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It’s still tolerable in the morning here in Fort Stockton.  Not so hot that the trees are fighting over male dogs for some relief.  In fact, the air almost had a crispness to it.  Not enough to be called a chill, but enough to feel good on bare skin and almost raise a goose bump.  Probably the result of the humidity dipping down below 90%.

I decided to take the Fairlane 500 down to the Grounds for Divorce for the Folgers-N-Fenders event Lucinda puts together whenever she feels inclined.  She charges five bucks a head to park your old car in the lot, raise the hood, and pull a lawn chair from the trunk and swap stories with other old guys of a like mind.  The only rules are:  it has to have chrome bumpers, run on fossil fuels, and have current insurance.  That keeps out the riff-raff, the Teslas, and those who don’t want to really celebrate the old car hobby as it should be celebrated.

For your five bucks you get an endless supply of Folgers as long as your car is parked in the lot, and a couple of Delgado’s famous breakfast tacos.  And of course the camaraderie of those fellow travelers who have also made the trek.  Harlan Beaucamp shows up every now and again in his ’59 Dodge Power Wagon.  Doesn’t even spray the animal manure out of the bed of the truck.  We all know he just comes to look at Lucinda, not show off his old Dodge, but nobody faults him for it.

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What was really unusual about this particular Folgers-N-Fenders event was the line up of four old Fords parked near the old Pecan tree between the GDF parking lot and that of the Piggly Wiggly.  Without any planning or coordination, my ’60 Fairlane 500 was right next to Paul Binderman’s 1959 Ford Custom 300.  Next to that was Chad’s 1958 Ford Country Squire.  Alongside Chad’s wagon was Benard Marx’s 1957 Ford Country Squire.  It was a chronologically fortuitous formation of Fords that had never formed before.  We were all kind of amazed and impressed.

Chad had never shown his Country Squire before.  He brought the family with him and it was good to see his young boys enjoying all the old cars.  Prudence looked good.  Seemed like their family had turned a corner and we were all glad to see it.

We all knew the story of Chad being gifted his ’58 Country Squire.  Most folks, or those who cared, anyway, have heard the story of how I came to own a twin of my first car.  Same kind of story for Paul Binderman; a return to his youth.  Nobody had seen Benard Marx’s ’57 Country Squire before, though.  We were curious.  Every car is a story, we wanted to hear the one on his car.

“It was a long time ago, but I remember the day pretty clearly.  The day I learned to swim.”  Benard said.  It was a little bit random, but sometimes it takes all of us a while to get warmed up.

“It was June and we’d already moved to our new house.  I remember our old house.  It was much bigger and my room was upstairs and huge. I loved the back yard that I could see from my bedroom window.  I’d watch the breeze passing through the leaves on the big trees close to the house. I loved the sound of the leaves rustling. In fall the trees turned mostly red and yellow. The October sun gave the light a magic glow as it passed through the leaves and landed in my eyes. I’d cried the day we moved out and I left behind all the wonderful memories in that house. My birthday parties, Christmases, Thanksgivings when my grandparents and my uncles and my cousins would come for the meal, and my wonderful secret hiding place no one knew but me. No one ever found me when we played hide and seek thanks to my secret place. And we were moving away from all my friends in the neighborhood.  My best friend Gloria.  Gloria and I played endless sunny days and almost all the childhood games I learned in our big backyard.  My little heart was broken,” Benard seemed to be more emotional than most of us normally get when starting the story, indicating it was going to be a good one.  Still, the remembrances of Gloria were different than many of us had when it came to girlfriends and first cars.

“Dad promised me the move to our new house was only temporary, that we’d come back in a little while.  He did his best to make me feel better. I supposed it helped a little bit to think we’d be coming back but I didn’t feel it that day.”  Chad was shifting in his lawn chair restlessly.  Millennials tend to have the attention span of a goldfish.

“It took a while for me to feel better about our new place,” Benard went on.  “No big room on the second floor. No second floor. The place seemed shabby compared to our big house. Mom said that it would take her a little time to make our new house as lovely as our old one. My first new friend was Jeff next door. Jeff was the same age as me. He had very red hair and a brush stroke of freckles across his nose and cheeks. A lot of the other kids teased him about his hair but I always thought it was pretty. Maybe that’s why he and I got along so well.  It was a good thing I’d found my first new friend.  Dad’s new job kept him away from home a lot more than before and mom had started working also. When they were home they always seemed tired and didn’t do much. They were happy to let me go next door and play with Jeff almost every evening. I grew used to our new situation and I was happy again though at times I’d feel sad thinking about our lives before.”

About then Chad said something about going into the cafe and getting another breakfast taco from Delgado.  Lucinda brought around a fresh pot of Folgers from the Bunn-O-Matic.  Most of the crowd had slowly wandered over in the direction of old Mustangs and Impalas.  Binderman was showing Rex Hall the original green upholstery on his Custom 300.

“I think it was the 15^th of June that mom and dad took me to learn to swim.  It was a Wednesday and Mom and dad had the day off.  Some of my other friends had already learned how to swim and I felt jealous and wanted to learn as well.  Dad hadn’t told me that Wednesday was the day he was going to teach me how to swim.  It was a surprise. He only told me that we were headed to the lake. We drove our old Ford Country Squire way out into the countryside out to the small lake above Morgan Creek. On the few weekends that we’d been there before there were a few other families but on this day we were the only people around.  Dad and I put on our swimming trunks in the car while mom waited outside. Once dad and I were suited up, we gave mom the car to herself to change.”    

Benard looked off into the distance, remembering the details as though maybe he hadn’t thought about them in decades.  Or, maybe he thought about them every single day.  It was hard to tell due to his voice getting softer the longer he told the story.

