I saw a man in the parking
lot of a school I visited and he was bent over staring at the bumper of my 1993
Ford F-150 pick-up truck.
"Nice truck," he
said.
"Gets me around."
The man sighed, shook his
head and laughed. "Just look at that bumper, solid metal." He banged
it with his knuckle. "All metal and chrome."
I nodded. "You say it
gets you around? Where to and where from?"
"Well, I said, "It
got me out of a mosquito ditch I was in."
"How'd it get in
there?"
I laughed, remembering.
"My best friend drove it into the ditch."
"What'd he think it was,
a flying horse? Any more?"
"Well, it was in a
hurricane and made it through but my neighbor across the street, well, his RV
got picked up in the air and when it came down it flattened his mom's
caddy."
He smiled. "What
else?"
"Well, let's see. My
wife gave it those racing stripes. They were made by our farm gate."
"Took it a little close,
eh?"
I nodded.
"Well I'll tell
ya," the man said, "one day you're going to thank this old gal for
saving ya when someone backs into ya."
Yesterday in the parking lot
at Publix I was remembering that funny old guy when, right then someone backed
into my F-150.
A loud grinding,
jaw-clenching crash.
The driver couldn't see out
of his back window because it was all steamed up but that didn't slow him down
any.
When I checked the damage the
score was Ford F-150 one, blind driver zero. His back end was crunched so bad
some of it fell off in the parking lot. "It wasn't my fault," he
sputtered, "I was just let out of the hospital, and now look what I've
gone and done."
The old gal, my Ford F-150
didn't have a mark on her even though my jaw was still quivering from the jolt.
Old Gal, God bless you
and Henry Ford too!
