I first saw my truck on my birthday this past October, eating at the Route 66 Restaurant on Prince Street in Lancaster, sitting on the corner across the street, a hand-printed sign in the window, “For Sale”, eating a Nashville Hot Chicken Sandwich with my wife Wendy and my mom Nancy.

It felt like a moment. 

As we left the restaurant, I steered us to that corner, two extra street crossings away. My truck was a 1994 Ford Ranger, some shade of red, a bit of paint peeling here and there. The interior was crowded with boxes and a sagging ceiling that looked to be indoor-outdoor carpet stapled to a piece of cardboard, held up with duct tape loops. 

I’d been looking for a truck, somewhat. We’d given our Honda Pilot to our son Oliver who had it in Seattle. That left us with two cars. Two cars is plenty, but when our son Theodore came home from school we’d have three drivers and two cars. A problem.

The bigger problem, though, was that I couldn’t haul stuff.  With our two cars–a BMW and a Chevy Bolt EV–there was no way to bring a sheet of plywood home, or a cord of firewood, or  take a mattress to the dump, or drive a winning little league team to Dairy Queen after winning the league championship.

Ok, I certainly wouldn’t use it to transport children, but I rode in many, many truck beds growing up in the 1970’s holding my glove in one hand and my hat in the other. 

The good old days were demonstrably more dangerous.

Wendy took one look at the truck and said, “Um, no.” 

As we drove home I thought about how much my dad would have loved that Ranger. He loved trucks. And vans. And older cars. Dad had a penchant for finding cars that needed a lot of TLC. 

A lot. 

Dad always knew a guy who had a vehicle for sale. This was not the same guy who sold him the last car, it’s gas tank full of sand for some reason. Or the guy before, a bird’s nest in the rear hatch entered through a small rust hole next to the license plate.

Clearly, this Ranger was a car like that. A car to stay away from. A vehicle destined to let me down at the worst time.

So, two days later I stopped at the auto shop and asked about the truck. 

“Let me get Bill. He knows about that.”

I stood in the shop’s small waiting room, an oily desk cluttered with stacks of yellowed papers in cardboard boxes, spark plug containers in a rickety pile next to a cash register, black vinyl chairs repaired with gray duct tape. 

Bill came out, grabbed some keys off the counter, and we walked to the truck.

“We’re selling it for a customer,” he said. “He’s asking $2000 but I’ll bet he’ll take $1500.”

I took a test drive in the parking lot across the street. The shifter knob rattled in my hand as I let up on the clutch, the engine racing as I bounced forward.

I had to lower my head to keep it from touching the ceiling as I took a short lap then finally tested the car in reverse. Literally the shortest test drive one could take.

“Its inspection is good for the next four months,” Bill said. “It’s got new tires and new brakes too.”

After I gave Bill my number to pass on to the seller, I drove home imagining myself hauling stuff. Lots of stuff.

David called later that day, telling me he’d owned the car for about a year, that it had 226,000 miles on it, that it was a great truck for him, that he’d kept it in a garage the whole time. That he was asking $1500. 

He accepted my offer of $1400 and we agreed to meet the next morning at the shop. “Bill can take care of everything then,” he said. “He’s got his dealer’s license.”

Wendy dropped me off the next morning at 8:00 am. The shop had just opened and I sat in the lobby waiting for fifteen minutes until David and his wife showed up, watching news on a small television on the wall.

Bill could not, it turns out, handle the sale. “You’ll have to head over to Brimmer’s,” he said, “or AAA, but they don’t open until 9:00.”

I rode with David’s wife over to Brimmer’s while David drove the truck. We waited in her car, the outside air frigid, talking about teaching and nursing and David’s diagnosis of dementia, the reason for selling the truck.

When the office opened at 9:00 David and I got in line together. He told me about being a high school football coach and designing commercial fire alarm systems. 

“You just need to teach kids how to run the wing-T,” he said. “They do all these fancy California systems now with motion. It’s too much.”

Fourteen hundred dollars became seventeen hundred and fifty after paying for the tag and taxes. I shook David’s hand and waved goodbye to his wife.

This too felt like a moment. 

The truck’s tank was full and it started right up. I reset the trip odometer to 000 and pulled out onto Harrisburg Pike. 

When I got home I tore the ceiling out of the truck right away, taking the cab back to bare metal on top. I tore duct tape and then electrical tape and then more duct tape from the gear shifter, finally discovering that tape was wrapped around the metal post to wedge the knob from falling off. Multiple owners had just kept putting more tape on when it got sticky or UV degraded. Thirty years of repairing a repair.

I found a tape of “Rattle and Hum” by U2 I had dubbed years ago and popped it into the tape player on my way to an auto parts store to get cleaning wax. The truck drove well, the clutch a bit sloppy, the smell of gas clearly present when I stopped. 

