T100

I wrote this story for a High School report and it just made me smile:)

We’ve had the Toyota for years now and it’s been mine since I started to drive. My Dad had to get it because his old Chevy actually blew up, yeah not good, anyway back to the Toy as we call it. It’s not a big pickup, yet it’s not as small as my sisters Ranger (which I can never help but let her forget.) It’s really the perfect size because it’s small enough to be easy to park and maneuver but big enough that you feel safe in it. It’s got a long bed but has a standard size cab. It’s kind of a sandy brown sparkly color with the paint peeling off of the cab showing primer grey. One of the biggest things about it is that it’s a five speed stick shift, making it really entertaining to learn to drive when you are a kid.
This thing has so many stories it could tell. I think that the first incident to happen had to do with my Grandpa. He was driving my pickup as a pilot car for my Dad, who was moving a dirt mover/scraper /very BIG tractor, down Vineyard Drive. Well these particular tractors don’t have any brakes and Grandpa decided to stop right in front of my Dad. It didn’t cause too much damage, just creasing in the back bumper and breaking out one of the taillights so it did survive.
For my poor little pickup’s sake I wish that was it but it just keeps going, sigh. My family was on vacation and my Grandpa (yup the same one) borrowed the Toy to get some cows in. It’s a 4x4 and can get you anywhere in any weather, yeah it’s a good little pickup. Him, being my Grandpa that he is, got a little impatient with one of our cows and tried to "hurry it along" by pushing it. He didn’t hurt the cow but now there is a rather nice dent right in the middle of my hood.
The next thing was when my dad put a thirteen foot long, 1,300 pound, Cat D9 ripper shank in the bed. I think that it was a little too heavy because it bowed the bed in so much that the tailgate won’t stay on any more. So now I’m using a couple of two by sixes screwed together as a temporary fix.
Luckily I’ve only added one "flaw" to it. Once when I was really little and I couldn’t see where I was going all to well I scraped the right side of it on a green a gate. If you would have been there you could’ve seen why I did it: Short kid + long pickup x sharp corner > pretty gate = Trouble. So now there is a rather nice shade of green making a beautiful stripe along one side of my pickup. I’m glad that I like green.
This thing should be terrified of tractors by now because it’s worst injury came from my Dad’s Excavator. He was moving his excavator over a hill to another work site and had an extra bucket to take along. He couldn’t safely carry it with him so he thought that he would just gently set it in the back of the Toy and be off, wrong. While he was trying to put it in one side slipped out and it fell into the bed, bouncing off both sides of the bed railing as it went down. It ended up bending the sides in even more than the ripper shank had and left a few rather large holes in the wheel wells.
I think the most recent ordeal included a can of undercoating. For those of you who don’t know what that is, picture spray on tar, it’s NASTY stuff, anyway… Dad jumped into the Toy and slid the seat back really quick. (I always had to have the seat slid all the way forward when I was younger so that I could reach the pedals, remember short kid here.) Well there just happened to be one of these awful cans of undercoating behind the seat. When the seat slid back it smashed the can and made it explode, no joke. It made a Huge mess and totally killed the drivers’ side seatbelt clip. We were finally able to track down a replacement although it’s grey not brown , it is nice to have a seatbelt that works again though.
As for the inside it’s seen some hard times too. The horn only works when it wants too. You can’t read what the radio station is. The speaker covers have popped off and the speakers themselves are starting to fall out of the doors. The windshield has little metal B B’s imbedded in it from someone welding to close to it. And the seat hasn’t had a much better life. Most of the foam from the drivers side of the seat has been torn out from people getting in and out in a hurry. Having a pair of pliers or some other tool in your back pocket while you are doing it probably hasn’t done it any good either. Now people say that it is an "anatomically correct seat" you come to your own conclusion on that one.
Other than the cosmetic body damage though it’s actually in pretty good shape. It only has about 65,000 miles on it and for a ninety four that’s not to bad. Those were some pretty hard miles tough. I feel bad for my pickup because everybody is always making fun of it. Especially because of that pink and purple curly ribbon still on the antenna from last September, oh well. This pickup has been good to me and I’m thank full for it. One of these days it would maybe be nice to replace the bed with a wooden flat bed though.
Who wants to take bets on how long it would take for someone to catch it on fire?