The Pecan Park Eagle

Thanks for sending this portfolio to me, Sam Quintero! This one was irresistible to any “pass” motion I may have feigned with my electronic finger in the past. I’ve never written in any long form about my lifelong love for the cars of the 1950s, but this one column changes that limitation for all time, with one big exception. – Unless you are old enough to have been coming of age when all these sights were everyday drooling stimuli for just about every teenage guy in America, these sights are far more powerful as pictures in the recreation of a loving thrill that sums up for some of us our eternal attraction to that style of automobile design. Ask us what we think of all those familiar oval shaped gray and tan plastic cars that today are barely distinguishable from one another, or from themselves over one model year to the next. They all look pretty much the same these days. Without their attached manufacturing brand logos, they are all too similar to be distinctively identified – and they all lack that shiny substance that once distinctively adorned our great American muscle cars. Ask us wizened ones what we think,  and we will unitedly tell you, in parody of the lyrics from a great old swing era big band number from an even earlier time, that, when it comes to cars:

“It Don’t Mean a Thing, If It Ain’t Got Chrome Bling!”

Feast your eyes and feed the soul on a small sample of what were once the great American cars for each of us who wanted to rumble down the pavement of our own street of dreams. We didn’t always get there, or end up exactly where we thought we were going with the map plans and partners we started out with, but that’s life. Our job isn’t to be right about everything we think is out there when we start the journey, but to learn and adjust to our mistakes, and to celebrate and be grateful for the people and experiences that came along to teach us what we needed to learn to reach our best destination.

In the end, it’s all about us coming to understand this much about time. – Today is where we live, but that isn’t limiting. It’s very powerful. It’s where we get things done with those things that are possible. The future and the past exist only in the mind. We cannot capture what is yet to be with our promises. We cannot regain what might have been with our regrets. In baseball, as in life, we are all day-to-day, taking each game and each day – one breath at a time.

Our journeys are each our own, but, once upon a time, we could always make sure the chrome was bright and shiny before we gassed up to go!

IT WASN’T JUST THE CHEVYS ~ THAT FED US ALL THE HEAVIES!

Tags: Roam with Chrome

This entry was posted on January 9, 2015 at 2:27 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.