For Where Your Treasure Is, There Your Heart Will Be Also
I could still feel in the back of my head, the smell of 70-year-old grease and oil. Even though the garage door was closed and I was good ways off the pungent odor had a way of finding me, magically warming and repulsing me at the same time. I’d spent the better part of 2 months with my hands stuck deep in the dark muck of a 1946 Willys Jeep, the rebirthing of which was to be a gift for my father upon his retirement. It seemed a fitting gift, dad was born in ’41 and this was born in ’46. He drove one on his first job (that I was old enough to recall), now he can drive one on his last job – the one that I’ll never forget. Transmission, transfer case, steering knuckles and axles all were field dressed; disemboweled, reviewed, fiddled with, cleaned and reassembled with amazement and reverence. She’d been a “field find” which means that my heart ran way ahead of my brain, seeing in that fallow field a vehicle that offered only a vision of finished beauty a