Barbi Beckett - Grandma's Car

Mrs. Collins was unimpressed when I pushed a red haired girl called Charity down to the ground and laughed. I didn’t laugh because I hurt her but because of the way she slid across the floor on her knees. Charity was the younger sister of Faith and Hope, reason enough to push her across the room. Our third grade teacher didn’t think so, though, and her disappointment shut me right up.

Mrs. Collins was in her fifties, slim, with an airy, gray bouffant that gained her five inches. I would write her love notes and she would write back. Here is an except from my diary the day I brought Charity to her knees:

March 8, 1978

Dear Diary today I was bad in class I wrote mrs. collins a letter she wrote back and when school was out I said thank you to her and she said tank you to me my brother bugged me agin today.

I had watched teachers nostalgically greet classmates as they called roll on the first day of school, “Are you Oscar’s younger brother?” I didn’t share a last name with my siblings, plus, my next youngest brother was six years older and already a drop out. I didn’t expect to garner any special esteem based on family ties. But, somehow, Mrs. Collins and I put together that she’d been Ken’s teacher and, to my delight, she was delighted.

For two years Ken and I had been under separate roofs. I lived with our dad, my mother’s second husband and nobody’s biological father, while Ken lived with our grandma. I spent weekends with them. I’d been feeling the clouds descend around my brother for a few years. That baleful air was confusing and never made clearer by my grown ups. When I brought the curious spray paint laden tube sock and paper sack into my grandma’s house from the backyard, I never expected her to yell, “That goddamn boy!” and burst into tears.

Another diary entry:

February 8

Dear Diary tonight my Brother got picked up by the please cause he had merawana on him and my dad has to pick him up. my other brother went to a class he will see a film with people throwing up and he bugged me agin.

On another confounding morning Ken and my grandma stood in the hallway near the refrigerator where she screamed at him to drink more beer since he liked it so much. They were both crying and he was saying he never wanted to drink it again and he was sorry. I sat on the living room floor trying to escape into my coloring at the coffee table. Our mother was over and I remember looking at her with a vague sense of, “Shouldn’t You have some part in this?”

One afternoon Mrs. Collins quietly knelt down and told me that I was needed in the office. Her sweet but forced smile told me I wasn’t in trouble but should be worried. When the administrators in the office saw me, one picked up the phone and another opened the low swinging gate allowing me passage beyond the tall counter. On the phone my dad told me that Ken had stolen my grandma’s car. I was not to go with him if he came to pick me up after school. I went back to class where Mrs. Collins gave me a knowing look and I felt the burden of worrying about my brother was not mine alone.

On the twenty minute walk home I was all perked. But the cars whizzed by and, when I turned onto my block, the driveway was empty. I wondered why he hadn’t come for me. I flashed on the night before. My dad had come to pick me up at Grandma’s house. I picked up my bag and said goodbye to Ken but he stepped over and hugged me, a long hug, and he whispered, “bye.”

Several days passed with no word. One night, on our way home from Long John Silver’s, I suggested to my dad that we drive by Grandma’s house. We knew it was bingo night and she had arranged a ride but there, in her driveway, was the long, blue LeBaron. By the light of a street lamp we could see a blanket in the backseat. The carport was only steps from the front door. We knocked and waited but, even though he had a key, my dad didn’t go inside. Instead, we went to the neighbors house where Pop borrowed the phone. A few minutes later, one police car pulled up and then another. The blue and red lights flashed around while we all stood back from the house as if it might explode. It was quiet except for the staticky jabber from the police radios. I shuffled around a bit with the others but mostly stood leaning back against my dad wondering what the big deal was – why was everyone being so cautious and mysterious? There was a light on inside the house. It shined one bright stripe between the drawn drapes. That window looked through the dining room, into the living room; Ken was either in there or he wasn’t. I pictured him sitting in Grandma’s chair watching TV, oblivious to the small crowd gathered outside.

I decided to take matters into my own hands. I walked across the yard and climbed up on the tall brick planter box in front of the window. It never had flowers in it but Ken and I liked it because, standing up there, we could write messages to each other in pencil under the eaves of the house. I peered through the crack in the curtains and saw across to the empty living room. Then I heard a cop yell, “Get down from there!” Another cop came from the other direction, grabbed me, and ran to the sidewalk. It scared the shit out of me. That’s when it occurred to me that they were not imagining my brother inside, oblivious, watching television. They were imagining him in there, scared, with a gun.

