Pleasing Aroma
When I was barely 16, my father bought me a 1949 Ford Coupe from a neighbor. It was black and I tried not to drive it in the rain because the floorboard on the driver side was somewhat rusted out. Water slinging from the left front tire would somehow find its way directly into my face.
My high school years were spent living in a modest subdivision in the Roosevelt Gardens area of Norfolk, VA. My friend group was very broad, strong, and included Mary Ann although she was going with Dave LaVack, God rest his soul, an intensely handsome doppelgänger of Elvis. It was Dave from whom I would steal the heart of Mary Ann and miraculously make her mine for over 58 years now.
One day, it dawned on me that I could rescue some of my Wedgewood friends from the sentence of going to and from Norview High School on the school bus. That was my first entrepreneurial experience which netted me 10 cents each way, payable at destination.
Like all of us having just learned to drive, I wanted, no lusted, for that emblematic really cool car. To me, that meant something “customized”– No hood ornament or door handles. It must have fender skirts, and very tasteful pinstriping. A louvered hood hood under which were secreted more horses than those that carried the Cossack invaders into Poland and the Ukraine in 1647.
I never dreamed that I would someday have my very own street-rod. Because of a benevolent impulse by God, 63 years after I drove my 49 Ford coupe for the last time, a tractor trailer rig pulled up to our house late one night and off rolled the most beautiful metallic candy apple red 49 Ford fully customized two door coupe with gangster white walls. I’m still gasping for breath from beneath the waves of joy.
Later, after I ran through the pre-bed time checklist, I, pajama bound, strolled into the kitchen for a bite. As I entered the room, I became aware of an aroma I had not smelled since a B-24 taxied by my lawn chair along a taxi way at an air show. Not the pungent smell of the products of combustion, but the smell of the heated air wafting from around the exhaust manifold and that of the cooling engine oil in the crank case of the crated Edelbrock V8 flat head 8 cylinder engine perched beneath a fully aspirated four barrel carburetor.
The sensory reaction exceeded that which I experienced the first time I heard Larry Fleet and Morgan Wallen sing “Where I Find God.” (YouTube)
Under the spell of that aroma, I was transported onto the kitchen floor from where i had stood and laid prostrate in thanksgiving and praise. On the one hand, I was enraptured with gratitude for having received the age old desires of my heart but somehow ashamed that I had never expressed the same dimension of gratitude for the unspeakable gift of His only Son.
I can only hope that the meditations of my heart were a sweet smelling savor in His Nostrils and that the replica of my first car will not become an idle
“Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”
Kent
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