The news has not been good.

"Gas prices are expected to spiral this summer...Expect to pay more at the pump when the travel season begins...AAA reports rising demand for oil..."

The time had come and I knew that this time it would not be so easy. It was time to sell my truck, Big Red.

And to make things even worse, Big Red is actually (gulp) Mrs. A's truck.

Because we already had a car loan in my name, her name went on the ticket for the new wallet-bruiser.

So the hardest part of selling the overly powerful, testosterone-bolstering, ego-massaging extension of my personality is in convincing her that it was no longer a viable member of the family.

You see, Mrs. Anthony likes the power of intimidation just like anyone else. And back in 1999, when she test drove it off the lot, her beautiful green eyes widened noticeably as she bore down on the drivers in front of us. Big Red, as a full-size four wheel drive pickup with oversize tires, huge chrome brush guard, standing tough in fire-engine red, dominates the landscape wherever it goes and other motorists, upon seeing the behemoth bearing down on them, tend to scatter.

"We'll take it," she said.

There is a price to pay for all that glowing, ripe tomato-colored sheet metal and noisy rubber. Back in 1999, with me ensconced in the pseudo-cushiony swells of that dot-com mania, Mrs. A and I shopped trucks together.

My job in downtown Seattle, slinging humorous code at the web for way too much money, made it easy to feel cavalier about major expenditures and on the weekends we would idle past new car lots, pretending to be oblivious to the horrific depreciation all new car buyers suffer.

And one day, there he was, wedged impossibly into a space between fifty other enormous, shiny, unapologetic fossil fuel eaters.

The price of petrol was hovering around a buck and a quarter, so because this was nothing to a couple who had big wads of (soon to be worthless) stock options, we drove Big Red home.

Somehow, after putting everything in the garage into the basement, and with a little grease on the mirrors, we squeezed him in like a seven-and-a-half-foot pimento in an eight-foot-wide olive.

Since I had my old van to tool around in, Mrs. A had the pleasure of regaling me daily with stories of other, hapless motorists who, when she was still in her small, fuel-efficient Camaro, would tailgate and generally annoy her each day, but now whose mirrors and windows would be filled with her enormous chrome grill or rear bumper with the 'If you don't like my driving, stay off the sidewalk' sticker on it.

Paybacks, you know what they say.

But eventually that terrible equalizer, Time, and the vagaries of oil futures in an oil-based economy had splashed our faces with the cold water of reason. Big Red had to go.

I placed the ad online and oddly, the phone went nuts. Mostly kids who loved the really good photos I took, Big Red glistening, Big Red posing, Big Red menacing.

But in the end, it was a local longshoreman with a weird name who actually brought the cashiers check. 'Gov' looked Big Red over and after a short drive, and just like Mrs. Anthony before him, said, 'I'll take it.'

Seems that big longshoreman and diminutive blonde budget analysts are not all that much different when it comes to big shiny things with lots of horsepower.

Now that Big Red is gone, the part I will miss the most is how, when we would go out for a movie, or to dinner, she would sidle up next to me on the bench seat like a teenager, her hair up in a ponytail, her subtle gardenia perfume filling the cab.

It was the zenith of an urban cowboy-wannabe's existence, the fulfillment of an adolescent dream for me, and when she took the wheel, she had the luxury of indulging a bumper car mentality, where, if only for the 30 minutes to took to get to work, she was large and in charge.