“Instead of going to the ‘beach’ where I normally played in the shallow water, we went up onto a little bluff past the beach and a small clump of trees growing next to the water.”  He looked up at the big pecan tree we were under, our lawn chairs grouped together like a flock of birds seeking shelter from a storm headed their way.  “There was one large tree on the top of the rise and it had a limb that grew out over the water.  Someone had tied a rope to the limb that people used to swing out over the water and then drop in. The water was really deep below the tree on the rise so it was safe to drop into the water there.  The water from on top of the rise looked very blue that day. I guess being higher up gave me a better angle for the water reflecting the sky.  At the beach the water had always looked a little green.  The rise wasn’t very high but to me on that day it seemed like you could see the whole world from up there.  I remember feeling the warm breeze on my face as it blew my hair away from my face.”

Rusty Hammer, who’d been leaning up against the front fender of my Fairlane 500 slipped away, looking at his phone and saying something about a problem at the store he had to tend to.

Benard glanced over in the direction of his 1957 Country Squire, squinting at it just a bit.  “At first I thought dad had just brought me up there to show me the lake from up there.  He asked me if I wanted to learn to swim.  I told him, ‘Yes’ because my other friends were all learning how.   Dad picked me up in his arms.  I had no idea what he had in mind.  As we walked toward the rope hanging from the limb, I remember thinking that maybe dad was going to put me on his shoulders and we’d swing out over the water and then drop in.  We’d never done that and I was a little afraid even though I trusted my dad.  But dad walked past the rope to the edge of the rise.  He didn’t say anything and just flung me out into the air above the water!  I heard him say just before I hit the water, ‘Swim!!’  I hit the water hard on my back and butt.  Before I went under the water I saw mom and dad standing side by side at the edge of the bluff watching me with large eyes.  When I hit the water it felt like it was hard because of the speed at which I’d hit. It knocked some of the air out of me and I didn’t have a chance to suck in more air before my momentum pushed me down into the water.  I went down for what seemed like forever. My eyes were closed so I saw nothing. I had always been afraid to open my eyes below water because I’d tried once and it made my eyes burn.”  

Of course, I knew Benard didn’t drown that day, he was sitting right next to me, after all.  But I was concerned for him, nonetheless.

“I was waving my arms and kicking my legs as I went down. My little brain raced trying to make sense of what was happening to me and what in the world to do next,” he went on.  “Eventually I stopped going deeper into the water. I continued to thrash around silently. I’m not sure exactly what I did right but I started to rise toward the surface.  My whole body was aching to breathe as I slowly rose upward.  At last I couldn’t put off taking a breath any longer and I pushed out the air in my lungs I’d been holding. I started to inhale just before I broke the surface of the water.  I wasn’t above water long but between the violent coughs I got a couple of long full gasps.  Then I was going down again.  Back down into the black silence.  I continued to thrash under water and started to rise again. This time I was able to hold my breath until I broke the surface.  I remember gasping like I never had before.  Just before I went under again, I remember hearing my dad shouting at me, ‘SWIM!.’”

Chad had come back and sat down to eat his breakfast tacos.  Prudence and the boys were strolling through the other cars.  The boys seemed to be looking longingly at Lucinda, her GFD T-shirt showing a little more cleavage than usual.  They grow up so fast.

Benard didn’t miss a beat, even with all the other activity.  “Knowing my dad was up on the bluff gave me a tiny bit of confidence thinking that if things really started to go bad, he could jump in and save me.  The next time I came to the surface and got some air, I leveled my body out as I thrashed with my arms and kicked with my legs like I’d seen people do on TV.  As uncoordinated as my arms and legs were, I started moving toward the shore.  I had no confidence I could make the shore but I flailed away in terror only with the thought of getting out of the water. As I moved closer to the shore I felt like I couldn’t keep up my level of exertion to make it all the way in.  That thought only increased the terror of drowning that was driving me.  I flailed in the water for what at the time seemed like thirty minutes.  In reality it must have only a couple.  Next thing I remember was crawling in the mud on the shore next to the bluff.  Mom and Dad were both there.  I couldn’t stand up and I was crying. I could hear mom and dad trying to sooth me, saying, ‘Good job son!  You know how to swim now. Good job. You did it.’”  Benard stopped for a minute.   Like he was collecting his thoughts before he went on.

“Hearing that, I quit crying and hugged my mom and dad with my muddy arms.  I don’t think I ever loved them as much as I did right then.  I felt pride. I knew how to swim!   Mom got another towel and wiped the mud off me.  To say I was shaken doesn’t even come close.  Instead of staying at the lake we walked back over the bluff, through the clump of trees, past the beach, and back to the Country Squire.”  Glancing at the back seat of the Ford, Benard’s voice trailed off for a minute.  

Chad wasn’t sure what to say.  Binderman came back and sat down in his lawn chair.

We all thought the story was over.  I started to get up and look at some of the other cars.  “We hadn’t been in the car very long when my mother started to cry.  She was sobbing loudly and buried her face in her hands. I could see her shoulders heave.”  Apparently that wasn’t the end of the story, after all.  I sat back down as Benard went on.  “I guess my mother’s pride in me must have been overwhelming.  Dad took his right hand off the steering wheel and put his arm around my mother’s shoulder.  He pulled her close next to him. She continued to cry. He leaned his head against hers and patted her right shoulder with his hand, trying to comfort her.  The words he came up with to try to sooth her were, ‘Don’t worry honey.  We’ll try something else next week.’”  Benard looked at the Country Squire, then down at his lap.  He didn’t say anything else.

Every car is a story.  Together they all weave the narrative of who we are, what we become.  Something to reflect on with fellow travelers on the journey, or under the pecan tree.

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