All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum

Author:Robert Fulghum [Fulghum, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780345479105
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2004-05-04T07:00:00+00:00

PICKUP TRUCK

TRANSPORTATION IS MUCH THE TOPIC of the day. You’ve noticed. Our devotion to the car is worshipful. Guys, especially, will talk cars for hours. Eric Berne called it the cocktail-party pastime game: “General Motors.”

Despite what you hear, it’s not really a matter of economics. It’s an image issue. In America, you are what you drive. Go out in the garage and look. There you are.

Well, my old hoopy has joined the cripples on the edge of the herd. And a new vehicle (image) is in order.

The silver-gray Mercedes convertible with glove-leather everything really felt like me. The bank did not really think it felt like me to them. The shiny black BMW motorcycle with sidecar kind of felt like me. My wife did not think it felt like her—especially the sidecar part. The Land Rover with gun rack and shooting top felt like me. But there are so few game-covered veldts around town now. The new VW Bug is Consumer Reports’ choice, but a bug I am just not. If they had named it the VW Walrus or the VW Water Buffalo, I might go for it.

One of my former students suggested I put all my money into drugs. Stay home and take all the trips I want. But that’s not me—you don’t bring back groceries from those trips. And nobody really envies you. And we must be envied.

It’s clear that what would be fashionably hip is a fine piece of engineering—something that’s luxurious yet practical, useful, and economical. Like a Porsche pickup truck that runs on Kleenex. Silver-gray, of course.

What I really want from transportation is not an image but a feeling.

I remember riding home on a summer’s eve in the back of an ancient Ford pickup truck, with two eight-year-old cousins for company and my uncle Roscoe at the wheel. We’d been swimming and were sitting on inner tubes for comfort, and had a couple of old quilts and an elderly dog wrapped close for warmth. We were eating chocolate cookies and drinking sweet milk out of a Mason jar, and singing our lungs out with unending verses of “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” With stars and moon and God above, and sweet dreams at the end of the journey home. And not a care in the world.

Now that’s transportation. The way I like to travel. And that’s me.

If you hear of a dealer, let me know.

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