THE SO-CLAMORED-FOR TALE - TRUCK IN THE PARKING LOT

Okay, so Jaco has been injected with the spew-factor-3 medicine and we are on our way back to Eddie’s house. Everything was smooth sailing and Eddie was back to his normal self. Actually Eddie’s mood took a noticeably good turn after the vet explained that money, even of the paper persuasion, holds up very well in most pets.

I had another great friend when I was in high-school. His name was Greg, and actually we’d been friends since junior high, a.k.a. middle school. But hey, who’s going to count the years when you’re best friends, right? Wow the stories I could tell! A Greg had a pickup truck. Oh no, not just any pickup. He got a job just so he could customize the thing, and customize he did. First of all it had a lift-kit, flashy rims, and gargantuan tires, a superbly detailed paint job. You had to have some powerful thighs to jettison yourself up into the cab. Oh yeah, he technically had a pickup truck, but you were NOT going to call Greg to help you move!

Funny that he was a Christian when we were growing up and I was not. Then we went our separate ways: he went to college and I went into the military. Greg succumbed to the liberal rantings of leftist whacko profs, the allure of feminists who were ready to discard everything about themselves that made them precious, and the stupid dimwit cries of his partying humanist “friends” there at those places of supposed higher learning and he abandoned the truth. I, on the other hand, came to recognize that Jesus was the truth, the way, and the life, while I was in the service. Now Greg did eventually return to his senses, but like many humans, he had to hit bottom before he looked back upward.

Well, there we were tooling on down the road with Jaco in the hatchback of my pretty sports car, when lo and behold what did I spy in the parking lot of the Speakeasy Bar-n-Grill? Of course, it was none other than Greg’s unmistakable pickup truck sitting head and shoulders above all the other vehicles there under the floodlight’s beacon. There was no doubt. Now, Greg and I had lost touch with each other, he moved several times, I was transferred several times and his parents moved as well so this was likely the only opportunity I was going to have (unless he showed up at some future high school reunion) to get back in touch.

Eddie saw the truck same as I did and was excited but was pretty apprehensive too, saying that we didn’t want to be late getting Jaco into a tub before he started letting loose with the $50 bill and whatever might be accompanying it.

“No worries.” I said, “I’m just gonna get his phone number and we’re gone.”

Yes, that was the plan. I zipped into the parking lot and Eddie and I ran inside. Greg was there, bigger than life and apparently with a whole entourage of other friends of ours from high school, including Nate. Oh man, it was great! We were laughing and hugging and everyone was slapping everyone else on the back – I was just overcome with seeing so many friendly and familiar faces. I remember telling Greg how shocked I was that he still had the custom truck what with college expenses and all. He explained how he managed everything (he mooched off his folks as much as he could – ah the character-developing secrets to life you learn at our fine universities nowadays!) and then he asked what I was driving.

That was the moment that time sort of stood still. All the sound around me in that bar just sort of deepened and slurred. Eddie and I looked wide-eyed at each other and screamed running out the door.

J.P.T.