go.Jimmy.go

And when it’s time for leavin’, I hope you’ll understand … that I was born a ramblin’ man… —The Allman Brothers Band

I suppose this story would have a little more poetic symmetry if I’d been sitting in the back of a Greyhound bus when I saw it.

But I wasn’t. I was behind the wheel of my 2022 Ford Bronco, heading home after work and driving over a hill near my house that I’ve crossed more times than I can possibly count.

And there it was.

Sitting off to the side of the road, basking; or maybe rusting is a better word, in the late afternoon sun was a battered old 1964 AMC Rambler.

Now, anyone who knows me knows that when the subject turns to classic cars, my mind usually goes straight to one place: Mustangs.

I grew up around them. My father had them. My brother had them. Cousins and uncles had them. For years, it seemed like every Wood from the South Side of Easton to Palmer Township had a Mustang parked in the driveway or cruising down the road.

I even have a 1965 Mustang of my own today, but seeing that old Rambler stopped me in my tracks. Because before I knew anything about Mustangs, engines and horsepower, there was a little green Rambler….

… And my grandfather.

The Rambler is one of the first cars I can remember my family owning. In fact, some of my earliest childhood memories have that car parked somewhere in the background.

It was already pretty beat-up by the time my five-year-old eyes began taking notice of it. I couldn’t tell you what engine was under the hood, what kind of transmission it had or whether there was anything remotely considered an “option” inside it.

All I knew was that it was green. And it belonged to Pap.

In the early 1970s on the Southside of Easton, it was his daily driver, and one of my favorite sights was seeing him pull alongside the house, tap the horn and ask if I wanted to go with him to the Seiple Hardware store across town on Berwick Street.

For a five-year-old boy, there weren’t many questions easier to answer. A ride with Pap? Absolutely.

Whatever incredibly important five-year-old business I was involved in at the time was immediately abandoned. I’d climb into the front seat beside him, and off we’d go.

The Rambler certainly wasn’t luxurious. The front seat was so worn that holes had developed in the upholstery, and the springs underneath occasionally threatened to introduce themselves to anyone sitting above them.

My grandmother came up with a solution. She covered the seat with one of her old summer dresses.

I can still picture it. The pattern didn’t match the Rambler’s interior, but I couldn’t have cared less. At five years old, interior decorating wasn’t high on my list of automotive concerns. I was riding shotgun with my grandfather. That was all that mattered.

Eventually, Pap suffered a stroke in 1975 and could no longer drive. The Rambler was passed along to my aunt and uncle, who lived next door and had three children of their own.

And so the little green car began another chapter.

Over the next several years, each of my cousins learned how to drive in it. As I got older, I began to see the Rambler almost as a family heirloom. It had belonged to Pap, then moved on to the next generation, and eventually—at least in my mind—it would make its way down to me.

I was already imagining my turn behind the wheel.

Then the unthinkable happened.

My cousin, who had possession of the Rambler at the time, broke with what I had apparently decided was sacred family tradition.

He sold it.

I still remember watching the new owner drive away in Pap’s little green Rambler. I had never technically owned the car, but somehow it felt like something of mine was disappearing down the Smith Street hill.

I eventually learned to drive in my cousin’s 1986 Dodge Colt, which, admittedly, was probably a much easier car for a teenager to learn in than a Rambler more than two decades its senior.

Sure, it was a brand new Dodge Colt, but it wasn’t the Rambler.

As the years passed, the memory of that old green car faded along with so many other pieces of childhood, and Pap’s Rambler became another relic tucked away in some dusty corner of my memory.

Until I drove over that hill.

For just a second, my 2022 Bronco disappeared, and so did the road in front of me. I was no longer a grown man driving home from work anymore.

I was five years old again. Pap was pulling up beside the house. The horn was beeping. My grandmother’s ridiculous summer house dress was stretched across the front seat. And Pap was asking me if I wanted to go to the hardware store.

Isn’t it funny how memory works? We spend our entire lives surrounded by things like cars, houses, toys, songs and photographs. And somewhere along the way, those ordinary objects become containers. They quietly hold people and places and moments in time for us until, sometimes many decades later, we unexpectedly stumble across the key that opens them again.

That beat-up Rambler on the hillside was one of those keys.

Back in the real world I kept driving, watching the sixty-two-year-old car grow smaller in my rearview mirror until it finally disappeared.

That was when I smiled. Not because I suddenly wanted to trade my Mustang in for an old Rambler, but because for a few precious seconds, it had given me something far more valuable.

It gave me my grandfather back.

And what I wouldn’t give to hear that horn beep one more time, climb into that worn-out front seat beside him and hear him ask:

“Want to go for a ride?”

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My new novel, The Seventh Echo is available now from 
Adverse City Publishing
© 2026 James Wood