Truck Life in the Big City

My friend opened the truck door, looked up at me and said, “How do you drive such a big vehicle?” And I paused for a long minute and then said, with a perfectly straight face, “I’m tough.”

Then I told her that there is an axe in the side pocket of the driver’s side door in case we want to cut down a tree on the way to the swimming pool or cause some other kind of mayhem.

These are moments to treasure – when you realize that you very well could become unhinged, but you haven’t yet. Just moments earlier, I’d encountered both ends of my street being blocked off by orange cones and big public works trucks. I felt the hinges loosening quite a bit then. Workmen at one end of the street were digging a hole between the curb and the sidewalk. At the other end, workmen were standing in the street watching water jet out of a hydrant. They shrugged when I asked if they’d coordinated their efforts so the street wouldn’t be entirely inaccessible to the people who lived on it.

There was repeated shrugging. Rehearsed almost. To the same beat.

I could feel my sarcastic body language bubbling over.

Ultimately, I had civil conversations with all of the workmen although the definition of civil may need to be stretched just a hair. They weren’t impressed with my truck-inspired toughness, nor did they know about the axe in the side pocket of the driver’s side door. The water workmen were willing to negotiate a deal which would allow me to move certain cones in order to park on my street as long as I moved the cones back. It felt like opening the Strait of Hormuz.

Today tough old lady in a truck. Tomorrow sweet old lady in a sedan, no axe. We are who we pretend to be.