My uncle told me this story, and I will now try to pass it on to you in his own words...
When I was fifteen, my mother bought me a pickup truck so I could drive myself to work. The state of Texas issued me a hardship driver's license, and I found a summer job in the East Texas oilfields. I worked fifty to sixty hours a week, toiling in the heat and grime, mostly high up on workover rigs that cleared clogged oil wells.
When I got behind the wheel of our newly acquired Chevrolet in the mid-1990s, I had no idea what an exceptional vehicle it was. It simply seemed old to me. It was a 1983 model with a front bench seat, two-tone brown paint, and a bed long enough to comfortably hold both of my younger brothers, their friends, our four-wheeler, a dirt bike, and perhaps even several bags of fireworks.
Whenever I wasn't at school or work, we drove it together along the rough roads through the pine forests. It was a solid, durable truck. My brother Dan started calling it Brownie, and the name stuck.
The previous owner had taken exceptionally good care of Brownie. His name was Red, he was a World War II veteran, and he lived along a gravel road near my grandparents' farm. My uncle persuaded him to sell us the truck because he believed Red desperately needed something newer.
I drove Brownie for three years and, as far as I can remember, kept it in fairly decent condition. Dan, however, was a total wrecking ball. Once the truck passed to him, he really put it through the wringer. Eventually, we sold it to a classmate who believed he could get it running again.
The last time I saw Brownie was about ten years later. By then, my first pickup truck had finally given up the ghost in that former classmate's yard, where it was slowly deteriorating, rusting, and falling apart.
Not long afterward, I left East Texas and became a city dweller. My wife Petra and I rented a small apartment in downtown Austin. A few bus tickets, one shared car, and our own two feet were all we needed to get around.
I never hid the fact that I wanted another pickup truck. It was a distant longing that grew stronger as I entered middle age. My father and uncles had always owned similar vehicles. My grandfather Bob also had a pickup truck. He let me drive his farm truck as soon as I was tall enough to see over the steering wheel—though only when I was hauling hay for him, of course.
I even began to miss the cloud of smoke from unfiltered Camel cigarettes that once filled the cab of my other grandfather Bill's pickup truck. I used to sit beside him and help him open gates around the farm and inspect the oil wells.
Nostalgia alone, however, could not justify the expense of a large, gas-guzzling vehicle, especially one that would be driven on city streets. That changed when Petra and I lost our apartment in Austin and ended up in a suburb with no public transportation.
My uncle then told me that Red, Brownie's first owner, had died at the age of ninety-five. His last pickup truck, a beige 2005 GMC Sierra with a metal toolbox, stood in front of his old house, slowly gathering dust and tree sap.
Did I need it? Probably not. Even so, I had to have it. After the battery was replaced, the engine started on the first try. The air conditioning stopped working almost immediately, and the check engine light came on as well. Yet Red's old truck had no trouble making the journey from the red-dirt fields where he and my grandparents had lived out their lives and died, along the highways through downtown Dallas and Austin, all the way to its new home.
Today, it sits there by the curb in a Texas suburb, and every now and then, it comes in very handy.
