With no particular place to go

I took my old Ovation guitar down to the Record Heaven music store in Griffin the other day to see if anything could be done to spruce it up. The guitar man there – I didn’t catch his name – shook his head ruefully and said, “Ain’t worth fixing.”

I didn’t expect to hear that. What did that mean?

The guy looked at it and said, “I can fix it, but there ain’t no way I can make it sound worth a toot.” Well, I’ve been playing it for 15 years, and I’ve never been able to make it sound worth a toot, either. But he told me that it would cost $300 to get it into passable playing shape, and even then he made no guarantees, so I decided to pass.

I was a little down after leaving there, so I decided to indulge one of my favorite pastimes – I went riding around.

Riding around is what I spent about 75 percent of my teenage years in Griffin doing. There wasn’t much else to do there besides school, church and work, and I didn’t find any of the three to be fun. So my buddies and I would climb into our cars that got about 20 feet to the gallon and we’d ride around aimlessly, past all the same old places.

The best time of day to ride around is twilight, or in the loaming, as I’ve heard it called. The setting sun casts a softer light on the world, and everything just looks better.

Of course, a key part of riding around is having some good music to listen to. An activity like that needs a good soundtrack. On the day I got the bad news about the guitar, I went with The Allman Brothers’ Eat A Peach album. You can never go wrong with Duane and Dickie. They always sound worth a toot.

I rode past the house I lived in as a small child. I have almost no memory of it, which is just as well, because that whole neighborhood has been taken over by trashy people and the house looks like hell.

Then I just rode around on some country roads, looking at cows and fields and old churches and mobile homes with Rebel flags still flying out front. My reverie was broken when I got a phone call reminding me that I needed to go by Walgreens and the grocery store. Riding around was a lot more fun before cell phones.

When I was a teenager, my mama didn’t like it when I would tell her that I was going to go riding around. Y’all are just going to find trouble out there, running the roads, she said. No, I would think, if we find trouble, then we’ll stop the car. But I never said that to her. She wasn’t the kind of mama you sassed.

In truth, we never got into trouble riding around. We didn’t drink or do drugs, and girls didn’t have much interest in just driving aimlessly. Anyway, if you had a girl in the car, your goal was to park it somewhere, as soon as possible.

Now, I do all of my riding around by myself, and it never lasts as long, but it’s almost always a good time, even with a dying Ovation lying in the back seat.