Sometimes the trail is all incline. It’s the never-ending winded climb where you do not get to really take in the surroundings, only compensate for them. Logically the answers are easy, in reality, they are impossible. Some days, I am working in the garage to find that all the bolts in my possession are not the correct thread type.

Some days I want to help, but then find that I am the problem. I know how to win, but I haven’t got the energy to do so. Looking back at the last 120 months is like looking down at Hot Springs after climbing the hill. It does not seem that far, but the elevation was rough.

I knew a man named Jack. He had a way of approaching challenges using tools that were right in front of him that the rest of us did not even see. A sacrifice of a small piece of real estate became a working instrument that could solve the problem in record time. As I think of old Jack, I wonder, is there something in my day that I could tear up and turn into a tool? Something that makes the pending tasks that rotate through my mind like space junk orbiting the planet always posing a risk of injury by way of impact or even worse, distraction.

It is the distraction that has me the most concerned. It is the deadliest of weapons that I know of. Sensory overload is coming from every direction, little do we know, we are traveling at the speed of sound into oblivion, and we don’t even know it.

Time is picking the pockets of all in the room as we laugh and socialize. Those who might be aware seem strange and don’t fit in. The futility of them, the futility of us, somehow looks so different, but is it?

I know why I was thinking of Jack. In my mind, I know what I want to accomplish, but the limitations that I have been fighting for years dictate what the end result is. Jack showed me that we could still take the hill, we just have to do it differently. That stark vision reads like sarcasm but isn’t. 

I make dumplings a lot, but they can be a journey. I have to remember that they do not need to be. See the result, not the process, and find the path can be much shorter than anticipated. 

There is no time for the nebulae of overthinking as it is all waste. It is a virtual game of Eat This Not That, but in a much wider sense. When it came time for Dad to park the Plymouth in the driveway in March, the ice, the racing slicks, and the slope of the driveway did not deter him from what needed to happen. He saw the tool and that tool was velocity. 

It happened on a March night in 1972.  We had gotten home late on a Saturday night from my Grandfather’s house. A late-season wintery mix was falling and Dad had put racing slicks on the back of the Plymouth already.  As he attempted to back the car up the driveway, it was clear, it could not be done. A coating of ice had made the driveway difficult to even stand on, let alone back a car up the small incline. After several tries, I heard him say to my mother in a low voice, “Get out.”

She got me, Brooke, and Amy into the house, and I went straight to the window to see how he would get the car into the yard. He drove down Lillian Road a few houses, and then,  I saw the backup lights come on. When that 63 hit the driveway it was screaming. I would have to say that even if it would have been off and in neutral by now, it would have parked just fine on pure momentum. But this was so much like Dad, when he meant it, he meant it. The car flew up the driveway in reverse, all the way up, then passed the house and into the back yard, way into the back yard. There would be no tickets for parking on the street happening tonight. 

Yes, we did have to dig the car out of the snowy backyard in the morning, but the point was, that he saw the goal, identified the tool to make it happen, and everything else did not matter. That is how you park a 1963 Plymouth Sport Fury.