My grandma’s bingo ride dropped her off and an officer slowly escorted her to the door and into the house. I’d already told them, through shaken tears, that he wasn’t home but they still acted all coppy.

The following day we learned that Ken had parked the car in the driveway and headed, on foot, to the police station to turn himself in. He’d been all the way to Dallas and back, hoping to join forces with our outlaw sister.

A couple weeks later, on a Sunday morning, Ken and I were lying around on his bed. He entertained me with a Hotwheels car which he used to perform a routine that I call “One Time When I Had Grandma’s Car…”. He would open each bit with “One time when I had Grandma’s car” and go on to describe and demonstrate increasingly absurd adventures in driving. “One time when I had Grandma’s car, I had to swerve to miss hitting this dog but I clipped a curb and went up on this ramp and the car flipped in the air and landed in a spin.” The images of that tank of a car behaving so sprightly had me in stitches.

He was surprised when I told him about being called to the office at school. “Really? They thought I’d come get you? I wish I’d thought of that.” I told him about Mrs. Collins’ concern and he quieted down. We shared a distaste for disappointing her.

We never would have let Grandma hear us carrying on about her gravity defying landboat. And our tones were hushed when he talked about his disgust with himself for hurting her. This would prove to be a pattern; Ken takes advantage of Grandma’s generosity and lack of spine, Grandma’s crushed, Ken hates himself for abusing her trust and kindness. The salt in those wounds was that he’d learned by example. Grandma spent some serious time in the wringer courtesy of “that goddamn boy” and our outlaw sister. At least she wasn’t alone:

January 18

Dear Diary my sister still isn’t home I know any one eles wood be wreryd to cus if they had a sister that has been in troble so much even jail. I’m scerd that she went off with some gey she don’t even know and he mite hurt her I don’t know about her she may get hurt very bad.

my mom is gone.

my brother shot me tew hi and hurt my but.

Grandma had a comrade in me, even if I couldn’t articulate that. Mrs. Collins was a kind lady but teachers had too many boundaries for my taste. And, their stint in our lives is short. My grandma and I were stuck with those kids, year after year, shenanigan after shenanigan. No doubt we appreciated days like:

January 19

Dear Diary nuthing exiteing happend today so I allmost forgot to right. and my brother bugd me agine.

Steve Strong: Christi's Legacy

Christi was a beautiful young lady. She was perky, energetic, and absolutely full of life. She was an extrovert, and all about drama before it was fashionable for young women to be dramatic. In describing her like this, it sounds like I’ve written her obituary – but Christi is alive and well. She’s just not around me anymore.

Christi was the kind of girl who, when you were making small talk with her in a crowded cafeteria, would suddenly yell “Hi Robert!” Six guys would turn their heads to her and she’d wave to each one and say hi. Then I’d ask her who she was saying that to and she’d say no one – she just knew it was a common name.

In the very small community of Mormons in Michigan in the 1970’s it was understood that Christi and I would date and, maybe more than just date, it was possible that we would marry. At least, some people were rooting for that.

Christi joined the church while I was a missionary laboring in Japan. She was extremely popular in her high school, and was voted the school’s “Snow Festival Queen” of 1978. She was from a broken family, and when she joined the church, the last of the family members that cared about her quit talking to her. She was alone and on her own by the age of 18.

By the time Christi and I went out on a date, she was living in East Lansing and attending Michigan State University. I had basically been avoiding girls for the two years I was in Japan, so when I drove down to see Christi I was very nervous and awkward around women. It was arranged that I would drive down on Friday night, have dinner with her, then stay on the couch of some guys she was friends with, and then spend Saturday together.

Christi wasn’t weird. But that was the first word people used to describe her if they didn’t understand her. For instance, when asked what her major was in college, she would say, “Puppetry.” Then you would naturally ask, “Does Michigan State have a Puppetry major?” To which she would reply, “Not yet. They’re making me take English, but I plan to start the Puppetry major here.”

On that Friday night of our first date, I got down to East Lansing and she told me wanted to make me a dinner with the theme of “Indian.” I thought she meant we were going to have curry, but no, she meant Chippewa. She baked fish that was burnt and too salty to be edible. We both picked at it but couldn’t eat it. To go with it, she made succotash which was lima beans and corn. I can’t stand lima beans and was choking this stuff down trying to be polite and I noticed she never ate at all, but was just watching me. I asked her what she was doing and she said she hates lima beans so she wasn’t planning to eat that night.

