Please enjoy this excerpt from Get ‘Er Sideways
The old recliner had seen better days. It had been a Christmas present from my wife on our first Christmas as a married couple, and it had moved with us to our new house a few years later. But today it was time to say goodbye, and I loaded it into the back of my pickup to take to the dump. I backed up to the private dump ditch on a relative’s private property, jumped up into the back of the truck, and grabbed the old recliner. It was not a big chair; it was the small variety that sold for $49.95, with only vinyl upholstery, but it was all we could afford at the time, and I loved this thoughtful gift from my young wife. Because of its small size, I was able to lift it over my head and prepared to throw it deep into the ditch, just for my own entertainment. Just as I got the chair over my head I heard a metallic clunk hit the bed of the pickup. I let fly with the chair and looked down to see a women’s leather key fob, the kind that has a flap that you can fold the keys down in and snap the front closed. It had an embossed decorative pattern, and the words “Jesus is Love,” and I recognized it immediately as belonging to my wife; it had gone missing years ago back in our trailer house days. As I picked it up and spread all of the keys out, I saw the front door key to our trailer house. Next there was a large rubber headed key with a VW emblem that had belonged to our VW Rabbit, but the next keys were the special ones: they were the original Chrysler corporation logo keys to my long gone, 1967 Plymouth GTX. Being young, and poor, and with a two month old child, we had sold it during one of the 1970’s gas crises. This car had been instrumental in me meeting my wife and in it we had dated and fell in love. This was the car in our wedding album pictures, all adorned with toilet paper and shaving cream, with “just married” painted down the side and us smiling out the windows in our matching polyester, baby blue leisure suits. This also was the car that had quite a reputation, and the one that my friend would jump in the front seat and proclaim “Get ‘er sideways!” Finding those old keys again brought back all of these wonderful memories.
Having these keys in my possession again was like having a symbolic piece of the GTX back. Several more years passed, and being a car nut, sometimes I would daydream about seeing a 1967 GTX at a car show and pulling out this old set of keys, putting them in and turning the lock. In my mind that would be a Cinderella being reunited with her glass slipper moment.
Now here I am in Illinois, a long way from my Oklahoma/Texas border home, pulling into a driveway surrounded by cornfields, and there sits the red, 1967 GTX I have come here to see. There it sat, backed up to a fence, facing the road. There was nobody there but my wife and daughters, who watched as I walked to the back of the car, pulled the old key fob out of my pocket, selected the round headed key, and stuck it in the trunk. I turned it ever so slowly, but at a certain spot there was a very lively pop, and the trunk sprang, just as though it was saying to that key, “Where have you been all these years?” You only have so many dreams come true in a lifetime, and I had just had one.