November 18, 2012

  • Sunday driving....

    When I was a kid (many eons ago....) my parents used to torture me every Sunday with the dreaded Sunday drive.  We would all pile into the car and drive around looking at things.  Gas was ridiculously cheap, so it didn't matter how wasteful the drive was.

    My father was a carpenter and the company he worked for built homes across a good third of the state.  He was proud of what they built so we would often drive around to their latest subdivision and look at the homes and he would tell us how many rooms, etc.  I didn't realize it at the time, but those houses were the pipe dreams of my parents.  At the wages paid to my father, they would never be able to build for themselves the homes my father helped build for others.  But dreams were cheap and they enjoyed the time together.  Our drives would almost always end at a "custard stand" which is what ice cream stands were known as in those days.  I could rarely eat the goodies, though, because riding in the car made me car sick.

    Fast forward to today.

    Hubby and I took our Jaguar Vanden Plas out for a final drive before putting it away for the winter.  Now, lest you think we are rich, I happen to be married to a real car guy who found this very, very cheaply and took it upon himself (with friends) to restore it for me.  It was a labor of love because he knew that of all the car types in the world, the only ones I could reliably identify were Jaguars.

    This car had not been driven as much as I would like this summer, but today made up for it.  There are endless miles of back roads and we covered most of the southern half of the county on this trip.  The drive was leisurely and we enjoyed looking at the scenery and commenting on the changes we have seen over the years.

    We realized that we had become our parents.

    There have been a lot of those moments lately.  We are in our mid 50s and we find ourselves doing, saying and fussing over things we swore we would never do.  We are not sure if it is maturity or we have just caved in to our destiny.

    But if our destiny has occasional bouts of Sunday driving in a Jaguar....I'll take it.

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