it seems inevitable that I will crash at least for a few days, perhaps courtesy of SAD, or maybe just thanks to the emotional muscle memory dredging up again how my father was never more miserable and terrifying than he was at Christmastime. There is no escaping the triggers and land mines of that holiday, which fill the stores and lawns every year, beginning sometimes in September, twinkly lights and scary Santas, carols blasting through the PA systems of even the most (allegedly) secular of locations.
But my father’s legacy also includes a few gifts, the three main ones being this: a love of the ocean, an utter obsession with popular music, and an addiction to old vehicles. The beach is my favorite place. Music is my savior. And as for automobiles, I have given my father a run for the money in that passion.
My first car, a 1964 Plymouth Valiant with a slant-six engine, holes in the floorboard, duct tape and chicken wire accents, came into my possession when I bought it from my sister for $150. We were both, that car and I, 18 at the time. I went on to have a number of other classics-- a ‘67 Dodge Dart Swinger (also with a killer slant-six), a ‘63 Galaxy 500 sedan with enough chrome to rival a toaster factory, a ‘67 Volksgwagen Camper, and a ‘67 Chevy pickup.
These last two are the most important to the story of the red truck. In 1984 I was attending the University of South Florida when I met the man who would become my first abusive boyfriend. I was 20. In my family it is not uncommon to marry one’s first love and so I assumed this would be the case with us. Maybe that’s why, when we bought the camper, it didn’t even occur to me to put my name on the title, just his. When, thankfully, we broke up in 1986, he got the van, which was a total bummer, but hey, I got to live the rest of my life without him so, in some ways, fair trade.
A couple of years later I was out in the world struggling to make my living as a writer, and one successful moment found me receiving a rather large (for me) check for $1800. This I handed over to my father because, though we could not bear each other, I knew he was good at finding vehicles. I told him to locate me another VW.
Not long after, he announced he’d found just the right thing and told me I was the owner of a ‘67 Chevy pickup truck with a camper on the back, a sofa inside, and a Mack Truck bulldog soldered to the hood. Maybe he thought this was enough of an approximation of the item I’d sent him in search of. Really, I think he just fell in love with the truck and couldn’t resist.
That thing was a beast to drive, three-on-the-tree, clutch so tight my left calf was, I think, noticeably bigger than my right after I drove it for a while. I took it with me to Knoxville, where I was living by then, and roared around town in it. Though it was over twenty years old when I got it, it had only 26,000 miles on it, something mechanics scoffed at when I said so, but then-- upon taking a look at the engine-- would offer me cash on the spot. I always refused.
The following spring my father’s mother died. I got the word while waiting tables at the legendary club Ella Guru’s. That was the night I made an astonishing $129 in tips, a number I remember because it provided me just enough to drive the truck to Philly for her funeral, including gas, tolls, and replacing a cracked distributor cap. I had exactly $1 to my name when I arrived.
My father stood sentinel at the head of his mother’s casket. Most of my siblings had spouses then, and Noah’s ark style, they approached the corpse in pairs, kneeled before it. I attended the event alone and was paired with another solo sister, who at the last moment could not bear to look at our grandmother. This left my sister Kitty to pinch hit. She and I kneeled there and peered in. I saw some flowers atop the corpse, with a card reading, “From Romeo and Jiggs.” Puzzled, I asked Kitty who R&J were. When she explained they were my aunt’s dogs, I burst into a fit of the Funeral Titters and my father marched over and announced that was enough dues paying, get up and move on.
The other exchange I had with him came after he repositioned himself as casket guard. We had so little in common. “How’s the truck running?” he asked.
Sometime during this blurry visit, I decided-- perhaps to console him for the loss of his mother-- that I should give the truck to my father, knowing how much he coveted it and, no doubt, once again hoping to win his love. He liked the offer and traded me for a ‘77 Dodge station wagon, which had a Dodge ram soldered to the hood, which made pulling up alongside actual Dodge Rams very embarrassing but also sort of hilarious.
In 1994, the pickup truck returned to me. By then I was in Austin, and a single mother, and I did not have transportation beyond my feet, an antique Schwinn, and a jogger stroller a friend had given me. I don’t remember if I asked for the truck or if my father offered it. Either way, he and my mother drove it down from Jersey, then took the Greyhound back. I loved the truck and it was a burden-- lap belts only, riding on top of the gas tank with a little kid. And the linkage slipped constantly, this during a period when I had basically starved myself down to too small a size, wore mini-skirts regularly, and thus gave a show to the world every time I had to pop the hood and haul myself three-quarters into the engine to adjust things and get her going again.
Around this time, the boyfriend of a friend moved to town. He needed work and was handy and so I gave him the truck so he could start a business. By now I was married to a man so mean he made Volkswagen douche seem like Mister Rogers-- a sociopath and psychological terrorist who also got physical from time to time. I remember his astonishment that I would just give away the truck like that. But I had recently been given a beater Toyota by an artist friend, a car spray painted gold outside and red inside, like a cheap Italian restaurant. It was about as reliable and definitely safer than the truck. Shortly after, I received another donated car, a Cressida, that had previously been driven by thieves into a lake. That one ran great, save for the absence of air conditioning. Never did the terrible husband find away to wrap his head around all this car giveaway stuff, the generous spirit that pervades Austin.
