Traffic finally starts moving. You press the gas pedal and the engine roars to life, transferring precious power from the crank to the other thingy to the drive shaft and you move forward. None of that, sir, is ever taken for granted in this old car you love.

The driver in front of you seems to know what she’s doing and that’s good, because with this many cars going fifty, no chance to change lanes. But she does change lanes and because you’re fiddling with the radio you don’t see the long flatbed truck that slid in front of you. The truck with all manner of bouncy things on its bed. There is nothing close to good looking about your car but it’s still your baby and you guard it like one.

On this truck, there’s a rope lazily thrown across some boards but that is the least of your worries.  You worry about that Mighty Joe Young tool chest inching its way to the back of the bed. You worry about those eight steel rods that jump every time the driver shifts gears. There’s the garden tiller (Oh! That’s where the chunks of clay smashing off your windshield are coming from), that doesn’t seem tied down to much of anything. You can’t keep a can of soda from falling out of the cup holder in your car, and this guy has so much stuff dancing around his bed it looks like a Disney construction cartoon.

Only one thing to do.  That joker who’s been trying to get in front of you for the last six miles and is so close he could kiss you on the neck? Find a way to let him get in front of you.

What about that smell? You know, the one that comes out of your air vents when you turn the air off or turn the heat on or switch the fan off or, heck, change the radio station, while you drive in the middle of nowhere at one in the morning. You start to think you smell something but when you sniff, you don’t smell it. Do that a couple of times, and then you turn the radio off. Everyone does that, right?  Turning the radio off seems to be the first step to troubleshooting on a car.

“Well, Mr. Phillips, right before the transmission dropped off the Johnson rod, what did you do?”

“I…uh…turned the radio off.”

“Okay, great! You’re a ‘car guy’ aren’t you?”

Then you really start to smell it and turn every switch that’s on to off, and vice versa.  You shift gears, speed up, slow down, pull the lighter out of it’s hole or you fiddle with the hole where the lighter used to go.  Then you start to curse the idiots who make this foreign/domestic truck/car/suv and swear the next one you buy will be the exact opposite of whatever it is currently causing all this heartache.

Then you pass by a tar truck.  You hope your car didn’t hear anything you said.  It’s still one in the morning.

1993 Don’t remember if I blinked, laughed, stuttered, or shouted when Lil Sis said, “Can you drive me to my bike?” But I know she walked to get her bike.

In fact – as I walked there with her – it may have been our first real serious conversation about working hard and working smart and how sometimes the smart thing to do is work hard. She listened, I can tell you, because as she heads towards her twentieth birthday, one thing the girl can do is work; she’s not skeered of putting in hours.

1995 “Oh, I have to be Abe Lincoln tomorrow.” Uttered by Big Sis at 9 PM CST, on the last night of vacation. She snagged her PhD in Angling to Stay Up Later at an early age. The Abe thing was…well…if I was her peer, there’d have been a fist bump. Being her dad…no fist bump. She still makes a number of last minute decisions but gets it all done.

1997 We assumed Bubba overheard our conversation about Christmas presents and bills because one day he said, “You mean you can’t just go to the bank and take money out; you have to put money in? What's up with that?”

Apparently we had a financial whiz kid in our midst and didn’t know it. We assume he ignored our laughter, championed this thought over the years and slowly the basic premise slithered into practice in the banking and mortgage industries. The residual effect we enjoyed in 2008. All to well. Sorry about that, y’all.

I'm thinking we all learned some stuff and blazed through good times, indeed. Some serious things, too.

One year, as I walked her home from school on the last day before vacation, Big Sis ran this by me.

"Dad," she confided in as serious a tone as her nine years would allow, "I heard a kid at school say a bad word. He used a bad word for black people."

We got into a conversation about prejudice and racism, and she asked, "But how come some black people call each other that word?"

"Good question. I think every nationality feels it's their right to do that to maybe help take the bad feeling away from the words. When we go to see your cousins up north, remember hearing them talking about Polacks? We’re all Polish, and I guess everyone feels its okay to say it. If you weren't Polish, it'd be a different story."

She thought for a moment, and then announced, "I don't think I'm ever going to call a black person a Polack."

It’s a good day – vacation or otherwise – when you learn your kid’s heart is in the right place.