These days, given our covid world, it’s nice to even be out at a stoplight. There are so many people! But while sitting at a light, a large, greasy, black smoke billowing flatbed tow truck rolled to a stop carrying the remains of an old Autin Healy. A real classic, but it wasn’t the make of the car that caught me, it was the old, patina, rusted exposed body parts that caused me to pause.
I like old things.
- They have stories.
- They have history.
- And they lived beyond their time.
I like old things. Not because I am becoming something old myself… it’s because, as I drink in this old machine and the stories she has, I relish in the idea of what the original owner must have felt driving down the twisties with their hair full of wind and fire. I think the reason I like old things is that they force me to dig into my own history, my own imagination to put the full picture together. Yes, sometimes the made-up imaginary things are better than the real and… there is something there about that statement.
Those imagined images, those imprinted colors, sounds, light, and action, rooted in passion and inspiration within, paint a more vivid and enjoyable picture. Why do you think, when you get together with family, one of the most common things to happen is… you start reliving the past. Your history, your joint history is a way for a group to tap into their own passion and imagination, to create a shared experience.
To this day, though weird as it might seem, I can hear the music from the original Star Wars movie and it brings a tear to my eye. Way back when cassette tapes were the big deal in auto sound, my dad’s company had a huge passenger van he brought home one day. Instead of riding the bus for school the next day, dad took me to school in the van. I didn’t know why but as we were going down High Point Road in Greensboro, he pushed in the tape, and out of four, yes four speakers came the crashing thunderous orchestrations of the Star Wars theme. It’s the same thing for Close Encounter of the Third Kind. It’s not that they were the pinnacle of great storytelling, it’s that they are connected to deep-buried, rooted parts of my childhood so that they erupt from my memories like flashes of lighting.
I like old things.
They tell stories and those stories tell us about who we are today. Not so much that people haven’t changed, but how we think and react to the ‘old ways. My Grandad had a 1957 Chevy Pick up. I never thought it was ugly, even when he painted it with a brush… (you have to know my grandad). But the curve of the metal, the artistry that went into its making… it meant something then and it means something now. I look at old radios from the ’20s, 30’s and ’40s and think of the families who gathered around those massive, wooden artistic carved boxes with large lit frequency displays and think of the families that sat with bated breath as national news spilled out of its single speaker.
I like old things.
It reminds me to follow our passions,
Follow our imaginations
And as I said to Elizabeth… write and live your lives from our goosebumps.
