Continuing to think about my time at the drag strip Saturday afternoon….  Anticipation was in the air,  — that adrenaline sizzle as I waited for 20 minutes in a long line of cars and pickup trucks to pay entry admission to the track.  Excitement is contagious.   They came out —  dare I say, for love of their tricked-out pickup trucks !?

I, a drag racing fan, — could only observe as an outsider.  The pickup truck was not until lately, standard to my white-anglo-suburban-culture.  To plenty of Hispanic young men and women, whose heritage is of the southwest, a pickup truck is a reminder of home.  I do understand, and in a way envy their love for trucks, their sense of community that draws them to an afternoon of fellowship, food, and music here at the race track.

Do we not need something real to anchor our imagination, to signify that life has meaning, no matter the ugliness, disappointment, and raging chaos that often intrudes?  In my case, for the arc of my adult life, since my sophomore year in high school, a drag car constructed to make as much power as possible given the laws of physics, beautiful to the eye, elegant to the mind, an engineering marvel, — has been my imagination’s attachment to reality.

A quarter mile of asphalt, a warm summer day, and the sound of a nitromethane-burning-race motor warming up in the pits, is a sign that Life, beyond my individual existence has enduring meaning.

In my mind a tricked-out pickup truck on a drag strip is ridiculous.  Nevertheless, I understand the love which the guys and gals have for these vehicles, and the energy of life expressed in this passion.

Can we live without such a passion?  Can life endure apart from such a love?

Such a energizing passion can be attached to something as unlikely as one’s beloved cat…………

Shakespeare thought that we could not live without such a quest for beauty in something we love:

Sonnet 65
By William Shakespeare

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea
But sad mortality o’er-sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out
Against the wrackful siege of batt’ring days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall time’s best jewel from time’s chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
   O, none, unless this miracle have might,
   That in black ink my love may still shine bright.