Fast forward to December 2015, twenty years or more since I gave away my ‘67 Chevy, a truck that still resides in Austin, still is driven by the man I gave it to. I lost touch with him ages ago, but when I got the ranch I contacted his ex-wife to see if she would inquire if he might be interested in selling it to me. He was not.
A lot was going on in December. I was just unpacking at the ranch. I was trying, on my own, to sell my Cherrywood house. I was bouncing back and forth between the two places. And, as is always the case, as the 25th loomed closer and closer, inner turmoil and deep sadness seized me. Though time has clearly shown me I can keep full blown depression at bay with meditation, still when the holiday sadness grabs me by the throat and gets up in my grill, I panic. Will this be the year depression returns? I feel a desperate need to cry and an equally desperate desire not to, lest I be unable to stop.
This latter fear relates back to another marriage to another mean man, a hoarder like my father, a narcissist like my father, a man who shared my father’s birthday and who was old enough to have fathered me, though as I am utterly blind to red flags, I saw none of these as warning signs. When he left me, before I understood what a gift that was, I cried for months. Every. Single. Day. It would not stop. I did not know the human body could produce so many tears and not just shrivel up and blow away. I was as close to a genuine mental breakdown as I could be then. I sat in the backyard every morning pounding coffee and chain smoking and perseverating on how I had been left, how this was the most horrible thing in the world, how I could not comprehend why this mean man could not love me. It was awful beyond awful. It was horrifying.
And then one morning, not long before the divorce was about to go through, I was in the backyard with my coffee and my fags, still obsessing, when I heard for a fleeting second a bird singing. It was so very very brief. But it was clear and it was beautiful and I had this momentary awareness that I was, right then, IN THAT MOMENT WITH THE BIRDSONG. I slipped back into my sadness almost immediately. It took years to really get over that divorce. But from that moment on to this moment right now anytime I hear a bird singing it fills my heart and reassures me that I am okay, even if in that moment I’m not feeling terribly okay.
So there I was, I think it was Christmas Eve proper, and I took the dogs over to the old Cherrywood neighborhood for a walk, my heart heavy, a heaviness exacerbated by frustration with myself for not being able to just get past this Christmas shit because I am in my sixth decade now and enough really is enough. The pull to cry was there. The push to not cry was there. Then I looked on my phone and I saw this picture and I wept. It was a picture of a little baby tucked inside a Christmas stocking I had knitted. The baby’s grandmother was a Facebook friend, and had written the previous summer to say she knew I hated Christmas but she had a grandbaby on the way, and she was dying, and the chemo and the pain prevented her from making a stocking for this imminent baby as she had made for his siblings. Would I knit the stocking? I agreed to the task and here, now, was the result.
That picture was a gift on so many levels. Most immediately, it allowed me to cry. It was then, as I was crying and meandering with the dogs, that for the ten millionth time, I passed the bright red ‘66 Chevy pickup my neighbors had parked out front with a For Sale sign months before. So many times I peeked inside. I lusted for it. I just could not get it out of my mind. But I also knew it was beyond my means. And besides, surely someone would come along and scoop it up before me even if I were to attempt a plan to buy it.
That day, my neighbor was outside. Though we’d been neighbors for ten years, I’d not met him before. Mostly when I walk the dogs I am lost in thought or an audiobook or talking on my phone. Now we stopped and chatted and I told him how much I loved his truck. He told me how much he loved it, too. I explained how I was leaving the neighborhood, hoping to sell my house not just to anyone, but to someone who would love it as I had. He felt the same way about his truck. It was so important that he hand it off to a passionate Chevy truck person. I told him if it was still around when my house sold, I would buy it. He told me he would hold it for me.
At the end of our talk, we introduced ourselves by name. When he told me his last name, I hardly believed him. Birdsong he said. Easy to remember.
Easy to remember? Impossible to forget. That interaction provided a crucial boost to push me through the rest of the month without falling apart. Not just the promise of a truck. But the arrival, once again, of birdsong when again I was feeling so low. And the promise of some of the positive legacy of my father.
I closed on my house on Friday 12 February. Twenty-six hours later, I headed back over to my old neighborhood, back to the promise of Birdsong, back to the truck. He gave me manuals and spare parts and advice and insight into all of the little quirks particular to this truck-- how I love the little quirks of old cars, how to start them you must engage in some intricate dance of lifting your butt off the seat three inches whilst chanting six Hail Mary’s in rapid succession, or rubbing the dashboard whilst reciting Come on baby, come on come on come on.
I took the truck on a little jaunt through Austin before taking it to the ranch. In less than an hour I got many smiles and approving nods and compliments. They really don’t make them like they used to, and it is an added joy to see and feel the joy this truck brings to others, too.
Now she’s home, in the yard. She’ll be my Sunday-go-to-meeting ride, my showpiece, not my daily transport. Mostly she will sit outside the door, surprising me anew each morning, as I step out and see her, and know she’s mine, and just look at her and love her and listen to the birdsong.
