I’m writing from behind the wheel of my Ford F-150.

It’s a 2021 model, a four-wheel-drive, quad cab I bought used last year. The first time I took it for a test drive, my wife told me she thought it was sexy.

My daughter wasn’t so easily convinced.

“It doesn’t look like you, Dad.”

I knew what my daughter meant. I’d spent the better part of her youth making disparaging comments about four-wheel-drive trucks and the men who drove them. I took pride in my 10-year-old, two-wheel-drive Tacoma, a truck my kids affectionately named the “Dirty Turtle.”

I drove my daughter home from the hospital in the Dirty Turtle. My son, too. I traded in the Tacoma that had come before it, a 2007 model, a few months before I became a father. I needed something with an extended cab, a little more space for car seats and diaper bags.

Long before all the kids' crap cluttered my floorboards, long before the Dirty Turtle, there was the Gray Ghost.

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The Gray Ghost was a 1991 Ford Lariat. It was my father’s truck. He drove me to school in that truck. We made countless trips to and from Dwight Elementary (where he was a counselor), then on to the middle school, the junior high, and eventually the high school.
The engine made this high-pitched whistling noise. It was a stick shift. None of my friends’ dads drove sticks.

When I turned 16, the Gray Ghost was mine, whether I liked it or not.

Before my next birthday, I’d wrecked it twice. The first accident happened in a parking lot. The second occurred a block from our house. The cumulative damage resulted in a severely dented passenger-side door.

My friends, boys who cruised the Russ-Vegas strip in brand-new vehicles, cracked Gray Ghost jokes constantly. The way the door was dented, the truck looked warped, like it would only drive in loops.

But the frame was fine.

My dad checked. He made sure the Gray Ghost was still safe to drive, and then he sent me on my way. There was no talk of body work, no hope of repair.

I drove the Gray Ghost all through high school and never wrecked it again. My girlfriend had to get in through the driver-side and crawl over the gearshift. She didn’t complain, and I didn’t either.

The Gray Ghost became my trademark, a core component of my high school lore. Ask any of my fancy-car-driving friends to recall the name of my first ride, and they'll tell you, twenty years later.

When I purchased the new four-wheel-drive Ford, it felt as if things had come full circle. My Toyota era was over; I was a Ford man once again.

And listen, the new truck is fine. Maybe even better than fine. The backseat has more leg room, more space for kids’ junk, than my wife’s seven-seater SUV.

Okay. I like my new truck. I like it a lot, actually. But up until recently, I felt like something was missing, the character, the charm, the charisma that my previous vehicles possessed.

Then it hit me; the new truck needed a name.

Luckily, my wife had one in mind already:

“Big Sexy.”

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