It’s the Sunday of a three-day weekend. Tomorrow is MLK day and the banks will stay closed.

I’m standing on a street I used to live on two decades ago at the start of my experiment in middle classery, in Prettytown.

I’ve come back to look at an empty cargo trailer that’s there now. It’s about as old as the experiment, and it’s got oil stains on a crusty plywood floor. In addition to these failings, it’s about a foot smaller than I’d like in all three dimensions; height, width, and length. (On the plus side, it does have tandem axles, and bright lights, and a roof fan, and a triple tongue.)

I explain all this to the kid who now owns it. Besides all that, I say, I just bought a rooftop tent this week, and so, strictly speaking, I don’t even need the trailer.

So, I say, let’s work it like this … Leave it posted for a few days and see if you can get the price you want.

If that doesn’t work out, I’ll be your fallback.

Just know that if it ends up that way, I’ll come back with a lowball offer. I can give you 3K. (This is a third off his asking price.)

With zero hesitation he says: I’ll take 3K today.

I temporize. I say, well … if that’s how it is, I better hook it up and test drive it, at least around the neighborhood.

It rolls along behind the truck just fine. I come on back to the warehouse he’s living in.

I have a very good impression of him. Lord knows I’m no great judge of character, but I really like him, and I even believe his story, which implausibly includes a sick grandmother as the reason for his negotiation flexibility.

It has a license plate. He says he already has the title notarized. I slide toward a flaky yes.

Later in the evening, I spend three full hours in the Home Depot picking out materials for the truck and tent project, and during this adventure, I get his Zelle via text. It checks out; of course it does. I drive back to Basecamp A, at Sand Rock. Rackless, boxless, the old truck feels like it’s dancing down the road.

Tomorrow I’ll drive back, lay eyes carefully on that title, and take possession with one low fully electronic payment.

That done, it will acutely feel like high time to stop spending money now, and begin making it again, in the midst of these refresh and renewal projects.

But listen.

I’ve cobbled together all the building blocks of my ideal rig for right at a mere ten thousand dollars. I have a four-wheel drive truck. I have a crude approximation of a pop-up camper for its bed. I have a seven (almost) by fourteen (almost) office space room on wheels to pull behind it.

It’s true that it’s all twenty years old, except for the new RTT waiting for me in the Valley.

It’s also true that there’s a metric fuckton of sweat equity ahead of me that must be applied to pull it all together.

But honestly, this is exactly, exactly how it should be.

I am not now, nor have I ever been, no Senator’s son. It ain’t me.

No. My father started out beatnik like Jack Kerouac. Unlike Kerouac, he never wrote a successful novel, or any novel, any creative opus, at all. But like Kerouac, he slept rough and poor often, and suffered for his sins, and ended up drinking too much, and living stupidly Republican in his salty psychotic bones, and failing to support the multiple children he brought into this vale of pain.

Incredibly, they all ended up successful anyway, if you stretch the definition of success a bit to include his eldest living and legit, who always was a late bloomer, and whose face I study with mixed emotions sometimes in the mirror.

Dearly beloved. Thank you for being there for me even when I thought I didn’t need anyone.

The spring, the bloom time, is only just around the next corner of this two-lane ribbon of blacktop.