A Little Consideration

I spoke to my father yesterday. He was cruising down the highway somewhere near Vail, Colorado and I was right here in school. Our conversation was short but very sweet and afterwards I realized that he and I had a special connection to cars. I don’t mean that we fixed them or that we were aficionados; I mean we simply spent a lot of time together in and around them. There are many pictures of us in my head and, when I look carefully, the frame is usually a car. Maybe my earliest memory is of a dark road in Florida or Georgia. We used to drive down every winter and this one night we’d been on the road for hours. I think we must have been a little lost. I know for sure we were starving and needed a place to spend the night. As usual, dad was driving and I was in the back seat. Just when our hunger and impatience were at their peak, an oasis of lights reading Kentucky Fried Chicken appeared ahead. We never ate much fast food growing up, and so this, combined with the darkness of the road and the depth of our hunger, would be a particularly sumptuous meal. In fact, my only Kentucky Fried experience prior to this may have been the ads on TV. Those advertising guys can make things look pretty delicious, but it was nothing compared to what greeted my eyes and nose that night. Mom handed me my own little box and when I lifted the lid, I saw gold. There were two beautifully browned pieces of chicken, a scoop of Cole slaw and a little bun. The difference between the dark hungry road and the sanctuary of that little box was so stark that I can still see it today, almost forty years later. The box was a rectangle, and in it the world was composed for a time, fear eclipsed, hunger assuaged. Then there was the day our car rocketed over that roller-coaster part of Flatbush Avenue near Floyd Bennett Field: September 23, 1966. Dad must have been doing at least eighty, mom egging him on as the pains were getting closer and closer together. I was in my usual spot in the back seat, except that this time I thought we were going to crash for sure and I was confused: imagining the terrible impact, I was happy the front seat was there to protect me, but frightened that my parents had nothing but the windshield. I gripped the top of their seat and scrunched down so that only my eyes and the top of my head were vulnerable. Somehow we made it to the hospital in one piece. My sister Pamela was born around three seconds after we arrived. The beginning of summer brought not just the end of school but the drive to Monticello, the long and curving route to baseball fields, swimming pools, and Ruby the Knish Man. Dad took pride in packing a whole summer’s worth of stuff into one trunk, and working with him in the driveway those early mornings, watching the choices he made, the rearranging he did, were some of the earliest and most indelible lessons I would ever receive. The world was the trunk and in it we could allow chaos to reign or we could use our brains and our energy to create some kind of order, some kind of lasting peace where all the bulky, ill-fitting items could coexist peacefully for a time. The final test came when we closed it. Would that one last box be in the way or would our labors be rewarded with the sound of the latch catching just right? We loved that sound. The whole ride upstate would be smoother because of it; we shared a private satisfaction. The tall trees on the right as we neared the Quickway were emblematic of the job we had done together: there was order in the outside world, too. God had done his thing and we had done ours. Dad worked in the city all week while we played. But Thursday nights we stood near the bungalow’s back window, watching for his car. We relished the crunching sound the tires made as he pulled in, shifting and pulverizing the gravel. Did he give us our weekly presents right there in the lot or am I just embellishing the simple present of his arrival? We hadn’t thought much about him all week. But seeing him getting out of the car, stretching, his business suit creased, a little tired-looking after the long drive and the longer week, made me wake up a little more to what he was doing for all of us. I helped him in with his things and ran to get his slippers. Years later, he drove me up to college for my first semester. Some radio station owed him a lot of money and he had managed to get me a brand-new Atala racing bike out of the deal. S.U.N.Y. Fredonia was close to a ten-hour drive, but I remember he and mom had to be back home for some reason; so they dropped me, got me settled, then had to turn around and do the long trip all over again. I hugged them goodbye, but didn’t get enough. I remember peddling madly on the road out of town, catching up to them just before they got to the highway. Dad saw me in his rear-view mirror and threw a kiss. I got off the bike to steady myself and waved until the car disappeared around the bend. I got back on and rode the bike back to the college, into the rest of my life. Of course, it isn’t really the car that this is all about. Our glue could have been tools or TV or baseball or music, and the product would have been the same. The product was constructed of two primary pieces: he was always there; then, I was born. In the beginning, he carried me. Later, I got big enough to walk around on my own, help him out a little bit. I remember driving through the city with him on days I had no school. I would sit in the car and put quarters in the meter while he ran up to see his clients. This was long ago, when missing kids’ faces didn’t stare back at you from milk containers. Is it really harder to be a parent today or do all parents think that way? Whatever the answer, the years pass and we either see more clearly or become blind. Stand here with me now. Look down there, just beyond the ball field to the left. Do you see that big parking lot at the base of the hill? Watch how the dads of the world pull up from their long workweek. Watch how their children run out to greet them, to thank them, to hug them long and long.