Remembering the time when families piled into the station wagon after Sunday dinner just to see where the road went, long before screens and schedules took over.
A Quarter Tank of Gas and Nowhere to Be |
Remembering the time when families piled into the station wagon after Sunday dinner just to see where the road went, long before screens and schedules took over. |
|
|
News for the America we remember |
The afternoon sun always seemed to bake the vinyl seats of our Ford Country Squire to the exact temperature of a fresh pie. We had just finished Sunday dinner… pot roast, green beans, the kitchen still warm with the smell of coffee and dish soap. That was usually when my father would push his chair back from the table, fish his keys out of his front pocket, and let them jingle once in his palm. He did not say where we were going. He did not have to. We were going for a drive. The entire point of the drive was that there was no point at all. |
Back then, a gallon of gas hovered around a quarter. You could fill the tank from the loose change rattling around the glovebox and still have enough left for a cold bottle of Nehi Orange at the filling station on Route 9. There was no anxiety about the price of fuel, no schedule pulling us back by three o'clock. My mother rode up front with her elbow on the window ledge, watching the passing fields the way other women read magazines. My sister and I piled into the back, fighting for the window seats, rolling the glass down to let the rushing air tangle our hair. The little triangular vent windows whistled a high, steady note as we picked up speed on the county roads. |
My father was a quiet man during the week, worn thin by his job at the hardware supply warehouse on Birch Street. But behind the wheel on a Sunday afternoon, something in him loosened. He rested his left elbow on the door frame, steered with one hand, and used his right to point things out. He pointed at our neighbor Mr. Darnell's new fence and said one word about the craftsmanship. He pointed at a cornfield and told us what a dry June did to those stalks. He pointed at a freshly painted dairy barn, and then at a rusted Farmall tractor left at the edge of a field like something the land had swallowed partway. He had something to say about each of them, quiet and unhurried, as if the whole county were a book he had been reading for thirty years. |
We were not entertained. We were not distracted. We were simply there, the four of us in that station wagon, sharing the same slow window, the AM radio fading in and out of a Cardinals game, wrapped in the comfortable crackle of static that meant you were somewhere between towns and nobody minded. My mother rested her hand on the back of my father's seat. There were long stretches of complete silence, and they were not uncomfortable. They were full. |
|
|
|
The way you’ve been building your wealth is working against you sponsored |
|
|
In 2022, the last time the Fed made a major shift, the 60/40 portfolio had one of its worst years on record. |
Bonds collapsed, stocks fell… there was nowhere to hide. Larry Benedict saw it coming. He went 11-for-11 while most investors had no idea what hit them. He says the same pattern is setting up now — on a much bigger scale. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
No comments:
Post a Comment