“Hmmm, “ I said. “I wonder what that’s about.”

I drove the truck very little over the next few weeks, in the meantime cleaning the floor and seats with a steamer and carpet vacuum, removing years of grime and making a noticeable improvement. 

I hauled some firewood. I took short trips to the grocery store and carried the bags in the truck bed, watching them slide around as I took corners.

I noticed some things over time. The right door and right truck bed panel seemed to be a different color of red. The pin stripe was missing from both of these, a sign that they had both been replaced at some point. 

One of the cables that held up the tailgate was broken, duct tape wrapped around it as if that might hold a steel cable together under strain. 

The rear window latch turned out to be broken. The left window crank cover was snapped, though it still worked. The cloth on the sun visors had degraded into a fine dust that settled over the car when I touched them.

Early December gave me the chance to really use the truck. Wendy and I wanted an extra tall tree this year so we headed north of town to a local tree farm where you could take horse drawn wagon rides into the field to cut your own tree. 

On the way we stopped at a Sheetz to get gas. It was the first time I had gotten gas for the truck, now with two hundred and twenty miles on the trip odometer. I put the nozzle in the tank, clicked the lever into place, and began cleaning the windshield. 

Soon I heard the sound of gas overflowing from the tank, pooling under the truck in a growing puddle. I quickly grabbed the nozzle but not before gas started pooling under my boots. 

“Hmmm,” I thought. “That’s a problem.”

I notified the clerk who sent out a worker to deal with the spill. I apologized to him as we drove off. “Not sure what happened there,” I said. “It just didn’t click off.”

I was pretty sure, though, that the gas tank had a hole at the top of the tank, so that when it was nearly full the gas would pour out instead of filling up the neck to trip the nozzle. 

Still we got the tree, an eleven foot monster that stuck out over the tailgate three feet. A tree that we could not have gotten home with the Bolt or the BMW, not in any way I could imagine, at least.

At that point I began to rationalize the purchase, to think through things to convince myself the truck was a good buy.

Being able to haul a tree. That’s a worthy reason. If we’d had to hire someone to deliver that tree that would be at least $50, right?

And firewood. Firewood was at least a $15 delivery fee. 

That next weekend my mom fell and I began seven weeks of almost full-time caretaking. With my son home from school, I really needed the extra vehicle. If we’d had to rent a car during that time, it would have been around a hundred and fifty dollars a week. That could have run to over one thousand dollars. 

The truck was almost paying for itself at this point.

But, of course, I am my dad’s son. And he never had any luck with buying cars.

My son Jack and I went out the week after we got the tree to get some Christmas presents. I was excited for him to drive the truck.

He noticed right away that the truck swayed a lot side to side. 

“Yeah, I noticed that,” I said. “You get used to it.”

Then the truck stalled right after getting through a light. He coasted into the parking lot of a package liquor store.

“Hmmm,” I said. “That’s not good.”

We switched places and I finally got the truck started, pumping the gas pedal in a way that no car these days ever needed with fuel injection, a skill I had long ago perfected driving the cars my dad would buy.

We made it there and back without a problem, but my distraction about the breakdown led me to forget my phone at the store. 

I got in the truck to head back out and it wouldn’t start. 

“Hmmm,” I said. “That’s strange.”

I took a bottle of starting fluid I kept for our leaf blower and sprayed it into the carburetor, feeling almost giddy when it started right up. I stowed the can behind the passenger seat just in case it happened again.

I used that phone two days later to call my friend Ken on my way to breakfast in Willow Street, coasting into a parking lot after the truck shut off just before the Conestoga River bridge south of Lancaster.

“I ran out of gas,” I told him. “It says I have an eighth of a tank but the gauge must be off.”

“Hmmm,” he said. “That’s odd. I’ll be there in ten.”

Ken pulled up in his 2019 Ford F150, a truck that made mine look like a toy parked beside it. He handed me a gallon tank and I stuck the nozzle into the gas tank of the Ranger.

“Thanks so much!” I said, right then hearing the sound of gas pouring out onto the ground under the truck.

“Hmmm,” I said. “That’s not good.”

Ken had a small funnel that we inserted into the gas line first which worked like a charm. We mentioned this to Mark at breakfast.

“My brother had a problem like that in his Ford,” he said. “There was a hole in the pipe that led to the gas tank.”

“Oh,” I said. “That makes sense.”

“Just only fill it to half full or so and you’ll get by,” Mark said.

I continued to drive the truck as needed over the next couple of weeks. It started every time. Gas did not leak out underneath. It did not stall on the road.

Then, driving my mom back to our house after visiting a personal care home in the city, the truck stalled going fifty-five miles per hour on Route 30. 

