Remembering the Good Old Days When Gas Was Cheap

Photo by SportscarWorkshops

Back when I was a teenager, you could pull into a gas station and not only would a smiling attendant, wearing a neatly pressed uniform, rush out of the station to wash your car’s windshield and check its oil, you could also buy a dollar’s worth of gas and, believe it or not, actually get several gallons for your dollar. And those several gallons of gas were enough to enable you to go cruising around the streets of Fairburn on Saturday night. Well, then again, Fairburn, Georgia only had two traffic lights back then, with three streets intersecting with Roosevelt, the main thoroughfare, so it didn’t take all that much gas to cruise around the town. My point, though, is that gas was affordable.

The good old days are over, though, and it’s extremely doubtful—more like totally improbable—we’ll ever see affordable gas again. In fact, gas prices just seem to keep escalating. Heck, would you believe it took over $50.00 to fill up the tank on my Tundra this week, and it still had a quarter of a tank left?

Of course, I know what you’re thinking: “Carol, you need something more gas efficient than a truck with a V-8 engine.” Yeah, right, as if I want to go riding around the highways of America in one those itty bitty cars you see some people riding around in today. You know the kind I mean. They look like something a clown would drive around in circles in a parade—tiny, boxy, beetle-looking things that probably don’t weigh more than, oh, 500 pounds, if that. Now, come on, do you really think I’m going to go riding around in what amounts to a sardine can and attempt to play bumper cars with SUV’s, 4X4 pickups, and semis with tires as big as a house?  

And since I’m not as dumb as my ex-husband thinks, I will continue to moan and groan as I continue to pay exorbitant prices at the pump. After all, the only other option I have, other than the option previously mentioned, is to park my Tundra and either walk or bicycle to destinations. Not that I intend to do that either, since pedestrians and bicyclists stand even less of a chance on America’s highways and byways than one of those ridiculous looking toy cars.