The wife and I have been travelling around the local area. Several weeks ago, as we drove along one of the roads we travel often, we noticed a red ruck parked on the side of the road.
Now this is a fairly busy road, with a lot of traffic. It isn’t some place you’d want to have your vehicle break down. There were no obvious signs that the car was damaged in a traffic accident. It looked like it could run.
Each day, as we drove the road we noticed he truck was sitting there. I wondered if it had been abandoned. I would have thought the owner would have had it towed to a nearby repair shop or something.
It got to the point that we turned it into a kind of game. “How much you wanna bet the red truck is still there?”
You would think that the police would have taken notice, but there weren’t any tickets or anything stuck under the windshield wipers, or stuffed into the crack of the windows, that I could see.
If we were still back in Houston, I might have thought this was a ‘bait car’. Bait cars are vehicles the police park in a neighborhood where car thieves tend to work. The cars have cameras and sensors so the police will be alerted when someone tries to steal the car. In our new neighborhood, that type of thing isn’t as common, so I don’t think it was a bait car.
The red truck almost became a sort of comforting presence, always there. It was consistent, stable, you started to think it was going to be there no matter what. Sure, some part of your brain knew that it wouldn’t last, that it would have to get towed or taken away at some point, but until then, it was a welcome sight as we passed it each day.
This morning the wife and I drove towards the truck and I asked if she thought it would be there. “Probably” she said. We came around the bend and sure enough it was sitting there.
We were driving back home later and we came up to the place the red truck was parked. Only, it wasn’t there any more. It was gone.
A part of me was a little disappointed. I was getting used to seeing it there. Now that it was gone I felt a little unsettled. A tiny bit of stability in the Universe had collapsed.
Whether the owner finally got it towed for repair, or the police impounded it, or it got hauled away to be stripped down for parts, that part of the owner’s life has been resolved and they will move on. I, too, will move on. I doubt I’ll think much about the truck from now on, likely only at those times if I come back and read this post.
Life is fleeting and ephemeral. Red trucks come into and go back out of our lives, like so many things. Do they mean anything, do they have any significance? I guess only what significance we assign to them. Maybe on some cosmological scale the red truck is vital to some grand tale we don’t know about because we are in the story, not outside reading it.
Maybe its a reminder of the temporal uncertainty of all things. Appreciate what you have while you have it, that sort of thing.
Maybe it means nothing at all.
Life goes on. Deal with it.
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