Tag: trucks

My buddy Stan and I started his bathroom remodel project by tearing out the old claw-foot tub.

“Where are we going with it,” I asked as we lugged it down the steps.

“To your truck.”

I tried to protest.

“You live in the country,” he said. “doesn’t everyone have a trash pit on their farm?”

Many do.

“Beats paying for a landfill,”  he said.

There isn’t much use arguing with Stan, So along with the bathtub, we tossed a toilet, a couple of iron towel racks and a shower stall into the bed of my truck. Later that afternoon, I got to throw them all into my in-law’s pit.

I bought the pickup to haul things around – but now I regret it.  The irony is, for most of my life I got by hauling things around in small cars.

I started out with a VW.  That little bug could carry anything.

Every time Stan and I got kicked out an apartment (we liked to party) we piled all of our belongings on top of my VW and puttered across town to our new place.  We had it down to an art.

After I got married, I bought a Honda Civic hatchback. We called it The Egg because it looked like an egg and wasn’t much bigger.

Regardless of its size, the genius of this vehicle was that Honda placed the wheel wells precisely 48.5” inches apart which meant the car willingly accepted a 4′ X 8′ sheet of plywood.

It may have been almost impossible to squeeze my wife and two kids into it – but once you dropped the tailgate, you could load all the lumber, plywood and Sheetrock your heart desired  – at least until the bumper touched the ground.  At that point, you usually left a couple of sheets on the curb to keep the sparks from flying.

I remodeled an old farmhouse and built a cabin in my woods using that little car – but then I went and bought a pickup truck…

Allow me to insert a little wisdom here: “Demand will always exceed capacity”

Let’s say you go out and buy a new refrigerator because the old one is too small. Within a week, you will find the new one holds less than the old one.   It is no different when you get a pay raise.  By the end of the month, you will have more bills than pay.

We rarely anticipate the obvious.  We move from tiny starter homes into suburban mini-mansions then act surprised when our three car garage fails hold a single car.

Why is this?

Blame it on normal.

Since the dawn of time, it has been normal to never have enough.

This is because every time we got more of something, normal simply adjusted itself to our new circumstances. It constantly shifts ahead of our desires in a never ending quest to keep us wanting more – because (duh) that’s normal.

So me owning a truck simply meant that I had more stuff to lug around – and to prove the point, a couple of hours after I got home from the farm pit, my wife told me she needed the truck.

I handed her the keys and she sped off trailing a cloud of dust. About an hour later, the dust cloud returned.

“Help me unload” she said and there in the bed of my pickup truck was an old claw-foot bathtub, a toilet and a couple of iron towel racks.

“What the?”

“Ellen spotted them in the farm pit and we got a little help loading,” she said, “won’t they look great filled with flowers?  So if you could just haul them over there…”