From a short story called, "Ford Gray".

My Dad had huge Ford pickup trucks that smelled like the inside of the oldest book in the library, all of his life. I can still get teary eyed just seeing one of those beasts in a junk yard. If I were able I would open it's long abandoned cab, sit inside it; cry. If not to cry then to use it's cab as one might use a confessional but in this case the priest on the other side would be the soul of my dead father. There I would hold a much needed spiritual communion with him exacting my anger while finally forgiving him his humanness.
Would it be possible that there would be enough juice in the battery that I could get the AM to play just one song? Ya load 16 tons and whad'ya get, another day older and deeper in debt, Saint Peter don't ya call me cause I can't go....I owe my soul to the company store. Truly a hymn fit for such circumstances as this.
Though our father owned many in his life, the last 77 with a 350 sits in our mothers driveway. So huge, so looming; my mother just leaves it lurking there because to sell it would be the saddest thing to do, and to keep it... sadder yet. It has sat there since 1997 when my dad died. Will it be 10 years next October?
My dad, with our ill begotten help, painted it himself and it shows a little. He was not a body man, he was a rancher, moved to the big city of 6000 turned mechanic. His spirit broken and his desire to live lost he made a living that one might call a dying. His sons, 2 of them, sorrows purveyors at never living up to the expectations of the greatest man and the greatest failure. So much like him, they seek life as violently as they can attain it. Drunkenly or stoned in whatever fashion the day meters itself out to them. We, the rest of us, watch in distinct horror at having to relive what we thought was a Greek tragedy written in the history of a dead man but now we see it living in the lost, the brothers, the men of the family now. Both now unable to take care of themselves, one closer to the grave, the other closer to the prison cell; they have become the dirtiest trick God has ever played.
What bitter pride they feel for knowing the man, his harsh manner and brutal tongue sometimes flecked with the humor and character that lines their flesh. Those Ford trucks, they still haunt them with this same bitterness; a reminder of their paternal heritage, the pride I suppose would be part of just knowing that your father is the one man that helps you be the man that you are.
For them the Ford sits in that driveway with as much resentment as it can muster for my father, paranormally, from the grave. Or is it just that last cellular memory of the huge man, leering from it's windows, forearms spattered with red freckles and light blonde hair?
He was 65 when he died and he had no gray in his hair. The gray Ford parked in the driveway had aged for him. Letting him die a little longer, berating all of us until he could not avoid the last rites on his death bed because his pain outspoken his words.
We wet sanded that body by hand and, I remember, it was red before he painted it Ford Gray. It was the meat beneath the flesh. It was his Christine and we cling to it as idolically as if he loved our being, our communion with him. We hate it too, it's presence calling us to it to make us sit inside and smell it, things dead, things gone, things better forgotten. Still we sit, we remember, we cry, we turn on the radio and listen to Hank Williams Sr. the eerieness is not lost on us that this is what he listened to last before dying.
We loved the man, his anger, his drunkenness, our inability to ever please him. We honor the man that others tell us he was. We fear him, we miss him, we hate him and we love him. We wash over it all with Ford Gray and say that it is done. It is over but it is all that we are, every organic morsel...Ford Gray.