July 1, 2013 (Monday)
“There is a time for everything..” – King Solomon
Hello, July. Seems like I hardly got to know June before you showed up. Oh, well, good to see you again. Be careful with those fireworks, ya hear?
I’ve been thinking about casings. Today that word describes a tire without any tread. Evidently the re-tread business is doing great, and along with it the casing business.
What was originally called a “tubeless” tire is now known simply as a “tire,” because most automobiles use them. They are constructed so as to require no tube inside. When I was a child, tires had tubes in them. The inner part of the tire was a “tube” and the outer part was a “casing.”
When I was a kid, all the boys in the neighborhood knew was a “casing” was: it was an old tire. The tires were smaller back then but the hole in the middle was much larger. Before the days of the big amusement parks the boys would find an old casing, climb inside it, get his buddies to give him a push, and down the road he would roll until it hit something, rolled into a ditch, or just ran out of steam. I don’t think I ever heard a boy refer to that thing as a tire–it was always a casing (actually, casin’).
For fancier travel, some old roller skates under a board with an upright board topped by makeshift handles made an excellent scooter. If we wanted a gunfight, we cut up old tire tubes and put them on rubber guns (a piece of wood with a clothes pin). We made our own kites out of newspapers and torn up rags.
We had no money, but we had fun. Those guys still living are now in their 80’s. Picture me today rolling down the road in a casing.
Devotional Thought: Paul said, “When I was a child, I acted like a child; now that I have become a man, I have put away childish things.” He said that in 1 Corinthians 13, and he was emphasizing the truth that Christian Love is the mark of maturity in a Believer. It’s time for us to give up our childish self-centeredness and grow up.