There I was, a young man working on a farm.  My boss was an old, grey-haired guy.  (Hmm … sounds familiar).  He was wearing dirty coveralls.  Probably I was too.

The farmer asked me to get into a big truck and back it up to the door of the barn.  The trouble was, I didn’t know how to work a manual stick shift.  I was a city kid.  Dad’s car had an automatic transmission.

I got in, gazed in wonder at the gear lever … and acted.  I pushed it way to the left, and then forward.  No idea what I was doing.  But as I let out the clutch (What’s a clutch?) the truck started backing up!

A big curving later, the tailgate of the truck was directly in front of the open barn door.  I did it.

My farmer boss wanted me to park the truck there, in gear.  “Engage the first and seventh gear so the truck doesn’t roll down the ramp.”

How the heck do you do that?  And this Toronto boy was trying to figure out how to engage two gears at the same time.

And then my dream shifted …

The vehicle was no longer a truck.  It was a red Massey tractor.  I’d been aware as a boy of Massey-Ferguson tractors, even though I’d probably never seen one in real life.  It brought images of Canadian wheatfields.

What I was seeing was a “Massey” tractor, not “Massey-Ferguson”.  The newer name was created in 1953 after a merger – four years after I was born.  The company Massey-Harris began in 1891.

It feels like I was transported last night to a time before my birth, and into a farming life far from what I’ve known.

***

Yay for the nighttime!