BACK WHEN GAS WAS FIFTY CENTS A GALLON

Thirty-one years ago, on this date, August 11, I financed my first "new" car. This was long before the Dead Milkmen wrote their song which tries to say it all about this sort of car. But it didn't even come close. My new car sported a mere five point one miles on the odometer when I drove it off the lot. It was a beautiful car. It was indeed, a bitchin' Camaro. The Milkmen nailed that much. But in fact, my 1976 Chevrolet Camaro was the nothing less than a magic carpet ride. For I would go on to put 96K miles on that metallic blue automobile in the first thirty-six months I owned it, traveling back and forth to Texas several times, and winding among the backwaters of the five southeastern states of Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, North Carolina, and Tennessee in which I worked as a surveyor for a prestigious civil engineering firm headquartered in Atlanta, flummoxing mayors, city managers, and county engineers with the well-packed trunk and backseat full of bush axes, machetes, hubs, stakes, chains, range poles, level rods, magic markers, flagging, tripod, transit, level, and a truckload of other tools of the trade, all ingeniously organized and functionally accessible when needed.

I shall return to this topic. Right here, in this space.