When a Truck is more than Just a Car

Almost a year ago, I bought a beat up truck for going on adventures with the boys in as well as assisting with truck related practical matters (i.e., hauling stuff!). The truck was your classic ranch truck, a dented and scratched up, AC-less beauty. 

The boys loved it. As soon as I got it, they were crawling into the back and begging to go for a drive. The older two were the only ones who could ride in it, and we went camping, fishing, and on adventures that you just need a truck for. 

“Can we take the truck?” was the constant question any time an errand needed to be run. The boys would scramble up the front seat and then bail over the bench seat to the back to get to their car seats. On July Fourth, we backed the truck up to the Pfield to watch the firework show in true Texan fashion. Watching the boys’ faces light up from the fireworks while sitting in the bed of our truck on a warm summer night was one of those memories that will forever be captured like a photograph in my head.

And last month, we said goodbye to the truck. 

It didn’t take long for us to fall in love with the truck, but it also didn’t take long to see the maintenance of the truck was not going to be cheap. When it came due for inspection, the fact that truck couldn’t pass the emissions test (and was still years away from exemption) made the inevitable conclusion imminent: the truck had to go. 

It felt kind of like shooting Old Yeller. This is Texas and we have a long history of strongly identifying with trucks. But it wasn’t just the “truck thing.” In such a short amount of time the boys and I had had some great times in the truck. And more than representing my Texas spirit, it represented a version of the father I want to be.

I know -- all this because of truck? 

Sometimes the trivial things and situations are a microcosm of the greater realities of fatherhood. 

In this case, the demands and responsibilities of having a bigger family meant choosing between competing options: being fiscally responsible verse fun. The truck represented all the father/son bonding time I aspire to have, but in an unsustainable framework. 

I knew the boys were going to be sad that I was getting rid of the truck. When I told them, they asked why and I said it cost too much to try and fix it and maintain a third vehicle. The two oldest got together and then offered me all the money in their piggy banks to pay for the repair. Now I was the one who was sad. 

I let them know that was sweet, but the repair was going to cost a lot more than $15. They then offered the 2-year-old’s money as well. 

We took one last drive on the backroads, and then I sold the truck.

I didn’t take the boys with me when I sold it. As I walked away from the truck, I was reminded of a scene from The Wonder Years. Kevin’s dad sells the old family station wagon and a tow truck comes to take it away. Kevin looks down the street at the station wagon trailing behind the tow truck as Neil Young’s “Long May You Run” plays in the background. 

Like Kevin watching all his treasured childhood memories being towed away with the car, it was hard to keep the montage of good times in the truck from flooding my mind. 

It’s funny how such a silly thing as a truck can come to represent so much more. In the end, it’s never the car (or the house or the boat or whatever) that was important but the people and experiences we have involving them. 

And unlike the truck or the other material things, those memories -- they’re for keeps.