The Call of The...Wait. What?

Hubcap? Seriously?

Apparently so. I’ll just come right out and admit it. I am drawn, somewhat secretly and inexplicably, to the hubcaps I see, lost and deserted and shiny along the road to our ranch.

For some reason, they are plentiful here. There is a lot of traffic, after all, headed down to GBNP, and maybe the road is just bumpy enough and just curvy enough to loosen the holds that last little bit so they just fly right off. And land right where I can see them.

I don’t know why they catch my eye so. They appear so…sculptural. So…intricate. So…shiny. I realize this will sound completely, um, redneck of me, but I have visions. Visions of a collection of artistically arranged hubcaps, filling one side of a building perhaps. Lining the rails of a fence. The possibilities are limitless.

But something keeps holding me back. It could possibly be #1, saying, “No. I’m not stopping. That is trashy.” Or perhaps it is the thoughts swirling around in the back of my mind, “That IS kinda trashy. I guess...”

Until Today.

Today, I picked up a hubcap. I had seen it, lying on the side of the road on my way to town this morning. If that is still there when I get back, I thought to myself, I am going to pick it up. I am. I will. If there is no traffic coming.

As luck would have it, it was still there. And there was no traffic. I pulled off to the side, hurried across the road, ironically in my red high heels. Honestly. I picked it up, put it in the van. “What’s that?” H-Bomb asked curiously from the backseat.

“It’s a hubcap, honey,” I replied.

“What’s it for?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

As I said those words, I considered what I had just done, what #1 would say when he discovered it in the garage. I had just picked up a hubcap. A slightly broken, not very intricate, hardly shiny at all hubcap. In fact, the more I looked at it, the more I was convinced that it wasn’t even metal—it looked plastic. I drove on, the hubcap beside me. Not shiny. Not very artistic. Certainly not sculptural. Kind of, shall we say, trashy.

After this short internal debate, and after a truck passed by, I rolled down my window and tossed the hubcap back out. I drove on, not watching to see where it would land. Let someone else pick it up and treasure it for its simplistic, lackluster brokenness. I’ll wait for another one. A better one. A hubcap that is blindingly shiny and unbelievably intricate, possibly from a Porshe or a Benz. Or perhaps I’ll find a hobby that is less, well, trashy.