ME AND MY DAD ON A SUNDAY DRIVE,
Honour thy father; go for a drive. “Get in the car, kids,” he would say, and we’d drop our bikes or dust sand from our knees and get in the car.
When a man who grew up with no childhood remembers the importance of injecting a little randomness into yours, you get in the car. We never asked where we were going; if it was Sunday, we weren’t going anywhere. We were going nowhere and everywhere because my dad said so.
It wasn’t about the car. Back then one station wagon was much like another, though if his AMC- loving heart heard me say that he’d scowl if he were alive. I’m not quite sure what part of car ownership my dad would brag about to his friends. There were many who had fancier cars and many who had newer cars, but he’d thump on the hood above his eight- cylinder chariot and somehow know his was better.
I just wanted windows that went down when you poked a button. I just wanted a car that didn’t have bits of bark stuck to the carpet from the last load of wood he’d brought back from the cottage. I was jealous of those fancier, newer cars and didn’t understand why we couldn’t have one. When the ’ 66 Rambler was replaced with the ’ 76 Matador, it didn’t feel like much of a step up.
He’d pay my sister and me a buck to clean it. We had to vacuum it and scrub it and rinse it and do the windows. We’d clog mom’s Filter Queen with junk and he’d take it apart and tell us not to tell her. He would make a great production of pointing out spots we’d missed and tell us to use rags, not paper towels, because did we think money grew on trees?
In the winter months, he paced like a caged bear, because you don’t drive to nowhere in the winter. Fields buried beneath snow don’t remind you of your childhood farm and driving with the windows up doesn’t let you smell fresh- cut hay and manure, because that is what the land smells like, kids, don’t ever forget it.
There is work, and then there is work, and my father made everything work. He put in his shifts at the plant and he worked hours afterwards in his garden. Everything he read was to make him smarter, because you can take the boy out of the classroom in the eighth grade but you can’t take the intelligence out of the man. He would shake his head at the novels his wife and daughters read but one day, one of those daughters would be using the richness learned in those wasted pages to tell the stories about a man who thought he had no stories.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t be fun or silly; it’s that he’d never learned to be frivo- lous. You don’t grow up raw and cold and still believe the world has room for decoration or chance. His only indulgence was those aimless Sunday drives with windows open and his shirt sleeve snapping in the wind; with Juicy Fruit for anyone who thought they might get carsick; with Jocko Thomas relating the updates from police headquarters; with a tiny girl sitting in the back watching first a horse, then a weather vane, then a tractor until they’d hurtled out of sight. We would chatter in the car, over the wind; we’d kick and complain and whine.
But mostly I would come to understand that my father was showing me what was important to him, the things that may now be out of his life but would never be out of his bones. He craved open spaces and quiet, though he worked in the noisy, dangerous confines of a steel plant.
We didn’t have a fancier car or a newer car because he didn’t believe in credit. We didn’t have a coveted swimming pool because we had a rough-and-tumble cottage he believed would give us more. We rarely went to restaurants and we never went to Disneyland. Instead, I watched a man who had nothing build a personal empire from determination and need and pain and pride. That steel plant filled his lungs with asbestos and as I watched the life leak from him, I couldn’t help but agonize over the price he’d paid to give me everything he’d never had.
Later, I started taking him for drives. He would still point out hawks and tell me the difference between cows you milk and cows you eat. His eyes would flash with anger at the clusters of housing, row upon row of sameness, steadily gobbling up his beloved farmland. It was a symbol of everything that was wrong when we couldn’t stay out l ong enough to clear t he clutter before he’d have to head back. He wasn’t strong enough to get lost anymore. And I wasn’t strong enough to watch him fade away.
Gone nearly 20 years now, my father left me with a mixed bag of frailties and strengths. His stubbornness and his pride, his flash anger and his slow trust, his belief we can all do better but his fear that we won’t. Like him, I still use drives to sort through the things that trip me up and confuse me, as if miles unfurling beneath me can undo hobbles I can’t tease apart by standing still.
He’s still with me every time.
GOING NOWHERE AND EVERYWHERE BECAUSE MY DAD SAID SO.