Skydiving and Project Cars
Notes on Mid-life Adventures
I turned 42 last week. I’m not exactly sure when you hit “mid-life” but I gather that it’s more or less your 40s, so here I am. My plan is to live to 100, which makes 50 the middle of my life? Nothing is guaranteed though. Might as well just admit that I’m at the mid-life point.
When I was much younger—maybe 8th grade or so, I don’t remember exactly—my Mamaw told me some of her family history including why her second marriage ended. Her husband didn’t like that he was getting “older” and wanted to still prove that he was “with it” and “cool” and such, so he bought a sportscar and started chasing skirts. She put her foot down but he kept doing it, so she called it off. I may be tweaking the details in my memory, the important thing is that it left an impression: guys get to a certain age and they panic that they are not a certain other, younger age anymore, and they nuke their lives trying to stay locked in time. He would have only been a few years older than I am now when this happened.
Once she told me that, I saw it depicted a lot in movies and TV shows, and I realized this is common enough to the male experience to be broadly relatable in entertainment. Anticipating that this phase of life would probably come my way, my plan was always to handle it with some self-awareness and not make a mess of anything. I was going to enjoy being Graham In His 20s, then Graham In His 30s, then Graham In His 40s, etc. I would have a mid-life. I wouldn’t have a crisis.
I’d be lying if I said that lately I haven’t looked back on the last two decades with the wish that I’d done some things differently, mostly in the realm of finance and travel. I should have picked a trade sooner, should have invested some money in something, should have gone back to Spain at some point. Other than that, there’s not much to regret. I married a great woman, we have three kids we love, I’ve written several books—some of them have even been read by double-digits of people—and we get out every once in a while. Still, it’d be cool to do a little bit more.
My wife is really good about encouraging me to do things that she knows I want to do, but I hold off on it because it takes a few extra dollars out of the budget. I tell her my hobby is books and comics (I spend a nice chunk on that stuff every year) but she knows there are other things I’d like to try. This year she took the initiative to tell me I should do two of them, and not worry terribly about the cost. Thus, with her blessing, I jumped out of a plane and bought* a project car.
*sort of
Skydiving
The jump starts around 1:30
There’s a place about an hour and twenty from OKC where you can skydive for multiple hundreds of dollars, and for another hundred and a half you can get a video of it. (Tack on even more hundreds and you can do it from such an altitude that it would require cold-weather clothes and oxygen beforehand. I abstained.)
I made a reservation a few months ago for my birthday weekend. We were going to take the whole family (they can watch you land from the shade of the hangar) but one of the kids was sick, and we didn’t know it at the time but the A/C was out in the van, and it’s July in Oklahoma, so that’s no good. I made the drive myself.
It was a great experience. The divers will jump 15-20 times every Saturday so they’re used to getting in and out quickly, making small talk, and doing it all professional-like. The plane was small but had a massively overpowered jet engine so it could climb to 14,000 feet in about fifteen minutes. I went tandem with the instructor, and two other pros climbed with us so we had company. The plane was basically a flying bathtub of testosterone on the way up; our cameraman Eric (jacked, tattooed, mustache) even jumped barefoot. These were Dudes all around.
I got just under a minute of free-fall before Mac (my tandem) pulled the cord. I wasn’t really counting the minutes. For a brief moment I wasn’t thinking about anything else, just rolling out of the plane and plummeting to the Earth at 125 miles per hour. (You slow to 50 once the chute deploys.) The clarity of mind was incredible. Mac let me steer a few times just to get a feel for it, then he took over and brought us to the landing patch, where I took a minute to get my feet back under me.
The whole thing was a distillation of some thoughts and feelings I’ve had in recent years: I remember as a kid being uncontrollably excited about the things that I liked (I will never again feel as much childlike joy as I did when I saw The Phantom Menace in theaters at 14) and also being inconsolably devastated by corresponding emotional lows (every guy remembers his first real heartbreak.)
