May 14, 2009 - 04:30 AM
By Neil Crone
The Oshawa GM Truck Plant is closing down and it's got me thinking.
I drive a yellow VW Beetle that runs on vegetable oil. I have yellow flowers on my dash. All that's missing is a Mary Kay sticker on my bumper. But I want you to understand I wasn't always like this. There was a time, a glorious time, when I was a trucker.
For a couple years in my early twenties, before all the pill-popping, liquor and fast women of Canadian show business, I was about as blue collar as they come. I ran my own roofing company until the snow came and then I plowed driveways. I was, in the vernacular, pretty darn manly.
And of course, I had a truck. I drove a great big, smooth-riding, silver-and-blue GMC Scottsdale. The only V8 engine I will probably ever own, that truck, in the vernacular, hauled ass.
While I love my little, environmentally-friendly Bug, there is something undeniably cool about cruising around in a big pickup. For one thing, chicks dig them. They don't call them pickups for nothing. A pickup truck says, "I have a big tool belt." It says, "I am a man who can build a home for you to safely raise our many children in." It says, "I hunt. So we will always have meat." What woman can resist such pheromonal messages? I, of course, could do or had none of those things, but that didn't matter. I had the truck.
I took my wife-to-be on our very first date in that old GMC and I'm sure it had a very firm hand in clinching the deal. She was a farm girl who'd grown up driving pickups and tractors and she could toss a 75-pound bale of hay around like it was a pillow. I was from the suburbs of Scarborough where the closest thing we had to "working the land" was dragging a weed-bar over the boulevard.
I like to think I had something do with her falling in love with me, but still, I can't help but wonder that things might have turned out very differently had I pulled up in a Smart Car. Which reminds me of another great thing about that Scottsdale. Bench seats.
There is no better barometer for how your date is going than the bench seat. When you take someone out and the two of you are planted in bucket seats, you've no idea how well things are progressing. There's no movement, no sliding scale of intimacy. You're stuck in those seats.
With the bench seat though, she may start out at the window, but by the end of the night, if you haven't blown it too badly, she will have sidled right up beside you. Conversely, if she's still hugging the door-latch after a night of wings, beer and bowling, it's probably not a match made in heaven. That's the beauty of the bench seat. That's engineering. And anyone who has ever been to a drive-in in a pickup with bench seats will tell you that is about as close to a perfect evening as you can get.
I was only a trucker for a short time. But it was a golden time and I remember it like it was yesterday. And so, as we say goodbye this week to the truck plant, let me very sincerely offer a tip of my soiled baseball cap to the folks who helped my wife fall in love with me.
Durham resident Neil Crone, actor-comic-writer, saves some of his best lines for his columns.
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