An Illusion of Life in Control
Friday, January 18Ð
Didn't go. Planned to, even after watching the weather forecast warn of night temperatures below zero. I needed the break and would go, to hell with the cold. It's only a state of mind.
Thursday morning I reconsidered, reminded just how cold theoretical television temperatures actually are when I stuck my nose out at 6 a.m. to let EZ pee. Re-consulted the Weather Channel and saw that high temperatures for Friday were only going to be slightly above zero. Changed my mind quickly and, after driving around a bit today, and to the grocery tonight for Tilapia tenders and broccoli broth, I became confirmed in my glad decision to stay home. Cooped up inside the cabin, the stove barely keeping up against the cold, and mounds of coals to discard every day.
When one is in paradise, it doesn't seem so wonderful, even moderately routine. Paradise only becomes it when I look back and realize how grand it actually was through the softening sieve of memory. While I'm festering at the present, in what appears drear and mundane, this is surely another paradise being lived at the present for fond recollection later.
Next Tuesday a man with a nice voice--who probably holds the adult education chairmanship role at his parish, with a good marriage and 2.4 statistically polite children, is coming to take away my truck.
He called a few minutes ago from the big far away city to orchestrate worthwhile details and to verify the location of my location. I liked the sound of him; a decent man with a contracted job to do. And it's not his fault he's coming to take away my first four-wheel drive friend and place it on a cold-hearted auction block to be maltreated by an impertinent used car salesman who, with striped-vis-a-vis-plaid mentality, will unsociably sell it to them who won't know of its soul or care where it's been.
But it's my truck.
By that I mean this. I signed my name to the promise more than five years ago when life was unlike now. When the business was still buoyant and I didn't like fretting too much about the far unknowable future, and I still had children who wouldn't all fit inside a truck cab if all three of them chose to climb up inside for a weekend of custody. So I held onto the Honda for a few months, just in case.
After Nice Man's call I went outside to shake the truck loose from its snowbank and double check for personal belongings that might've been overlooked two months ago when tomorrow's event was foreseen. Discovered only a crudely re-folded Minnesota road map. Pried off the license plates, which didn't want to let go either; think I'll save one for the sake of old times. Opened the topper and tailgate too, to search for overlooked stuff. Turned around as I finished and saw EZ standing her usual truck-jumping distance, poised to run and leap up inside, showing her, "oh goodie, a pickup ride again," expression. It turned sad when I banged the gates shut.
It's her truck too.
Just as much as mine, since at age five she moved out of the shelter and came to live with me and together we grew into our six-year old truck. The first time or two we went out riding she didn't yet know how to jump up into the back of a truck and was afraid to try because she'd learned earlier in life to get yelled at and beaten badly for all of everything and much of nothing. So I lifted her in, then said, "nuts to this," and taught her that she surely could do it and not to be afraid. The first few attempts were encouraged from a high ledge, from which she could mostly step in; then I progressively raised her bravado until she learned comfort with more daring leaps.
A topper was purchased and installed, with a sliding window at the front so she could sort of be inside with me, but during extra-cold spells in winter, completely inside with me on the passenger seat, is where we both liked her to ride. She re-wove the upholstery with fresh layers of fur. I built a platform with 2x4's and 3/4 inch plywood and painted it light gray with traction sand in it. But it was too harsh, so a black rubber bed liner was purchased and precisely trimmed in. It's where she liked to snooze on long trips over and back, with her head lolling over the transom so I could look back over my shoulder and see her eyes blissfully shut, and a wet black nose twitching twelve inches from my ear.
But it really wasn't our truck, as even without a lien against it neither is life ever really mine, but just loaned over for a time of my own. As are the kids. And as decent and prudent about life as I want, many times throughout it I have nothing to do but surrender and stop flailing, and accept what has come. Sometimes what arrives is outside of my doing, sometimes it's because of myopic poor judgment. Or circumstances like uninsured medical bankruptcy when one's heart tatters and unexpectedly needs a valve job and the mechanics will not negotiate the bill of seventy-thousand plus five (including, "while we're going in anyway" a triple bypass which would cost more, should it be done in two trips).
It is a cheap truck, a Nissan small cab without tachometer or automatic transmission, which is how God meant a right truck to be. As pickup trucks go in its day ten years ago, and even more so according to pickup truck standards these days, it was a teenager's toy which teenagers now sneer at in favor of bigger and faster. It has a four cylinder motor with modest power and no attempt by designers to make it luxuriant inside. It has manual locking hubs which means, to put it into four-wheel drive I have to step down into mucky mud or slip-ish snow and walk to the front of both sides in the pounding rain or blinding blizzard and twirl a mechanism in the center of each wheel, either by hand or with a pair of Vise-grips (if it's been too long since the last time), then get back inside, pull the short gearshift lever back toward the seat until the light on the dash glows green and assures that the front wheels are engaged. Then let out the clutch, and go without trouble. Such a feeling of security and self-sufficiency, all of it an illusion of life in control.
And I liked it.
I miss my truck. It seems impossible that my old-age loved-one is going to be adulterously auctioned to somebody else. Our history of good times and bad, like EZ's vomiting all over the seatbelt mechanism, dripping down into evasive dark cracks one winter day where it froze quickly due to sub-zero temperatures and I had to open the business in five minutes, can all be irretrievably over, without credit for having lived with and cared for my chivalrous chum.
Does EZ think about the truck? Of course not. Or does she? but, being unable to speak real good English, is unable to communicate her regret over why we no longer go for drives? Or why I don't, in gleeful tone of voice, say, "okay," to her which means, "C'mon, jump up in here and we'll go out to the woods where you can jump down and streak wildly with release." Or why we no longer sit together on the tailgate and together twitch our noses in allusive spring air.
So, I am required to move on whether or not I like it. And learn that life is no more uncertain than ever. Just, now I am learning how much. Looking back on good fortunes during younger years, floods the realization that all of it was graciously awarded without much effort from me. Prosperity galloped easily despite ignorances I unwittingly wielded against it. Then when it's time to move on and the glad hand of grace withers and withdraws and tough times of self-doubt and financial difficulty move in, are those circumstances any more my doing than were the earlier days of accidental ease?
I think not. But in both cases I gave myself credit for control far outside of my doing. I am learning how much less in control I was than I thought.
Maybe, to maximize
my pickup truck experience I should've installed a gun rack and big bosomy
mudflaps and campaigned for first song-leader chairmanship at the YMCA.
Postscript: The truck was gone when I got home Tuesday afternoon. In its place on the snow: two foil-wrapped green mints wrapped in a bow.