Driving Interstate 5 through the Willamette Valley is never a thrill. I was trying to calculate how many times I have made the trip from Portland to Corvallis or Eugene and back. 250? Maybe 300? I lived two years in Eugene in the '70s and did a 48 hours-on/48 hours-off shift as a paramedic in Portland. Lots of trips back and forth. Now there are the trips back and forth visiting or retrieving my daughters who live in Eugene and Corvallis, at least during the school year.
Sunday was another trip down the super-slab. At an especially numbing part of the ride I was startled to see a toy car in my mirror. A double take showed that it was not a toy, but a full-sized car. But this car was exactly as I had built a plastic model of a hot rod in my middle school years. I spent many after-school hours holding the finished model, imagining what it would be like to drive down the road in it. And here it was, come alive from my past and about to pass me. I don't remember the exact specs of that plastic model, nor do I remember hot rods well enough to identify the year and make of the body of this car, but the details of this shape, down to the wide whitewalls was burned into my brain 50 years ago.
As an 11 year old I had sworn to myself that someday I would have a driver's license, a job and enough money to own a car just like that model. Some day I would really drive it. But time passes, interests change, and I forgot all about the little hot rod. Until Sunday. For a moment I was 11 years old again. For a moment I wanted nothing in the world as much as to be the guy driving that car. And then it was gone. A dot up ahead blending into a group of other dots. Time in the mirror, fading into an autumn horizon.
