David Spates "Therefore I Am" Published Nov. 1, 2005

What good's a Big Wheel without a decent driveway?

Some home buyers want lots of square footage. Not me. I spend a good part of my day looking for things our family has lost, and the last thing I need is another 1,000 square feet to search. It's hard enough to leave the house on time without adding another 15 minutes to look for Phil's Blue Bear or Anna's beaded necklace.

While sheer volume impresses some, others passionately adhere to real estate's Prime Directive: location, location, location. Their homes must be on the right street, in the right neighborhood, on the right side of town. I presume these folks want to ensure their neighbors are just as finicky as they are. It's probably good that those types of people stay together anyway.

Me, I'm a driveway guy. I'll bet you've never heard of anyone describing himself as a driveway guy, but here I am. You can have your sunken living rooms, your master bath hot tubs, your kitchen wet islands and fully furnished basements complete with automated big-screen TV cleverly integrated into the hardwood furnishings. I'd trade it all for a quality driveway.

Without a doubt the driveway is the most important feature of any home. It's the first thing you see when you arrive, and the last thing you see when you leave. As much as a good driveway adds to a house, a bad driveway takes away.

My passion for driveways dates back to when I was a freewheeling kid growing up on Sunnydale Road. (You know that joke about deriving a stripper's name by combining your first dog's name with the road name where you grew up? I defy you to come up with anything as inspired as mine -- Carrie Sunnydale. It's poetry.)

Back in the day, I was not only a freewheeler, but I was a freeBigWheeler. We had a driveway that descended from the street to a flat area in front of the garage, and it was perfect for Big Wheels. For those of you who were born before 1965 or don't have kids, Big Wheels are like tricycles, but they're very low to the ground and feature, as you may have guessed, a rather disproportionately large front wheel. Somehow the Big Wheel has escaped the scrutiny of politically-correct worrywarts who like to sanitize all the fun out of toys. They're still making Big Wheels today.

My wee little buddies and I used to spend hours pushing our Big Wheels up our driveway and then roaring down at top speed, crashing, slamming and clipping each other along the way. When you're 6 years old, all's fair in love and Big Wheels. If winning the race meant putting your pal into the wall, then that's what you did. Hey, rubbin's racin', right? Everyone's friendly on the way up, but it was war going down.

Helmets? Ha! It was 1976. A bloody head wound was considered a character-builder.

Boy those were fun times, and they got even better when the Big Wheel people added the spin brake. Located on one -- and only one -- of the back wheels, the spin brake enabled us to do complete 360s. We'd apply it at maximum velocity and then proceed to skid and spin into each other at the bottom of the hill. It may have cost a little more than the original Big Wheel, but for a 6-year-old, the added mayhem was priceless.

And it never would have come to pass without a decent driveway.

Now, nearly 30 years later, I have my own driveway, and it's practically an exact duplicate of the Sunnydale version -- steep hill with a large flat area at the bottom. It's perfect, and my kids' Big Wheels are forthcoming.

A good driveway, however, is much more than just a place to crash Big Wheels and incur lifetime scars. Another reason I love our driveway is because it's wide enough at the bottom to turn around a car. That's very nice. As my neighbors are leaving their garages and exiting their driveways in reverse (knocking down mailboxes and rolling over family pets along the way), I can do quick 180-degree turn and go out front-first -- just like the Batmobile. The ultimate would be a rotating parking space just like the Caped Crusader has. I'll look for that in my next house.

There's another feature associated with a big driveway that I really enjoy. An ample driveway means less grass to mow. That may not sound like a big deal today, the first day of November, but it's a little slice of Heaven in August when the temperature is inching toward triple digits and the humidity is well past 120 percent. I'm trying to convince the wife that we should pave over the entire front yard and turn it into one colossal driveway, but she won't go for it.

Can you imagine the Big Wheel races we could have on THAT? It's poetry.

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David Spates is a Knoxville resident and Crossville Chronicle contributor whose column is published each Tuesday. He can be reached at davespates@tds.net