I bought 50 cents worth of gas Tuesday. There, I said it. I just needed to put all the cards on the table and try to move on.

I’m pretty bad about running down the “Miles To Go” in my auto — I was so proud to get the “0” a few weeks ago — but I’ve learned that can be dicey. It is far from an exact number.

So when I was coming back from lunch and I was down to “6,” I knew I had to stop. Keep in mind that shaving and stopping for gas are two of the regular activities I despise, but still recognize their necessity. (You don’t want to see me try to grow any facial hair.)

As bad luck would have it, I was on the wrong side of the street from the gas stations on the busiest street in Bossier City. It was lunchtime, and I didn’t want to make one foray fighting that left turn jungle, much less two.

So I pulled into a semi-sketchy gas station on my side of the road. I am a serial filler-upper — as long as I’m there, I might as well make it count so I have to come back less frequently — but when I began looking for a pump, my gas tank was on the wrong side of all available stations. So I whipped it around, and did such a bad back-up job that literally the hose wouldn’t reach.

It gets better/worse.

After re-positioning, I was already wanting to get out of there, so I punched the debit card numbers, dropped the nozzle into the tank and yanked the handle immediately.

I noticed the flow was maddeningly slow. But sometimes, an air bubble can form if you go too fast, so I paused for a few seconds and restarted.

No change. In fact, it was even slower, to the tune of about a cent every 5 seconds. (Run that scenario in your head real quick.)

Now I’m committed. My debit card is in there, I’ve already established poor driving skills, and I couldn’t trust another pump at this station. So I figured I’d keep going, like the idiot that I am.

Until it simply got to be too much. I made the resolution to stop at 50 cents. It was something like 0.15 gallons. I promise you could have filled up a Suburban faster than it took me to complete the process of buying two quarters worth.

To make matters worse, when I got back in the car, my Miles To Go was still “6.” I couldn’t even buy enough gas to go a mile.

I once wrote a check at the Handee Mart in Ruston for $0.83 when I was in college and vowed to never make a non-cash purchase in which a stand-alone zero is involved on the left side of the decimal. But a man can only take so much.

And yes, I limped into another gar station. One that was less than 6 miles away.

(This appeared originally in the August 19, 2018 editions of both The Times and The News-Star.)

Who understands it?, but what a time we can have

Forty years ago this month, the sheriff of Claiborne Parish, the late Snap Oakes, dropped me off in front of the football fieldhouse at Louisiana Tech. I had just got off work at Beacon Gas Plant, was covered in concrete, smelled like Junior in the pigpen, and didn’t know anybody in the entire parish, much less on the campus.

He told me I was going to school here. I told him I wasn’t.

He told me I was.

I was 18 years old. Scared to death.

But that day was one of the best things that’s ever happened to me.

Seems like yesterday.

But it’s not. It’s 40 years ago.

Do you know how long 40 years ago is? I am talking about 1978. But if you minus 40 years from that, the year is 1938. America is just coming out of the Great Depression. Germany is going crazy.

And if you minus 40 years from that, it’s 1898, and Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders are charging up San Juan Hill.

The point is, time marches on. What seems like a long time ago, relatively, is not that long ago at all.

I texted a couple of guys this morning to remind them that, 10 years ago today, we played a round of golf in a driving rainstorm at Angola State Penitentiary. One of them texted back, “I can’t believe you remembered that date!”

It’s a blessing and a curse, remembering things. The late Pat Conroy, my favorite “Southern” writer, alerts us that, “Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.”

He also wrote that time is the great mystery. Children who are supposed to be in the fifth grade are high school juniors. Your mom and dad who are supposed to be 47 are 80.

You are 18 and then…you are 58, and looking for a chair to sit in.

Time just…it just comes. And goes.

And no matter how much money you have or how much influence you have or how much power you have, time does not care. Not at all.

Like nature, time is indifferent. It’s nothing personal. It’s just indifferent.

Time does not care.

That’s the cruelest cut of all. Indifference. You’d rather time hate you. At least you’d know where you stood.

But time doesn’t. It just doesn’t care. You’re a parent? Great. Now you’re a grandparent? Great. The people 20 years behind you are parents. Which maybe you wish you were still. I mean, you’re still parents, but you’re parents to children with children.

You don’t have the energy you had. You can’t play wiffle ball all day as you could. You can’t even stay up ’til 9:45!, when at least 11 p.m. was a staple back in the day. Oh, you can still make it to midnight now and then, but your recovery time is much longer than it used to be.

“Wait?! My grandchild’s game starts at 8? I can catch the first two innings/quarters, MAYbe…”

Time is the great mystery.

“I’m fascinated by the people I grew up with and the mistakes I made — and God, I have screwed up,” Conroy wrote in Beach Music. “I like writing about where it all went off course.”

Getting it on paper helps you understand it all. Or at least begin to understand it.

But sometimes it doesn’t go off course. You had a son. You got to help raise a little girl to a young woman. You played golf with friends and got to actually leave Angola instead of staying for 5-to-10. You got to work at the newspaper, and at the University you flunked out of, the same one where a big man who knew more about life and about you than you did dropped you off one nothing summer day to give you a chance.

Then one day you were honored to offer the eulogy at his funeral. Time, the great mystery, offers up the good and the bad, often at the same time.

Things are going bad today? God has a sense of humor. The wind will change.

It’s just a matter of time.

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