It was 1986. It was a good year. Life was college, and college was life. Some time that year, college life seemed to become a bit too heavy to handle. Classes were hard, my body was tired, and homesickness began to settle in for the first time in a couple of years. It seemed as if Spring Break could not arrive quickly enough. I had endured the flu in the midst of a snowstorm and a torrent of exams just a few days earlier, and it felt like so much more.
As I drove the final leg of a four hundred mile journey home for the break, my trusty 73 Chevy developed a growing and increasingly troublesome vibration in the front end. Then, it happened. It seemed as if the entire front of the car exploded. Upon exiting the vehicle, I found out it threw a tread from the left front tire, denting both my fender and my spirit. And, to add insult to injury, the multi-piece product of American engineering intended to jack the car up did not have all the working pieces in place. I was stranded, indeed.
After briefly considering hitchhiking the final 60 miles home in that era before cell phones, I begrudgingly decided to drive on the flat tire rim until I found a country home surrounded by a fenced yard full of pit bulls and a house full of an even scarier man. But, he let me use his phone (a land line) to call my dad.
A few hours later, the afternoon turned better as the Chevy began being outfitted with a new set of Goodyear tires. It seemed that dad didn’t want me back on the road with the chance of repeating the afternoon’s adventure, the next time possibly even farther from home. And, to “topper” it all off, dad bought us a matching pair of Goodyear racing team hats just like the Indy drivers wore.
The hat served to remind me of dad’s words that “sometimes, things like that just happen. You pick yourself up and move on.” Good words, in a good year.
It all reminds me of a song by Jason Gray currently adorning the airways:
Hold on
If the life that we’ve been given
Is made beautiful in the living
And the joy that we get brings joy to the heart of the giver
Then right here, right now
This is the song I’m singing out
I wanna live like there’s no tomorrow
Love like I’m on borrowed time
It’s good to be alive
I’m currently reading the book Storyline by author Donald Miller. It tells of life being about characters overcoming conflict to obtain the things they truly want the most. Life is about living a good story, and it happens one year at a time, one day at a time, one moment at a time. The year can be good, as can the moments and days that make it up.
So, whether it was pausing to allow my kids to “help” me in mowing the lawn, or a number of other things, this hat has been a good companion, and a good reminder. Whether is was 1986, or 2016, save 2, hat number five of twenty-seven, save one, is a personal favorite. It was a “Goodyear”, indeed… It still is.
