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I was out driving the other day—on cruise control… iPod
shuffling… seat heater on.
I was doing 70 computerized, fuel-injected miles per hour
when I passed a used car place out in the country that specializes in what I
call, “rural exotics”.
You know—old American cars. Cars from before 1960.
Kaisers
Desotos. Hudsons. Studebakers. Cars that spent decades in dusty old
barns or in the box elders and weeds behind the outbuildings on some farm.
I’ve never met the guy who runs the place, but I’ve admired his
inventory from the highway for years. He always has something unusual over
there in the weeds, and this last trip he really outdid himself. He had a
19-something Model T Ford roadster.
It was rusty. The roof fabric was tattered and falling in.
It probably didn’t even run, but there it was—a Model T for sale. Probably the
only Model T for sale like that anywhere in America.
The scene was a late autumn roadside vignette—a Norman
Rockwell painting waiting to happen. Or if you threw in a couple of pheasant
roosters hunkering down in the dead November grass, maybe one of those
schmaltzy shopping mall wildlife art prints.
Schmaltzy or not, it melted my careworn, technology-jaded,
modern-car-driving heart. It was nice to be in a world where you could still
buy a Model T from a guy at the side of the road. I don’t know how else to
explain it—it was just nice.
If there were still Model T’s for sale at the side of the
road, then maybe we weren’t going to hell in a hand basket. Maybe there was
still a little old-fashioned, positive, “on-the-up-tick” American “can-do
spirit around—the spirit that built millions of Model T’s in the first place.
Maybe there was still a simple rhythm and pace to the
seasons. Maybe things would turn
out all right after all.
It was the sweetest little scene I’ve zoomed past in years.
It lasted maybe 20 seconds, then it was gone. I had a meeting to get to and
just thinking of it, the cares of the world returned.
They returned, but they weren’t quite as heavy. I’d seen a
Model T for sale at the side of the road. A Model T, for heaven’s sake. Life
was good.