“Hmmm,” I said to my mom. “I didn’t expect this to happen.”

I called AAA while we sat on the shoulder, hazard lights on. The call kept getting dropped though, and on a whim I tried to start the truck again. 

It started right up. 

“Let’s take a chance it makes it home,” I said to my mom. Which it did.

I called my mechanic John. Dad would have loved John. He has his own shop. He is as honest as you’ll ever find. And he never promises to fix something he can’t actually fix.

“It’s probably a problem with the fuel pump,” he said, hearing my story. 

“Oh,” I said. “That doesn’t sound too bad.”

We set up an appointment in two weeks. 

In the meantime the truck only broke down two more times. The worst was on the side of Manheim Pike, going up a hill. There is no chance to coast going uphill. I barely made the shoulder and waved cars past with my hand. The truck was full of stuff from Mom’s old cottage she had moved out of to the personal care home, on my way to Salvation Army, a green tarp tied over a kitchen table and chairs, a tv stand, two lamps and several small tables. It was raining lightly. I couldn’t see out the back window.

“Please restart,” I said. Which it did, two minutes later.

I assume the truck did not respond to my request, that it was always going to start, but if being polite to my truck worked, I’d be kind to my truck.

John had a look at the truck two weeks later. “It needs new ball joints and the muffler needs to have a pipe welded to repair a leak.

“Maybe nine hundred dollars for the repairs,” he said. “I didn’t look at the fuel pump yet. I need to drop the tank. Those bolts are rusty and it might be a tricky thing to do.”

“Ok,” I said, wondering out loud to him whether it was worth it to put the money into the truck.

“Well,” he said, “it runs. If I fix these two things it will pass inspection.”

“In the meantime, will the wheels fall off?” I asked.

“Maybe, but probably not. Those ball joints have been like this for at least five years.”

Probably not. 

“Hmmm,” I said. “That’s something to think about.”

The truck proved itself invaluable again two days ago, driving my mom’s expensive queen mattress and box springs home to replace my son’s mattress. 

Theo’s mattress became the Pee-pee Bed four years ago, just after we began fostering our dog Remington, right when COVID took over everyone’s lives.

Theo had brought Remy into his room to lie on the bed with him, just opening the door when Remy got the zoomies, jumped on the bed and ran in excited circles at the same time peeing, the urine soaking the bed, covering the pillows and walls and windows and blinds and dresser and clothes still on the floor. 

I bought the carpet cleaner that week that I eventually used to clean the cab of the truck, this moment some kind of a full circle. 

I had that thought in my mind when the wind caught the box spring from the north just after I turned onto Millport only a mile from home, flipping both the box spring and the mattress high into the air off into a muddy cornfield. 

“Hmmm,” I said. “I didn’t expect that.”

The next day as I drove the Pee-pee bed to the dump, this time covering the load with a tarp and two crossed ratchet tie-downs, I wasn’t surprised when the truck broke down near Granite Run, two miles from the waste facility. I coasted downhill into a  lot, right into a parking spot as if I was there on business. I had been driving slowly on back roads just in case, or in case the tarp flipped up, in case the straps broke and the mattress flew off again like a flicked playing card. 

Like in all card games, sometimes the deck is stacked against you. Life is, after all, quite a bit of a gamble.

My dad knew this. He and his buddies would play poker many nights after a day on the golf course he owned with my uncle Ivan. Dad kept a cooler full of beer with a box for “contributions”, unwilling to pay for a liquor license. He also kept an illegal electronic slot machine in the back, in both cases counting on the sheriff who was there to play poker with them to ignore, at least when he wasn’t grabbing a free beer or putting a quarter in the slot machine.

Likewise I’m taking a bit of a chance that I’ll be stranded on the road somewhere whenever I drive the truck. Theodore goes back to college this weekend and I’ll only need to drive the truck when things need hauled. 

Mom is at Evergreen Estates now with her cat Zach in the room and three meals a day in the dining hall. They assign seats for meals which is a godsend for her. She has social anxiety and would otherwise be stricken every time she went to eat in fear she couldn’t find a place to sit.

They get her pills and make sure she takes them each morning and evening. There is bingo just down the hall each Tuesday and Thursday. Last week they had a cupcake bar. Who doesn’t love a cupcake bar?

So my worry about my mom has relaxed. I’ve accepted the problems with the truck. I’ve got a bit more time now to write and exercise.

And last night I almost slept the entire night through, dreams of decks of cards tossed into the air waking me at three thirty. A magician could snatch an ace of spades or queen of hearts at will from that cloud of cards. I’m content though to let them fall where they may, playing the ones I’m dealt, throwing a dollar here and there in the contributions box and waiting for spring.