The county line
Today I ran an errand that took me across a county line and through a major industrial center. Every time I come out here I am struck by the fact that people still make things, build things, destroy things, move things around on big trucks. My county is a high-tech, white-collar community. We make data. A bunch of zeros and ones on a computer. Nowadays, you can take all the data from an entire office building and compress it onto a memory stick that you can carry in your pocket. We don’t need big trucks, just big pockets to carry around our data (and our colored Sharpie pens).
At a busy interchange on the main highway trending north-south through my neighboring county, I stopped at a stoplight that had two left turn lanes. I was in the leftmost lane. Along side me in the other left turn lane was a tractor-trailer with a flatbed carrying a huge dump truck. It was yellow and caked in mud. Situated on top of the trailer like that, the dump truck stood a whole house taller than my car. There was a "wide load" sign on back of the trailer. This was an understatement. The tires of the dump truck stuck out beyond the edges of the flatbed by two-thirds their width. That means only one-third of the wheel base of this beast was being supported on the trailer. I suddenly felt uneasy. I like to trust my fellow man, but I imagined that the decision to carry the dump truck on this undersized trailer was made by some redneck who drools chewing tobacco on his shoes: “She’ll be alright up there.” My concern, staring up at this mountain of metal, was that she wouldn’t be alright up there, that she was going to tip over and crush me like a plate of chicken fried steak with gravy. Can’t you just hear that redneck looking down on the wreckage? "Well, I'll be damned I really thought she’d be alright up there <spit>."
The tractor pulling this heavy load had been customized the way truck drivers like to do. It had a lot of polished chrome and runner lights, Yosemite Sam "back off!" mud flaps and the driver’s nickname stenciled onto the side panel: “Lil Richard.” High up on the back side of the truck, in bold letters, were the words "Daddy let me drive."
I thought about that for a moment as I waited for the light to turn green: Daddy let me drive. What the hell did that mean? Did the expression symbolize the impatient desire of certain little boys who want nothing more than to grow up and drive their daddy's big rig? If so, shouldn't there be a comma after the word daddy? I know that sounds picky, but the comma makes all the difference. Without the comma I'm led to believe that the driver is in fact driving his daddy's truck – with his permission.
It occurred to me that the only way to know for sure what this turn of phrase meant was to ascertain the truck driver's paternal lineage. In other words, ask him, "Who's your daddy?" I had a good laugh about that and forgot for a moment that I was just this close to being crushed to death by a free-falling dump truck. But then the light turned green and the tractor-trailer lurched forward. The massive dump truck on top shook and leaned a little in my direction. I stopped laughing. Instinctively, I hit the gas and accelerated out of harm's way. A half hour later I crossed back over the county line, drove to my office and put in my eight hours – making data.
Postscript: It turns out that the "Daddy let me drive" stenciled on the truck refers to a song by Country artist Alan Jackson called "Drive (For Daddy Gene)." Wifey called me all excited when she heard the song on the radio in her car. These lyrics are somewhere in the middle: "When daddy let me drive / Oh he let me drive / Daddy let me drive..." How could I have missed that? Needless to say, the research assistant here at Peeling Wallpaper has been sacked. --JM 10/25/04
12:27:12 AM  Stories
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