BJ Price
They say that admitting is the first step towards recovery. I’ll go ahead and say it, I’m a door slammer. Now before you get it in your mind that I’m prone to flying off the handle and stomping around the house in occasional fits of rage, I should clarify the door-slamming thing. I slam vehicle doors. I’ve been reminded of this on more than one occasion. Reminded by my wife, friends, and college buddies years ago. Full-size cars, compact cars, pickup trucks, heavy trucks, minivans, you name it, all vehicle doors get the same treatment from me.
I consider this vehicle door-slamming thing to be a product of my raising. I spent a lot of time riding in my dad’s 1970 Ford F-250 Camper Special pickup truck. Everything about that truck was heavy. It required a good deal of force just to shut the doors on it. As a little guy, it took all the strength I could muster to close those sturdy truck doors. Having spent some time driving an old dump truck and a few semi tractors years later gave me further practice in applying extra effort to shut the doors.
When I started driving in 1998, of course I was behind the wheel of my own Ford truck. It was already 20 years old and had spent its entire life as a farm truck. To put it nicely, that truck’s better days were definitely behind it. When I finally sold it, I found another less tired old Ford in 2000 and I’ve been driving it ever since. His name is Old Red. With normal age and wear on the door seals, hinges and latches on the ancient rig, it takes some work to get the doors closed. Sometimes it takes a couple of tries to get them shut. No amount of WD-40 is going to improve the situation. To further complicate things, sometimes a floor mat hangs out the door or a seatbelt flops down and gets stuck between the door and where the door needs to be. In order to compensate, I try to slam them hard the first time around to eliminate the chance of the door latching only halfway and then me having to open it back up and shut it all over again. Unfortunately, this heavy-handed habit even carries over to new vehicles equipped with doors that latch with very minimal effort. Certain members of my family remind me of this on occasion.
The conservationist in me keeps hanging on to Old Red for practical reasons such as the fact that it reliably gets me from point A to point B, it’s paid for, and it generally does whatever I need it to do. If I admitted to it, I hang on to it for sentimental reasons as much as anything. I’ve been driving it since high school and we’ve been to at least 25 of these great United States together.
One of these days I’ll have to park Old Red for good. He runs great but he’s looking kind of rough. I do have another truck in the barn that looks nicer and has a lot less wear and tear on it, but what’s the use. I’d probably slam those doors, too.
Reach BJ Price at 937-456-5159 for more information.
