THE SPIRIT OF ’76

There are perhaps six days a year in Fort Stockton when the weather has no complaint to lodge against the people living under it. It is neither hot enough to make a man resent the sun nor cold enough to make him reconsider his relationship with the outdoors. A breeze moves through town without bringing half of Pecos County along with it, and somebody, somewhere, opens a window just to see whether the screen still works.

This was one of those days. I had run a few errands in the Fairlane and stopped at the Dairy Twin for a cheeseburger basket. Buttercup was at home, and we were both likely enjoying the arrangement. Retirement has been a blessing, but it has also given us the chance to discover exactly how many hours two people can spend together before one of them begins offering helpful observations about the way the other one loads a dishwasher.

“How can I miss you if you never leave?” she had asked that morning.

I took it as an expression of affection and went to town.

I found a booth in the corner, where I could see the parking lot without being required to participate in it. My cheeseburger had just arrived. The fries were hot. Nobody needed a decision from me. For several minutes I enjoyed the rare privilege of doing one thing while thinking about absolutely nothing else.

Then Chad walked in.

He spotted me before I could become interested in the paper napkin dispenser.

“Hey, Captain! Good to see you. Don’t mind if I join you.”

He slid into the opposite side of the booth, making the question academic. Chad had his Piggly Wiggly name tag on and the slightly hurried look of a man whose lunch break belonged to somebody in the corporate office. As Acting Manager, he had responsibility for everything from the produce cooler to the customer who believed a coupon printed in 2019 remained a binding agreement.

He was also a millennial, which meant he still believed conversation was something people might enjoy during lunch.

Before I could swallow my first bite, he had told me about an increase in beef prices, a disagreement over the location of the seasonal display, and Mrs. Drury’s habit of coming into the store after working in her garden. He approached the last subject delicately at first, then supplied enough detail that I briefly considered returning my basket to the counter.

I nodded where the story seemed to call for it. Chad took this as encouragement. He moved on to New Guy’s insistence that dairy products be bagged separately, then double bagged, as though a carton of milk might tunnel its way through the plastic and escape into the parking lot.

That was when the Pontiac pulled up outside our window.

It was a Bavarian Cream 1976 Catalina hardtop coupe, long and low and entirely unashamed of the space it occupied. The paint had the soft yellow warmth of vanilla ice cream before somebody thought to put sprinkles on it. Bright trim followed the body sides and circled the wheel openings. Its Rally II wheels were painted to match the car. Rubber strips crossed the chrome bumpers, concessions to a world in which people occasionally parked by feel. All in all, the car contained more cream than the Dairy Department at Chad’s place of employment.

The driver eased it into a space, shut off the engine, and sat for a moment before getting out. Even through the glass I could see the tan interior: the broad front seats, the folded center armrest, and enough room behind them to accommodate three teenagers and a disagreement.

Chad stopped talking.

“It’s a shame the regulars at the Grounds for Divorce aren’t here to see that,” he said. “She’s a beauty. What year do you suppose?”

“Seventy-six.”

“You’re sure?”

“I graduated from Jim Bowie High that year. Our class was the Spirit of ’76. I ought to be able to recognize the car.”

He looked from the Catalina to me and back again. “Good Lord. That was fifty years ago.”

I put down my cheeseburger. Up to that point, lunch had been going well.

“What was it like?” he asked. “Graduating in 1976?”

I expected him to answer his own question with something about rotary telephones. Instead he waited.

“The country was celebrating its two hundredth birthday,” I said. “Flags everywhere. Red, white, and blue on things that had no business being decorated. The election was coming up that fall. Ford and Carter. Buttercup and I had just started dating, and a 1960 Fairlane like the one out there was my only transportation. Fleetwood Mac was on the radio, and I was willing to listen to anything Stevie Nicks wanted to sing.”

Chad glanced at the Fairlane, parked a few spaces down from the Catalina. Sixteen years separated the two cars. From our booth, it looked like sixteen years had mostly been spent adding length to the hood and improving the seats.

“Did you vote in that election?”

“First time I was old enough. I was nervous about getting something wrong. Checked everything three times before I pulled the lever.”

“Who’d you vote for?”

There are questions a man can answer while eating a cheeseburger, and there are questions that ought to wait until he has at least finished chewing. A vote, like a man’s religion, matters enough to think through carefully and can start a fight with somebody who only wanted to know where you bought your hat.