Life hardens us to both of these extremes. You protect yourself from the lows but it numbs you to the real range of the highs. There are things you can do to mitigate this (self-awareness is probably the main one, and we derive that from different motivations) and honestly, life isn’t always going to be the coolest thing ever. Most of it is hard work and sacrifice and even a little bit disappointing. It’s okay.
The jump was a reminder that I can still feel that extreme. It’s in there. You’ve got to find it the right way. I don’t think I would have enjoyed it if I’d flipped my family the bird and spent money I didn’t have just so I could do something reckless for me. Life takes context. The fact that my wife wanted me to do it, and my kids were stoked to hear about it, and I got to show them the video—the fact that I could share it with them—made it wonderful.
Project Car
The year was 1998. I was only a little older than my son is now, and my dad bought a project car. It was a 1967 Cadillac DeVille convertible. It wasn’t in objectively terrible shape but it was going to require a fair amount of deconstruction and investment to get it up to snuff. Working on that car was where I started to learn…anything about cars, really. Body work, engine, all of it. It was juuuuuuust about ready for regular use when I went on my mission, so of course my cooler little brother got to drive it the most. Turd.
Naturally you fantasize about getting a cool old muscle car and restoring it to its former glory, and there’s still a bit of that in me somewhere, but I am not planning on digging up a Charger or a Roadrunner and sinking a second mortgage into it. (For one, they’re all too expensive.) Still, every guy kind of knows what he’s after, and earlier this year I started looking at projects just out of curiosity. I had a low price point, a range of model years, and the hard requisite that whatever I got, it would be Mopar.
Once again, the superlative Wife told me I should definitely pull the trigger on something this year. Get a project in the shop. (This house has a shop, that’s why I bought it.) Start teaching the boys so they learn the way I did. I kept scouring Marketplace, looking for something that fit my criteria, and after months of searching, the right project came along.
I’m not going to share the details yet. I haven’t officially acquired the car. My job slows down a LOT in the summer, and I already spent a few hundred bucks on a skydive, so I have to wait. (Mid-life, not crisis.) Nevertheless, the seller dropped the price yesterday and that almost sent me into a panic because I really wanted the car and I didn’t want to get sniped. (That happened earlier this summer on a gorgeous 1964 Plymouth B-series. Body was completely intact and the guy just needed it gone. Didn’t run. Slant-6. 600 bucks. I was an hour late to offer. I was sour about it until yesterday.)
The seller was local to me, and lived about 15 minutes away on a farm. Young guy too, early 20s. Very professional. I took my sons and we checked out the car. They got really excited. (My oldest thought I was buying it for him. I will spend years disabusing him of that notion.) Does it run? No. It hasn’t been registered in almost three decades. Is there body damage? Yes, someone crashed it into something up front, but it’s not catastrophic. Also it survived a fire on another farm somewhere, but it must not have taken direct damage because the glass, trim, and most of the other sensitive parts are still intact. Funnily enough it will make it easier to strip the paint.
I told the seller my situation, that it would be around eight weeks or so before I could get the money together, and that I wasn’t asking any favors, but this car was definitely a fit for what we were after. He was a thousand percent cool about it and offered to take down the listing, count it as sold, and that I could even wait until October if I had to. (I didn’t tell him this, but just for doing that I’m going to throw in some extra cash for him.) In a couple of months, I’ll have a project in my shop, and I’ll get to work on it with my boys, and answer questions, and solve problems, and deal with frustrations, and lament how long it takes, and wish I had more money, and slowly-but-surely succeed until a few years from now when the car is ready, and then I’ll get to drive it around with my wife and my kids and take it to shows and have a grand old time.
We’ll live life together and I’ll show my kids how to navigate the extremes, how to have some vision, how to put life into context, and how to just…do it.
If I took anything away from the skydive, it’s that if you’re locked in enough on something immediate and awesome, the rest of the details can wait. You know, like…landing, and stuff. Prepare before you go up, and execute on the way down. But when you’re there, holy cow, man. Enjoy the ride.