On the second evening of our first date, she asked me to drive her to a graveyard. I thought that was an odd request, but I obliged. Neither of us had warms coats, and this was Michigan in February, but she said she wanted to get out of the car and walk among the graves. It was so cold out there, and she snuggled up to me and said “Hold me.” The whole thing was so strange I felt like I was on Candid Camera!

During the time I was seeing Christi I purchased my first car: a rolling piece of rust called a Ford Mustang II. It was a 4 cylinder car that took one quart of oil for each tank of gas. The driver’s side floorboard had rusted through and I bondo-ed in a piece of wood so my feet wouldn’t hit the pavement when I drove.

It had a tachometer that only worked when the car had been parked in the sun with the windows rolled up. It had the unique combination of no pickup and terrible gas mileage. It was truly an engineering marvel – the pride of 1973 Detroit.

But what the vehicle lacked in body integrity and motor mechanics it made up for in acoustics. I bought and installed a four-way speaker system with the front speakers in the door panels and the rear speakers sitting on the back seat. It had woofers and tweeters like a living room stereo in the back seat and the sound was excellent. If anyone rode in the backseat, they had to hold the speakers on their lap.

I wanted to impress Christi on our date, so I put together a mix tape of Foreigner, Boston, Skynyrd and other cool groups from the era. But when I took Christi for a drive, the first thing she asked me to do was to turn off the music. I was honestly shocked that she wasn’t impressed, and asked her if she wanted some other kind of music.

She looked me in the eye and said, “Wouldn’t you rather talk to me?”

She explained her philosophy that people hide behind noise instead of communicating. She said she liked music, movies and dancing as much as the next person, but she thought that the time two people spent together was precious and shouldn’t be polluted by noise which makes it harder to understand each other. She looked at me and said, “Let’s leave the music off and just talk – unless you’d rather not hear from me.”

That was an awkward moment, but the more I thought about her words the more wise they seemed to be. Why spend money on a date just to hide behind a bunch of noise? After all, isn’t a live person infinitely more interesting than the same old music you can hear over and over with the push of a button?

Kim Harmeling: Cool Redux

I love cars, old cars, new cars, trucks, SUVs, anything, as long as it’s got some personality and a bit of style. My husband just views them as transportation, a way to get from one place to another faster than walking or taking the bus. If it was up to me, I’d buy them like shoes, coordinating them with my outfits and that day’s mood, storing them in a big garage where I could go and ponder which of my collection to drive today, what do I feel like today… let’s see the Caddy or maybe the SUV? In a bad mood? Let’s take the black Dodge Charger. Whenever we buy a car the husband has to steer me away from the great cars on the lot toward the practical cars with admonishments about bad gas mileage and impracticality. I go along with him even though the car lover in me doesn’t really care about those things.

I’m particularly fond of old cars and muscle cars; big, old, American made gas guzzlers with steering wheels as big around as a large pizza, fins you could hang a laundry line from and that require a parking space large enough for semi; loud fast, muscle cars, the beefy originals of the re-imagined versions now put out by Ford, Dodge, and Chevy. Those cars are just cool – they look cool, they sound cool, I felt cool when driving one.

The very first car I ever owned, the one that was mine, paid for with my own money earned at my first real job, was a 1969 Ford Mustang Boss 302. It was white with black racing stripes and chrome wheels. I had trouble getting insurance for it since I was still using my parents insurance company and the place wouldn’t touch it because it was a “race car”. I didn’t really mind the hassles about insurance after that, I was driving a cool car so the cost of insurance wasn’t important. A car like that, it gives a girl confidence, particularly when she – I – was out in the world for the first time and not really sure I knew what I was doing. I could go out, get in the car, tool around for awhile listening to music, eyeing the guys eyeing my car, and get an instant attitude adjustment. I loved that car, drove it for years during college and after, did all the work on it myself, even changed the radiator and heater core out which was a bitch to do, even following the Chilton’s instructions.

Eventually it started to leak and squeak, water would leak into the interior causing it smell like a swamp and the windows to fog up on the inside when the heater and A/C couldn’t keep up with it any more; the suspension squeaked so badly that going over rough road sounded like a great Saturday night on a cheap bed. Practicality and lack of funds to fix the major problems led to the agonizing decision to sell it in order to buy something more dependable. More boring. More adult. Less Cool.