“Ford had pardoned Nixon,” I said. “My father was a military man. I’d grown up hearing about duty and consequences. To an eighteen-year-old, that pardon looked an awful lot like letting a powerful man walk away from both.”

Chad nodded.

“Then Carter gave an interview to Playboy and admitted he’d looked at women with lust in his heart. A Baptist Sunday school teacher volunteering that information during a presidential campaign struck me as a peculiar strategy.”

“So who got your vote?”

“Between punishment and lust, lust won.”

Chad laughed hard enough that a woman at the counter turned around.

“It was a scandal?” he asked. “That he admitted that?”

“People talked about it for weeks. We’ve traveled some distance since then. A man can now reach the Oval Office after being convicted on thirty-four felony counts and found liable by a civil jury for sexual abuse. Back then, admitting what went through your mind could make the evening news.”

Chad grew quiet. He had come in to tell me about grocery bags and had somehow found himself examining the moral standards of two centuries. I felt a little bad about that, though not enough to resume the story of Mrs. Drury.

Outside, the Pontiac’s owner came around to the passenger side and took something from the enormous back seat. The Catalina had a 455 under its hood, a four-barrel carburetor, and an automatic transmission. Its trailer package included heavier springs and shocks, meant for somebody who expected to tow more than a lawn mower. Yet standing there in the Dairy Twin lot, it looked less like a machine built to pull a trailer than a promise that a family could set out for another state and arrive with everybody still speaking.

“That would’ve been a new car when you graduated,” Chad said.

“Brand new. A family might have had one in the driveway. Or a LeSabre, LTD, Caprice, Fury, Monaco, Grand Marquis. Big cars with big seats. You loaded up the kids, the suitcases, an ice chest, and your father’s conviction that asking for directions was a character flaw.”

“Were they good cars?”

“Some were. Some spent enough time at the garage that the mechanic sent their owners Christmas cards. We didn’t discuss quality the way we do now. We discussed whether there was room for your legs in back and whether the air conditioner could overcome a Texas August.”

I had been staring at the Pontiac for so long that Chad turned to study it again. Its rectangular headlights and wide grille faced us across the parking lot. In 1976 it would have looked ordinary. Fifty years later it could bring a room to a stop, provided the room contained at least two people willing to look out the window.

“We had a ’69 Catalina when I was growing up,” I told him. “Only Pontiac my family ever owned. I took my driving test in it.”

“How’d you do?”

“Nailed it like the Ninety-Five Theses on a church door in Wittenberg.”

Chad gave me the polite smile people use when they suspect a reference has gone past them at highway speed. I briefly wondered how the Piggly Wiggly corporate office would evaluate knowledge of the Protestant Reformation when considering his permanent promotion. Probably not at all. They’d want to know whether he could keep the dairy case stocked, and in that respect Chad had his priorities straight.

“So what changed most?” he asked. “Since you graduated?”

He had asked two good questions in ten minutes. I began to suspect the acting title wouldn’t last much longer.

“That’s a big one.”

“I’ve got another fifteen minutes.”

“Then we’ll have to leave out the development of cable television.”

He grinned and reached for a fry from my basket. I moved the basket an inch away.

“In the Bicentennial year, it felt good to be an American,” I said. “People had their complaints, sure. Watergate had given them plenty. We argued about Ford and Carter. We were worried about the Russians and nuclear weapons. But every parade had a flag, and most of us thought the country would figure out what came next. Maybe that was youth talking. I’m sure people older than I was saw a more complicated picture.”

Through the window, I could see our reflections laid faintly over the Pontiac. Chad leaned forward, listening. My cap and gray beard hovered near the car’s windshield like somebody’s poorly planned dealership promotion.

“We had three television channels that counted,” I went on. “There was an educational channel, but I can’t claim I spent many evenings with it. Saturday Night Live was still new enough to feel dangerous. Charlie’s Angels gave parents a reason to walk through the living room and ask what we were watching. We had The Carol Burnett Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, All in the Family, The Bob Newhart Show. Everybody at school had seen the same thing the night before, so you could make a joke on Monday without first explaining where it came from.”

“We can all watch the same thing now.”

“We can. Somehow we usually don’t.”

