in my lifetime we’ve scrapped three cars.
the first one i have little recollection of. silver, maybe. tinny – all edges and angles. when i was 7 we got a new one. back in those days my parents picked me up after school. i would sit at the bottom of the stairs of our old IJ campus with friends around 5pm. we filled the twenty minutes between home and school with childish entertainment: licking nectar off ixoras, swinging each other by the belts – until the group trickled to a couple. that day i was the only one left. i hadn’t known the new car had arrived. no silver car rolled by.
this one was a gleaming peacock blue, round and pleasing. my family’s faces revealed by wound-down windows, smiling, excitement that reflected mine. my shoes slapping against the dusty concrete as i dived in to soak in the scent and smoothness of new leather. i dubbed it Dark Blue.
Dark Blue to me was rushing backwards into a vortex, knees sinking into seats. i spent most rides peering over the back window, waving at cars behind us. cars and faces, always pleasantly surprised, waving back, timid, bemused, eyes lighting up from the dim of after-work fatigue. rides back Dark Blue became my cradle, amniotic and gently rocking – head against window, the curve into our driveway so familiar i knew it was home before opening my eyes.
in our later years we felt ready for an upgrade. I was too young to understand change as loss. all i knew was that the new one would be champagne gold – partly my choice, and how exciting was that? this time we simply called it ‘car’, because champagne gold was a mouthful (and i was too old for anthropomorphic names [not really, i named my ruler theophilus]).
champagne gold was a haze of mornings to school. this time the seats were spared scuff marks from my knees, its back window didn’t frame my face throwing greetings at others. this car was the half an hour of reprieve before school started: we tossed aside shoes and rubbed bare soles against the warmth of mats, snuck in that few extra minutes of snooze, sticky-ed our fingers with hastily assembled peanut butter toast breakfasts.
we had this car for a long time. earlier this year we had it scrapped. mom, who spent the most time with it, sent me a message: “sad to let it go… after many years of driving it”. my reply was that her new ride was more practical, etc etc. i surprised myself with a dearth of sadness.
perhaps because in recent years i’ve taken fewer rides in the car, or these rides weren’t routine and significant as before. the last time i had been in it, it smells different. that may seem trivial, but i recognize a lot of things by their scents. including people, actually. when they smell incongruent it really throws me off. i think..i’m not sure but i think the car smell i know consists of the combined scent of my family members.
so i guess in the past couple of years we didn’t really sit in the car together, at least not long enough. not enough for the car to recognize us as a family unit. a few episodes of modern family capture the role of car to family very well.
in one, claire dunphy couldn’t let go an old beat up car because of past memories they had with it. phil wanted to reenact those memories for her with the kids, but everything failed miserably. it ended with the car rolling off a cliff, phil trying to stall it, holding on to its bonnet – the rest of the family yelled at him to let it go. to let go…they meant the car, but i think also of memories. they stay as just memories, and that’s ok.
Q 