Classic Trucks

This weekend I was inspired to do some photography when I visited Fairfax and saw some old classic trucks. They reminded me of my father. My father loved his classic trucks. There were three as I recall, a Chevy from the 40's and later one from the early 50's, turquoise green, then came the more modern beige-brown one. My father already appreciated their classic artistic lines, even before they technically qualified as antiques. I try to imagine what the poetry of it was for him. He had grown up in Queens, New York, and moved to Taos, New Mexico, as a young man, along with mother, when I was still a young toddler. Together we set out to add on to our adobe home. Side by side, we learned to mix the mud with straw and sand to get the right consistency to splatter and smooth over the adobe bricks. But it was the trucks I was telling you about, I am imagining the trucks. The old trucks he loved. He did not want to get rid of them even when they were leaked oil and got rusty-- though my mother prodded. I think he loved those round classic lines. I wonder what the trucks must have represented: something to do with his innate artistic aesthetic, he came from a highly educated cultured family so perhaps it was simutaneously an act of rebellion, the country rural life, the West, the poetry of traveling on Route 66 in a Chevy, independence far from the city life he had known, creating a life for himself. There is something rugged, purposeful, practical and artistic all at the same time about these trucks.