A picture tells a thousand words. But the tire treads of my dad’s cars? Imagine the stories they could tell.
When I was in the single digits, on Saturday mornings, after I watched cartoons and slurped the sugar-laden milk left behind after all the Frosted Flakes were gone, it was errand time. (I used to think we were running Aarons. It was my cousin’s name, yet we never saw him while we were out. I thought it the strangest thing.) Even the smallest of trips put me on the edge of my seat with excitement. If we took the station wagon, it was likely a trip to the recycling center. As a child, I was allowed to toss only cans and paper in their respective bins. But once older, I was entrusted with the glass. Glass! Clear in one bin. Brown in another. Green in yet another. I hurled them with all the might I had, reveling in the noises when my bottle made contact with the others and shattered in a million pieces. Breaking things down to be rebuilt again.
If we were in his red Toyota, maybe it was a trip to 905, the beer, wine, and liquor store where my father would bring back his empty Pepsi bottles and exchange them for new ones for the workweek ahead. He always carried two bottles in his briefcase. I’m not sure the brown leather case ever carried anything else. While he made the exchange, I waited patiently behind him. On special days, I got to pick out a Chunky: a candy “bar” about two inches square and just as thick, filled with chocolate, raisins, and peanuts. I’ve never had them since.
As the heat of the St. Louis summers bore down on us, we’d take refuge on the Carolina shore. The trip would start as so many did: My father blaring the “Raiders of the Lost Ark” theme song on the stereo at oh-dark-thirty. It became the song of adventure. The battle cry for the unknown. While my father was maybe more Mark Harmon (NCIS-era) than Harrison Ford, we’d follow him anywhere. While the trip there took two days, the trip home always took one. We’d push through rest stop after rest stop, counting down the miles to home.
When I turned 16 and got my license on a snowy day in January, any thought I had of driving one of my father’s sports cars was quickly dashed. In his youth, he had raced cars, and a string of fancy cars came and left our home like suitors tossed to the curb. First, a Maserati. Then a Ferrari. And a Porsche. Each one more impractical than the next. Until a Chevy Monza took its place. With no FM radio to distract me, and a personalized license plate to allow the town to track and report on my whereabouts, I learned the rules of the road and took my first steps toward independence.
When I got engaged to my husband and made the trip from St. Louis to Alexandria, VA, it was my dad who drove me in my green Toyota Camry. It was a sensible, practical car — matching the sensible, practical girl I’d become — and we navigated the mountains of Virginia as seamlessly as we did the flat terrain of Kentucky. It was as hard for him to let go, I suppose, as it was for me to leave. I had no idea it would get harder.
Today, his silver Porsche — the baby he got vaguely the same time as I welcomed my first baby — sits in my garage. I wish it didn’t. He drove it only on the days with the bluest of skies, the brightest of suns. It was on a day like that, nine years ago this month (as of this writing in October 2019) — maybe even the day you’re reading this — that he left us and this world, the undercarriage torn, the front disfigured, Good Samaritans on the side of the road with him, assuring us later that he didn’t appear to be in pain after suffering a fatal heart attack.
My mom never could bear to see the car again. I’d said goodbye to my dad, but I couldn’t bear to say goodbye to the last place he’d been. Perhaps as unsensible as my previous cars were sensible, I had it repaired. I restored its heart, even though I couldn’t restore his. It sits in the garage most of the time. When my husband asks why, I laugh and remember how I was admonished for ever getting near it, much less driving it. But when there’s a blue sky, and a bright sun, I’ll gingerly ease it out of the garage, holding the gear shift the way he did, thinking of all the miles we drove and the lessons I learned. I take a deep breath and venture out, wondering where the road will take me next.
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