I miss the time when just driving a car was all it took to make things better. All I had to do was put the Mustang on like a suit of armor and be a bit more invincible, more desirable, more confident than I was without it. The Honda just doesn’t do it that for me. It gets me from place to place, dependably, quietly, boringly but with no particular style or panache, no aura of cool confidence that I got from my first car. Maybe I don’t need that any more, practical considerations being more important, but I still miss it.

When I see an old, well cared for classic car on the street I have to walk over and take a look. It’s all I can do not to caress a fender or put nose prints on the windows looking at the upholstery inside. If I’m lucky the owner, usually a guy older than I am, will come out and I can openly admire his ride, envious that I don’t have one of my own. He’ll stand a little straighter, get a gleam in his eyes talking about it and you can see the Cool Guy he was when he drove that model for the first time. Maybe that’s why old guys have all the cool old cars, they remember how great it was to drive one and want to catch just little chill before it’s too late. Someday I’m going to be old enough to toss practicality out the window, maybe leave it open, get me another cool car and catch a little chill.

Marsi White: Treasures in the Abyss

My car is a mess. Not only from the rain that has plagued our region of late and the sap spray from the oak tree in our front yard, but from the tornado that rips through my car each time I transport my children. My kids are ages 7 and 11. We have encouraged their participation in various sports and extracurricular activities and take pride in their accomplishments. However, this also means that we are rarely home, living evenings and weekends speeding from one end of town to the next, cheering for the child of the hour and basking in their smile as we do. The car pays the price.

And yes, I did say sap spray. For some reason when ever I park my car in my driveway, after a undetermined amount of time, there is a fine mist of sap blanketed over my car. A mist so fine that it is only noticeable when I am sitting inside my car keys in hand, ready drive to that destination where a clean car would be preferred. The sap does provide a nice sheen. Just not a sheen that promotes the longevity of my car’s paint job.

I am not entirely innocent. The science experiment that was once a banana was left on my passenger seat before we departed for an 8-day cruise. I would like to blame the kids for distracting me to the point that I forgot my uneaten banana as I chased them into the house for some violation of the family code. Not so much. I do not think they were even in my car that day. The car was just the victim of my distracted mind.

However, the majority of the mess is from my children. I like to think of my car as the toy store of no return. At any given time, there are probably no fewer than five toys from the kids meals obtained at a drive-thru window while on our way to the sporting activity of the day. Closely related are straw wrappers. I am pretty good about removing out and out trash. I make the kids do it mostly, but it seems that the straw wrappers are like magnets to the floor of my car, jumping out of the kids’ hands and diving into the abyss.

The amount of straw wrapper and kids meal toys are followed by a close second by a score of socks. I do not understand what it is about getting into my car, but both kids suddenly feel the need to strip their shoes and socks off almost immediately. Getting out of the car, they always tend to slip their shoes back on to their feet without their socks. Now, I really do not blame them for not caring to put sweaty socks back on their feet, but why take them off in the first place?

I drove my colleagues to lunch this week but gave them fair warning about my car, cautioning them not to look too closely at what lurked at their feet. And really, that is the key. My car does not look all that messy from a far. As my three colleagues squeezed in the back seat, they handed me some glass rocks, or as my children would call them, “treasures”, that were lying in the crevice of the seat. I have no clue the origin of these particular treasures. But the sight of them brought me back to a story from my son’s early childhood. He was about five years old and not yet in Kindergarten. It was beautiful Sunday morning and we had planned to go on a small hike at a park near our house with his friends and their families. One of the dad’s had thought ahead and brought some of these glass rocks with him. When the boys were not paying attention, he had run ahead and placed them in the river for the boys to find. I still remember the squeals and excited looks on the boys faces, followed by their theories on where the treasures could have come from. Pirates, perhaps?

As I told this story to my colleagues, I felt myself smiling from my head to my toes. And in that moment, I did not mind how dirty my car might have been that day. The treasure found in the abyss provided me with a gift.

So, while my car might appear battered and worn from time to time, I cannot help but reminisce about all of the special memories that it holds. Family moments. Trying moments. Moments that I would never trade for a car wash, any day of the week.

Marsi lives in San Diego, CA with her husband, two children and dog. A private foundation grants writer by trade, Marsi explores her creative side by contributing to Writing Writer Writest. She is a breast cancer survivor and keeps a blog of her journey, entitled Nip-It.