"Reminders........................"

My mechanic operates out of an old barn converted into a garage, located about a half hour drive south of me, out a windy, two-lane road, up and down a few Kentucky hills, then back a ridge a mile or so over an undivided, even “crookeder” route. In terminology my family used when I was a child, it’s “out in the country”. With merely a few open days yet left on my calendar before school starts, though, I drove the old blue Toyota Corolla out for an oil change yesterday, taking along one of my Ravi Zacharias books to thumb through while there. This isn’t Jiffy Lube or the waiting area at your local auto dealer’s place of business. Henry’s “office” is to one side of four racks, no doors, not much in the way of walls, for that matter, several decades of grease, dust, tools, farm equipment, pin-up pictures of old cars as well as women, an ancient desk covered with paperwork that seems to overflow to other parts of the place, and a coffee pot sitting at an angle atop some books on a bench near the entrance. There’s a metal kitchen table with a couple of chairs positioned near a refrigerator whose outside surface appears to have never known a wipe-down with any sort of cleanser. Seated there on this occasion was an old man, a bit thinner than me, but about the same height, and his grey hair, though shaggy in back, merely an extension of his full beard, trimmed and not “Santa Claus”, yet a good handful around that lower part of his face. When he spoke, I sat down beside him; and, from there it was forty-five minutes of his life history. Born in Perry County, quitting school at the age of thirteen when his father died in the mines, he came north looking for a job, only by chance, while working at a sheet-metal factory in Cincinnati, did he pick up knowledge of automobiles from a friend and it led to nearly sixty years within such trade. My own contributions to the conversation were minimal, believing myself to be in the company of an “elder”. When, at one point just before leaving, I inquired as to his age, it was all I could do to keep from visibly showing my shock, his answer revealing him to be but seventy-four. While my own antiquity certainly doesn’t reflect youth and good looks, the journey, seemingly, hasn’t quite yet brought me to such stage as this fellow. It could be, of course, that others view me differently, my vanity interfering with what my vision sees in the mirror; but, of a truth, I’m glad for the changes that coming to Christ in ’72 brought to me in so many ways. An immediate break from an addiction to more than two packs of cigarettes a day, if nothing else, had to account for at least part of this longevity gained……