When I turned 16 in 1989, I was hoping for a new Volkswagen Cabriolet convertible, which was every teenage girl’s dream! That didn’t happen. Instead, my parents told me I could drive my dad’s 1979 Ford F250. I hated it. It was old. It was embarrassing. It was a stick. Not cool for a young city girl. Seeing as there was no other option, I tried to embrace it by plastering my snowboarding stickers all over it to “make it cool.” I left for college a couple years later and the truck sat in my parent’s driveway and eventually stopped working. A friend of theirs, Alan, offered to buy it. They handed him the keys for nothing, and he trailered it from Utah to South Carolina in 2007. That was the end of me thinking about that stupid truck. Good riddance!
Recently, my 16-year-old son started asking for a truck. Not just a truck, he wanted an old truck. My husband was ready to buy one, when for the first time in years, I thought about my old F250. I asked my parents about it, and they told me that Alan did some great work on it and named it “Big Jim” after my dad. I reached out to Alan, and he said Big Jim was still around but wasn’t running and had been sitting for the past 4-5 years. It was ours if we could get it. So, Big Jim just took another cross-country trailer trip from South Carolina to Colorado, and it is now in the hands of my 16-year-old son, Gunner. He is excited about fixing it up and getting it back on the road (or off the road!). I still hate that stupid truck, but now I’m happy to have it back in the family, old snowboard stickers and all! Big Jim lives!