Summers in Miami, Florida are hot and muggy and filled with bugs and mostly miserable. Marsha and I lived there for a good number of years and I, because I was in the heat a lot, really didn’t like it. Marsha, who went from the air conditioned house to the air conditioned car to the air conditioned office back to the air conditioned house, loved it. Occasionally she also went to the air conditioned store or mall and every once in a while we went to the breezy beach. It was all fine to her, but it beat me down.

          One hot and sticky Saturday in the summer of 1979 I spent the whole morning under my father’s truck putting on new shocks. You could do something like that so long as you wrapped it up by noon. By one o’clock I was sitting in a lawn chair in his back yard sucking down big glasses of iced tea. My father was sitting next to me sipping at his tea. I had been the one under the truck busting my knuckles, not him. I had been pondering something and I choose that moment to talk to the old guy about it.

          “Dad, I been thinking.” He rolled his eyes and said, “They teach you to do that in college, boy?” My father’s family was not big on college. In fact, my two sisters and I were the very first in the family to go to college. The fact that we all graduated and we paid our own way made that a pretty nice thing. My father had no use for such nonsense.

          “Well, yeah, they did teach me to think, but this has nothing to do with that. I was thinking that with your garage and the equipment you have, we could put out a sign offering to change the oil in folks’ vehicles for $19.95 and we could make a pretty good penny. Every Ford product takes the same filter, there are only two different filters for Chrysler products and GM only has four different filters. Inventory would be easy” This was before the quickie oil changes that we have today. If you took your car into a dealer for service they might change your oil or you could take it to the local garage for service and they might change your oil, but other than that, almost everyone bought their oil for fifty cents a quart and their oil filter for two dollars and changed their own oil. When you were done you had less than five dollars in the change, unless you splurged on a three dollar air filter. To me, the $19.95 seemed reasonable.

          “If that’s the kind of thinking college taught you to do, boy, you wasted your money. Who, in their right mind, would pay twenty bucks for an oil change?” My father died suddenly in February, 2005, in North Carolina. The last conversation we had face to face, we were sitting in my sister’s back yard in two lawn chairs, and he was still calling me ‘boy.’ He rarely called me anything else, except maybe ‘college boy.’ Once in a while he called me by my actual name, but rarely.

          “I’m thinking there are a lot of people who are sick of getting grit in their eyes. I might even pay twenty bucks myself to come away from a change without being filthy!”

          “Well, you college kids do hate to get dirty.” Mind you, I was soaked through with sweat, covered in rust and grit from his shocks and, over the grit, layered in the fine sand that was everywhere in Miami. He was sitting in a clean shirt and pants, sipping on an ice tea. I just sighed and let it go.

          Within five years the quickie oil change places began to pop up everywhere. For $19.95 you could get your oil changed in a guaranteed ten minutes. I kept refusing to go to one of those places until one day in 2000 when I got a pretty good dose of grit in my eyes. That was it for my oil changing days. After that, I was letting someone else do it.

          I thought about all this last Saturday as I sat in a hard chair waiting for my wife’s car to be done. It’s getting more expensive every time. I was feeling a little guilty, sitting there drinking my cup of ‘free’ coffee. I could be doing that. True, a quart of oil costs a lot more now, and the oil filters are more expensive and harder to get at, too. And you have to replace the air filter every other time, and they are really pricy. But, it would still be cheaper. Just then, the young man under the car in the next bay let out a yell and started to wipe at his eyes. I just sat back and started to enjoy my coffee a little more.

          I have often wondered what would have happened to my father and me if we had started that oil change business. We might not have gotten rich, but I think it would have been a nice income. Would it have derailed the ministry, though? It certainly would have changed my pursuit of the ministry. Things would have been different. So, I am happy my father lacked the vision to take that chance. It worked out for the best.

          2002. A warm Fall day in Lexington, North Carolina. My father and I were sitting in lawn chairs in his back yard. We were going to leave in the morning. The old guy said, “Miss Betty (we all called his second wife Miss Betty) took her car down to the Jiffy Lube and got her oil changed. I won’t do that, you know.”

          “Yeah, I remember, Dad.” Now, maybe he was going to tell me, after all those years, that the quickie oil change idea might have actually worked out.

          “So, before you leave, I want you to change the oil on my truck.”

          I just looked at him and smiled. “Sure, Pops, I better get at it.”

          Last one I ever did.

          Blessings.