Growin' Up (Behind the Wheel)

I find myself alone with what passes for thoughts at odd hours, almost always in my car, which, doddering curmudgeon that I am, is funny because life and times for my generation go full circle. 

When I was coming of age, the driver's license and the open road (and all they promised, if not always delivered) were a rite of passage. And here I am, very much as I started, a long way from home on a dark highway, lost but making great time.

It was the era of Springsteen's chromed invaders-GTOs, Malibu SSs, Olds 442s, Buick Wildcats, Mustangs, 'Cudas, and Chargers at the top of the list. All those muscle cars had gas lines the size of garden hoses, and all of us, the dweebs included (present!), knew the cubic displacement and the brake horsepower. MPG at a time when gasoline was thirty-five cents a gallon was a nonsense concept and was never explored.

We traveled in packs but were often alone. Our music was transitioning from AM radio to FM, and we struggled to move from converters to tape decks, almost always eight-track, with FM receivers. I remember taking the back seat out of a car to make room for ludicrously sized speakers that were very important to me, but I can't remember why. Because I suspect, just because.

Growing up in the sixties, we were the pioneers who 'experimented' with pot and sex, sometimes at the same time and sometimes not so much. We were all psychedelic capitalists who believed dope got you through times of no money better than money got you through times of no dope. 

Fifty-plus years later, we invented the Real Estate Collapse and Stock Market Meltdown (all caps for a reason) and were absolutely stunned when it happened (now I know why we called it dope).

I watched older neighborhood boys, sent off by my parents' generation, thousands of miles away to places I couldn't say, for causes I accepted as good and true because my government told me it was so. 

A lifetime later, it's my generation sending our children and grandchildren to other eerily familiar wars, and I know just how good we've gotten at lying, but I don't know who we're fooling.

Now that I'm retired, I don't get up with the chickens to go to work the way I did for decades, but I think I prefer to drive in the dawning and the gloaming--when you don't know (or care) where you're going, any road will get you there. 

Those with whom I traveled in the wee small hours always seemed as lost as I, and the roads led everywhere and nowhere. Even now, I keep the windows rolled up, crank the climate control, and turn the tunes up. 
-bill kenny