What Car do You Like?

Being in Scotland the last week or so I have had a lot of thoughts about cars and driving. Every day I get into a funny looking little hatch back. I drive on the opposite side of the car on the opposite side of the road. When I look around I see hundreds of other tiny cars, many of them hatchbacks as well. I have seen two trucks that I remember and 10 or 15 SUV’s during my entire trip. To say that the driving experience is different here is a bit obvious.

Driving experiences can vary for people from state to state back in the USA as well. Ranchers need big duel wheel trucks to pull all sorts of livestock trailers. Southern Californians probably have a higher percentage of convertibles because of the great weather. In the northern states people are much more accustomed to driving on snow and may even have some special snow tires on some of their vehicles. Down in the southern states we have a lot of trucks.

In the town I grew up in every male over the age of 16 and still above ground drove a truck. I would bet that three-fourths of them were Chevy trucks. I was probably 20 years old before I realized that Chevy trucks didn’t come standard with 4-wheelers and Labrador retrievers in the back. Everyone I had ever seen was equipped with both. Just because of all that popularity I decided to get a car. I didn’t want to fit into a mold or do things just because I was supposed to do them. I wanted to be my own person. Sometimes we try so hard to avoid being what others expect us to be that we forget to be ourselves. That is not the topic for today though. I simply wanted to discuss cars and what relationship Braden might have with them.

I have since realized that I am a truck man. I can’t imagine ever again not having a pickup truck. I use my truck to pull my boat. I use the bed of my truck for carrying off brush or trash. I have used it to move furniture. A truck certainly helps with deer hunting as it is ideal for carrying dead animals and 4-wheelers. There are so many useful reasons for a good old country boy to have a truck. I even have a 4-wheel drive truck, and yes it has been in the mud a few times. I even got stuck last year. I still maintain I would not have got stuck if I saw the mud hole coming. It was hidden beneath high uncut grass and camouflaged by an otherwise dry dirt road. If I was ready I would have made it across. Anyway, I love my truck.

What will Braden want for his first vehicle? I would love for him to want a truck like his old man, but of course that is not important. If he truly follows my footsteps he will get a car like I did. I have never been a big car fanatic. Don’t get me wrong I like fast cars. I appreciate them very much, but they are not an interest of mine. Maybe Braden will love cars. Arica’s family is big into NASCAR racing. Maybe from a young age Braden will want to work on cars or drive fast cars or something like that. Fast cars are cool, but I probably wouldn’t want him to have one too early in his driving career.

So here we are at the end of another of my future pondering posts. What is the point? There is not really a point other than to note that there are so many ways to define an individual person. We teach our kids the best we can. We influence them by our actions whether we mean to or not. But in the end things as simple as car preference are individual and you never know which way they will go. I look forward to learning about all these individual preferences that will make Braden his own person. The early choices will certainly be more along the lines of toys and food, but choosing cars will be fun when the time comes.