Hours

149,999.9—that magical number! It’s hard to keep my mind and eyes on my driving as my odometer spins through the next tenth of a mile. I take pride in my ability to maintain vehicles in their second (and third) stages of their life’s journeys. Milestones like this are meaningful to me. Perhaps it’s just a silent display of “macho.” (I’ve noticed others shutter in fear of pending disaster far in advanced of the opportunity to celebrate six digit odometer readings.) Perhaps it’s because I am chea….ah, thrifty. Whatever the reasons I’ve always felt that it was my calling to milk the last miles out of “Henry Ford’s creations.”
Of course, some of my family and friends relegate me to a the lower bracket on the awards charts. My brother-in-law has delicately babied his little blue Honda Civic toward the third of a million mile mark. A friend just purchased a big rig with two thirds of a million miles on it and is heading to the million mile mark.
When I thought of my new mileage milestone (no pun intended), I thought of the many hours that I (and others) have spent in this vehicle. Let’s see; at 50 miles an hour that would be three thousand hours or 125 nonstop twenty-four hour days in this car. That doesn’t count time sitting in traffic jams, winding down residential thoroughfares, or going through drive thrus, etc. There is actually no way to tell how much time was spent in the vehicles. It is not like an airplane that logs flight hours for maintenance purposes. My garden tractor is the only thing I’ve owned that has an hour meter and it’s actually the only “vehicle” I’ve ever purchased new . Because of that, I know that I (and my family) have sat on that big orange beast for exactly 277.8 hours since I’ve owned it. (Glancing out the window; amazingly, my lawn still needs mowed after all those hours of mowing it!)
Those thoughts cause me to think of what was accomplished in my thousands and thousands of driving hours. Guess it’s time to reflect a bit. My earliest recollections were of a special time in 1968 when I spent 17 hours with my mother in a ’63 Ford Galaxy driving roundtrip to North Carolina for my military discharge. (The speed limits were much, much higher then!) Then I thought of the thousands of hours in an earlier life that my bride and I spend together in a Datsun 240Z transversing the nation’s highways and byway on our way to various restaurants. And yes, I fed my family for thirty years by driving endless hours to hundreds of stores and bodegas in various vans. I remember those precious hours with one son driving back and forth to Penn State. I had some of my last dedicated “together hours” with my second son navigating back and forth on a journey to Toledo, Ohio. And most recently several years ago, there was the long special journey from Indiana with my only daughter. In addition while driving, I’ve had many private “aha” moments of reflection, perhaps hundreds of phone calls, and most importantly many other memorable traveling companions.
I realized that, like my life’s journey in general, many of those hours were very special. It isn’t just getting from “point A to point B” or even getting to a destination although that’s often my stated purpose. I am learning that it’s the journey and all that goes with it that is so important. I increasingly think of time spent with folks like you who have accompanied me as I travel life’s journey. Thank you for being there, and thank you for helping me learn this lesson because of those hours we’ve spent traveling together on my life’s journey.