Ranchero

Back in my early days of adulthood, just after I got out of the Air Force, my brother Hal who at that time worked at Bath Iron Works had a hobby - 1956 Buicks. In high school he bought a 1952 Buick Roadmaster two-door hardtop straight-eight DynaFlo gas hog. He eventually sold that car to me and I later sold it for $35.00, no rust anywhere on the car. At the end of his high school years he bought a 1955 Buick Century two-door hardtop that remains to this day in my mind the most beautiful car ever made. He modified it by fitting an updated version of the DynaFlo transmission from a wrecked 1957 Buick Super which turned the car into somewhat of a hotrod.

From that 1955 Century he moved to 1956 Buicks which, in my eye, were close to the ugliest cars ever made. But he kept with them and when I was in my early twenties living with my folks he took a red 1956 Buick and turned it into a pickup truck by cutting the rear half of the body off the frame and building a wooden rack body on it. My folks didn't use that much but they kept it registered and inspected and I used it to haul trash from a campsite my dad maintained on Lower Wilson Pond to "the dump" which was only a couple miles away by road.

That home-built Buick pickup was along the same lines as the Ford Ranchero, first introduced in 1957, and the Chevy El Camino introduced in 1959.

The odd thing about those things, our Buick included, was that they were neither a car nor a truck and there wasn't any category between those two forms of transport. There was the Ranchero and there was the El Camino but there was no genre they belonged to. They certainly weren't cars but you could insult a real truck owner by calling them a truck. Our red Buick was the shining example of that conundrum.

The thing was a freak!

Then again, back then, so was I, even by the new definition of the word, pot smoker with LSD tendencies. A freak was anything or any person who didn't really fit the mold.

There was an emotion involved for me whenever I drove that old Buick on the road. I could ignore it on nearby country roads, but it was almost overwhelming when I drove it into town. The emotion bore similarities to shame but spread wider, into the realm of isolation, of being alone and rejected.

So here's the weird part. I can't seem to help from feeling a tinge of that same emotion when I come across someone who is obviously transgender. I don't seem to be alone with that feeling either. There's the whole thing of pronouns. Is a trans person a "he" or a "she" or something else entirely? Was our old Buick a car or a truck or something else entirely?

I could stop driving that freak Buick and I did and I was relieved when that day finally came, but people who are trans don't have that luxury and I really do feel sorry for them. Maybe that's the emotion I used to feel driving that rack body red Buick. I felt sorry for myself driving it!