Nadine called Chad’s order to the kitchen window. It wasn’t ready yet. He stayed where he was.

“I saved up ten dollars during the week,” I said, “and if Buttercup was willing to go out with me, I’d take her to whatever was playing at the Bijou. Afterward we’d come here for ice cream. Sometimes, if the weather was right, we’d drive out toward Lake Leon.”

“Was that better than having the internet?”

“Chad, you have no idea how grateful I was to Jimmy Carter after some of those drives. And it had nothing to do with Sunday school.”

He looked at me for a beat. “It was the lust, wasn’t it?”

I had to give him that one.

The trouble with remembering yourself at eighteen is that the young man you find back there still expects to live forever. He has no idea which of his friends will drift away, which ordinary evenings he will one day wish he could visit again, or how long he will get to ride beside the girl in the passenger seat. He worries about whether he has enough gas to make it to Lake Leon and back. You want to tell him to pay attention when Buttercup laughs. You also know he would be too busy admiring how she looks in the dashboard light.

Chad watched me through a stretch of silence. He knew better than to fill it.

“Do you think those days were better than these?” he asked.

I looked at him, surprised to find he meant it. “I wouldn’t give up my phone. Or a navigation system when I’m somewhere unfamiliar.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“No, it isn’t.”

The owner of the Catalina came out of the Dairy Twin carrying a paper sack. He set it on the passenger seat with care, as though someone might be waiting at home for what was inside. For a moment I wondered whether he’d had that car since it was new. Probably not. But somebody once had. Somebody had signed papers for it, adjusted the mirrors, and driven it home believing they had bought a little security for the years ahead.

“I think people call the years around their milestones the best years,” I said. “Graduation. First vote. First job. A wedding. Children being born. Your first new car. You remember the feeling and give some of the credit to the times.”

“And you wouldn’t go back?”

“I’d visit. I’d spend an evening at the Bijou with Buttercup and take the long way home. I’d like to hear my father’s voice again. But I wouldn’t move back there.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’d have to give up everything that happened afterward. Both our daughters. The people I didn’t know yet. Fifty years with Buttercup, including the mornings when she encourages me to leave the house.” I looked down at what remained of my lunch. “And I’d have to go through college algebra again.”

That seemed to settle it for Chad, but only for a moment.

“Then why keep the Fairlane?” he asked. “Why does a Catalina like that stop us both in the middle of lunch?”

“Because you can visit without moving back. You climb into an old car and remember how the door sounds when it shuts, where your hand goes looking for the radio, how much road you can see over the hood. Sometimes the memory it brings back is one you hadn’t thought of in years.”

I thought of the ’69 Pontiac and my driving test. I could still feel my hands on the wheel, held at the positions I’d been told were proper, and my relief when the examiner said I’d passed. Until the Catalina arrived, I had not thought about that afternoon in a very long time.

Nadine brought Chad his burger basket and a fresh glass of tea. He thanked her, then looked at the fries as if they might disappear while we talked.

“I’ve enjoyed this,” he said. “We never get to talk one on one.”

“We do when you come upon me in a corner booth and sit down.”

“We ought to do it more often.”

“I’ll put it on my calendar, provided you leave Mrs. Drury out of it.”

He saluted me with a fry. I left him to his lunch and walked out into that rare, agreeable Fort Stockton afternoon.

The Catalina’s owner had gone back inside for something, so I took my time passing the car. Up close, the cream paint looked even warmer. I peered through the glass at the tan split bench and its folded armrest. There was woodgrain on the dash, a big steering wheel, and an AM radio. I could imagine a family turning it on somewhere west of town, searching the dial while the afternoon miles rolled under the tires.

Then I reached the Fairlane. Its driver’s door gave me the familiar sound I liked so much, and I settled behind the wheel without needing to look for anything. The interior smelled like anole Ford, just as it had fifty years ago. I thought about Buttercup at home and wondered whether I had been gone long enough for her to miss me. There was one way to find out.

Before I started the engine, I glanced back at the Dairy Twin window. Chad was eating his burger at last, alone in the booth, looking out at the two old cars. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Fifty years from now, he might see some ordinary car from this afternoon and remember the day an old guy interrupted his lunch with stories about an election and a girl he used to take for ice cream.

I hoped he would also remember to take somebody he loved for a drive while the weather was good.