This is an excerpt from Tom Poland’s “The Last Sunday Drive,” to be released Nov. 18.
’56 Plymouth Memories
In the 1950s it was customary for folks to take Sunday drives.
Gather up the family and see the sights. Tour the countryside. See what there was to see and visit relatives.
And like so many tires, the years rolled by. That was then; this is now.
That enjoyable pastime, the Sunday Drive, is fast fading.
“Sunday driver,” however, is alive and well.
In today’s mad race against time, a driver who dawdles is a “Sunday driver.”
Dawdling was the order of the day when the drive itself was the destination.
In the 1950s and ’60s families would make a Sunday drive just for the heck of it. It was a good way to see the land up close, a good way to banish boredom, and a way to visit family.
That was then. This is the era of superhighways. Interstates and ever-widening highways and freeways seldom give you much to see as you rush from point to point. That’s merely driving.
In Dad’s aqua-white ’56 Plymouth Belvedere, we journeyed. We weren’t so easily entertained in the 1950s. The country beckoned.
A Sunday drive was the high point of the week, a wondrous escape. The ordinary? It was extraordinary. See for yourself.
Eastern Georgia, Summer 1958
With church and dinner behind me, the afternoon looms long and empty — a vacant, blistering desert.
Nothing to do, nowhere to go, and all afternoon to get there.
Today feels like a month of Sundays. Time drags.
In the dusty heat even the cicadas refuse to sing their rising-falling singsong. It’s another sultry Sunday down South.
Here comes Mom with her purse. “Put your shoes on.”
Out the screened porch we go to pile into Dad’s car. 
“Where are we going?”
“Nowhere, everywhere,” Dad says.
Behind a sleek jet-like hood ornament, we’re about to take off.
The newfangled push-button automatic transmission turns the dash into a cockpit. Our long dusty driveway? It’s a runway. We build momentum, take off, and break through the boredom barrier.
We roll the windows down and breeze along the Augusta Highway.
Dad turns onto a dirt road. Now our jet-car leaves a contrail of dust as we glide by mysteries. Past a fire tower. What’s it like in that tower during a storm?
Just beyond it sits an old homeplace with a cast iron hand-pump. Dad drank from it as a boy. Said he had to work the handle hard. “The water was cold.”
Around a bend we pass a sawdust pile where chips glitter like sequins. Mom says, “Never play on a sawdust pile. It’ll swallow you and you’ll die.”
Not far past the death chips is a yard with tree trunks painted white, albino-like. Why?
Onto a tarry, graveled road we turn and like a dog, I stick my head out the window into summer fragrances ... a field of hay, the fertile smell of pastures, a hint of honeysuckle, and now and then musky swamp fragrances.
And always the ripping sound of tires rolling through tar.
If you want to know more about this book, email tompol@earthlink.net .