My wife has come around on the old truck.  She used the word “restore” Saturday in reference to it.  Someone had offered me $500 dollars for it.  He told me he needed transportation and I almost went along with it, in the spirit of wealth redistribution, for despite being conservative politically, I am a soft-hearted liberal personally.  She helped me decide that, for $500, I might as well keep it to haul dirt and stone and mulch. 

So I kept it.

Last week, I drove it to the dirt pile in our neighborhood, in the new part of the subdivide, where piles of dirt have been temporarily abandoned in the unbuilt part of the suburb.  No one can afford to build or buy houses right now.  We are in May and there are no dump trucks with massive tires, nor yellow backhoes tearing at the vacant lots with claws and teeth; no blasting into the limestone bedrock for poured concrete foundations.  The owners of this land, thought they would be done building last summer, but the second phase lies fallow and lots in phase one sit empty.  So sit the dirt and stone piles waiting for purpose.

I backed up to the pile and loaded the bed with a mixture of clay, farm loam, and compost–the mixture the bulldozer heaped together.  Arms sore, but pleased at having done something real for once.  I come from a family of laborers, men and women used to using their muscles to earn money.  I grew up on this diet of hard work.  I can work as hard as a German peasant, but I discovered books when I was young and that has made all the difference. 

The truck was dead.  Turn the key, add some gas.  Nothing, not the slightest quiver nor spark.  I sat in the truck as dusk turned into night and pretended that if I prayed and hoped the next turn might spark it back to life: a mechanical resurrection.

Why did I keep this stupid truck?  Why did I tell God, the evening sky, that I loved this truck.  That which we love gets taken away.

My grandfather, a Lutheran by baptism, who attends Catholic Mass on occassion and Lutheran services never, who can speak Pennsylvania Dutch and English, who holds nature and guns in some sort of religious reverence, and who regrets Germany’s failure to win WW2, came by the next day when I was at work and reattached the negative wire, which runs from the battery to the engine.  It must have come loose on the drive across rutted fields and chunks of rock used for temporary road.

On Saturday I redevoted myself to the old truck: I had the old aluminum cap removed and taken to the recycling center: $22 profit.  Here massive machines worked overtime to move, tear, and crush great heaps of steel and aluminum, rusted and tarnished.  Back home, I tore out the rubber stripping of the back cab window, which still held the teeth of broken glass from the Halloween vandals.  I powervacked the whole cab and washed the whole truck with soap, water, and rags, and sprayed it all with the hose, inside and out.  Years of grime pooled on the rubber floor covering.  A stray pumpkin seed floated in the pool. 

The kids couldn’t wait to board the cab of the steel-hulled truck.  We took a drive in the development with no cab window.  They liked it and said it was like a convertible and could we keep it like that with no window. They shimmied out of their seatbelts when we got home.  My daughter rolled the windows up and down and said she liked these types of windows and did they always used to be that way.  No we can’t keep the window like that and yes that’s how windows used to all be. 

I turned on the driveway light, opened my office windows and put a Dire Straits LP on the turntable.  I cut a window out of plastic sheeting to keep the rain out of the truck.  Lightning flashed as I stood in the truck bed and spread duct tape around the platic window.  My wife said that my process was fine.  She is a jeweler and works with a torch.  She knows far more about processes than I do. 

My truck is more than a steel boxy thing made for work rather than pleasure.  It is a living memory of when I looked forward.  Perhaps this is why men of a certain age start to rebuild old trucks and cars.  The restoration is not a necrophiliac love for a dead past, it is the persistence of what was real and cannot be undone.  The old truck is a symbol, surviving, if barely, into the new millenium.  It needs attention or it goes to the steel heap,  the dusty pit where workers tear the corpses of old cars apart to feed the desires of the new, enviromental-industrial complex.  It is a filthy place.   I am sure that the Obama-Gore people would like to see all such trucks and cars go into the fire of recycling hell.  From the old lava will arise small cars for childless couples. 

Perhaps, like supporters of guns, freespeech, veterans, and the right-to-life, middle-aged men who restore gas-guzzling cars will be classified as threats to the new regime.  Is restoring my truck a personal and a political act?  Has the radicalism of the left pushed me this far?  In this age of state control of GM, are such wild thoughts to be dismissed?  Ford has yet to take the bailout money, nor the government control: another reason to restore this truck.

Slowly, eventually, I will bring this truck back to full glory and I wil realize the dream of youth, when I wanted a Ford truck like my dad drove.  Drop in a rebuilt engine, find a replacement cab window, get rid of the rust and dents and apply a new paint job.  Maybe my friend Zapata, one of ten children from a Columbian family and who works for a division of Fiat, the company who took control of Chrysler, can help.  He has an old car sitting in his garage too.