Menu Close

Middle-aged Man is a Rad Dad

Would Kevin Costner be considered middle-aged? He’s 69 so maybe he’s on the later side of middle-aged. He is raising teenage kids, which is usually the realm of a middle-aged man. For our purposes, we’ll go ahead and call him a middle-aged man. This promotion he made for Lifted Trucks, below, was really well done.

Set beachside in spectacular Carpinteria, California with Kevin and his son and two really cool lifted trucks, Kevin’s best lines in the video are, “At that point I thought to myself, ‘I’m gonna get him the best, most bitchin’ truck,” and when his son saw his truck, Kevin says, “he couldn’t take the smile off his face, and therefore, I couldn’t take the smile off my face.” What a Rad Dad!

Our son had wanted a truck for quite a while. My wife and I discussed a potential purchase ad nauseam. Did our son really need a vehicle? Did he really need a truck? Maybe we should use a truck as a “carrot”–if our son does x,y, and z, then he could be rewarded with a truck. Or maybe it should be a high school graduation present.

In the end we decided that we simply wanted to enjoy him enjoying a cool truck, sooner rather than later. No strings attached. As an estate planner, I often see people hoarding and waiting until after their deaths for distributions to be made. As for me and my wife, we want to LOVE NOW! We want to share the joy now. So we bought our son a truck!

Even purchasing the truck created a special moment and memory. Son, father, and grandfather all went to the dealer together–what a blessing in and of itself. We looked at a few commendable rigs on the lot. Then the sales guy drove around the corner in a truck they had just taken in, and we all knew instantly–that was the one!

Murdered out with a massive lift riding on custom wheels wrapped in 37 inch off-road tires and powered by a 400 horsepower V8 linked to a custom exhaust that sounds like a Ferrari on steroids, this is one bitchin’ truck! It even has an onboard compressor that powers up an insanely loud train horn.

I love the idea that our son is experiencing the joy of such a truck in his senior year of high school. I mean, a truck like this for anyone who likes trucks would be cool at most stages of life, but as a 17 year old kid?!? His joy is our joy!

With Love,

P. Gustav Mueller, author of The Present