Driving Lessons

I apologize in advance to my father for having to endure this story one more time, and in public. I’m publishing it anyway because . . . well, because I love it, and it has become one of those well-polished  stories that somehow always shows up at holidays and family gatherings. At the time the story took place, my family was living in a small house on Bush Street in Southmoor Park, and my sisters and I were close to the ages we are in the photo. And I don’t know if I’ve included a photo of the same car. But you get the idea. Ultimately, it’s not a story about cars and driving. It’s a story about my father and his ingenuity and problem-solving. It’s also about how much a little girl can love her dad. Although I am now decades older, my father is still an ingenious problem-solver and this little girl still  adores her father.

Maybe my family memory will remind you of a  story that’s hung around your house for decades. Maybe, just maybe,  you’ll  write it down.

Enjoy!

Driving Lessons

Sundays passed in an unaltered rhythm when I was young.  After church and a meal of pot roast, canned peas, and a salad made of Cool Whip and fruit cocktail, my mother took off her shoes, went into her bedroom and closed the door against me and my two younger sisters.  It was the one time in the week she could count on taking a nap.

I would push against the door.

“But what if I need you,” I would whine.  I was seven and needed to be prepared.

“Ask your father,” she said.  I heard the click of the door latch. “He’s out front.”

Which is how my five-year-old sister, Karla, and I came to be sitting in the grass of the front yard, tormenting roly-poly bugs, while our toddler sister, Karyl, played with spoons on a blanket beside us.  Dad tinkered over the engine of our turquoise Nash Rambler, trying to coax it to one more week’s service.  Screwdrivers, greasy rags and wrenches littered the sidewalk.  Finally he stood and wiped the grime from his hands.

“No use,” he said, lifting the car hood from its support and letting it drop with a clank. “I’m going to have to jump-start it.”

I rolled the well-armored bug in my palm.  “What’s that?” I asked.

Dad propped his hands on his hips.  “I’ll hook up the Mercury in front of this car to pull it.”

“The black car?” I asked.

“Yeah, the black car,” he said.  “You’ll drive the black car and pull me in the green car until I can get it started.”

The roly-poly bug unfurled on its back, its many legs sweeping the air.  I brushed my finger against them and the bug rolled up again.  “But I don’t know how to drive,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” said Dad.  “I’ll show you.”

Soon, I was in the driver’s seat of the Mercury.  Karla knelt backwards beside me, her arms propped over the back of the bench seat.  Karyl sat in the back.  No seatbelts.  If I slid to the edge of the slick vinyl seat and gripped the steering wheel, I could just reach the gas pedal, which, my father told me, was the only pedal I needed to worry about.  I was supposed to push on the gas slowly, keep the steering wheel straight, and drive down the street.

“Now Barbie,” he said, “whatever you do, don’t step on the brake.”  He leaned through the open car window.  “I’ll be right behind you, hooked to this car with a chain.  I’ll stop you when it’s time.  Just leave the brake alone.”

I stared over the steering wheel down the street a few hundred yards ahead where the pavement dead-ended at a deep irrigation ditch.  Filled with tall grasses, dank water and an abundance of grasshoppers, the ditch was a tempting yet scary place to play.  From the driver’s seat of a car, it looked very near.

“Don’t stop?  Ever?” I looked back at my father.  A smudge of grease colored his chin.  His black-rimmed glasses framed his eyes.  He was so strong, so wise.  I desperately wanted to please him. “Okay, Daddy,” I said.

He climbed into the car behind us.  I stared straight ahead. Karla looked over the back seat.  “Daddy’s waving,” she said.

I gripped the steering wheel harder and pushed the gas pedal.  The car lurched forward.  I heard a loud, grinding clatter, but continued to push on the gas.  I stared at the black strip of pavement, watching it disappear beneath the front of the car.

Karla stood next to me, looking backward.  “Daddy’s waving again,” she said.

I ignored her.  I focused on that black strip of road and the gas pedal.  We neared the end of the street.  The ditch loomed closer.  I wanted to stop.  But Daddy had said don’t stop and Daddy knew best.  This I knew for sure.

What I didn’t know, couldn’t know, was that the chain connecting our cars had fallen off.  My father sat in the front of the dead Nash Rambler, watching me drive all three of his children toward a 10-foot drop into an irrigation ditch with specific instructions not to stop.

He got out of the Nash and started running.

If Karla saw him racing toward us, she said nothing.  She just knelt beside me, her back to the impending drop-off, and watched him run.

I was surprised, then, to see movement out of the corner of my left eye.  My father had reached my door, and jerked on the handle to open it.

Suddenly, I knew that I had screwed up somehow.  I’d misunderstood what he’d said.  I’d done it all wrong. My father, who knew all things, could fix all things, would be disappointed in me.

I slammed on the brake.

Unfortunately, I’d braked just as my father opened my door. He smashed into the open door, knocking his breath away.  He fell to the pavement, his hands to his chest, gasping for air.  I cried, seeing my father on the ground, knowing that I had made some sort of mistake to put him there. My sisters, seeing me cry, started wailing.

My father pushed himself to a seated position, still struggling for breath, and reached for my hand.

“’s okay, . . . .  Barbie,” he said, pulling me with my my gangly legs and arms onto his lap. “Not . . . your . . . fault.”

“I’m sorry, Daddy.  I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” I cried into his shirt, tears creating a big wet patch, my nose running.

“My fault . . . I . . . should’ve known . . . better,” he said, rocking me, pulling my sisters into the pile as well.  “It’s okay.  Shhh.  It’s okay now.”

I let him rock me until my my sobs subsided. Finally I was spent, reduced to occasional hiccuping gasps as I rested my head on his shoulder. “Snubbing,” my grandmother called it. I felt calmer, and yet it seemed like we’d crossed some sort of a line. My seven-year-old mind was trying to grasp two new concepts, as foreign to me as driving a car. First, my father had made a mistake. I couldn’t recall a time when that had ever happened before. My daddy wasn’t perfect. He wasn’t invincible. This might have been a devastating realization, were it not coupled with my other new piece of awareness: my father was really, really scared, and I somehow knew that the thing that frightened him the most was losing me.  I had always understood that my father–both my parents, actually–loved me and had somehow been put on this earth to take care of and provide for me and my sisters. It was a rule, a given, and something I had always taken for granted. But the realization that this love somehow cost him something was new. Imagining this fact as I sat curled on his lap, safe, warmed me. I realized that this is what it meant to be loved.

There we all sat in the middle of the road.  The Nash was far behind us, tethered to one end of the useless chain.  The black car squatted on the pavement, the door still open.  But it was all right now.  We were all okay, and Daddy was back in charge.

Eventually we stood and my father brushed dirt and gravel from his jeans. I wiped my nose on the back of my arm. Dad picked Karyl up and bounced her on one hip until she giggled.

“What do we do with the green car?” I asked.

He stared at the Nash for a moment and sighed.  “Just leave it there,” he said.  “It’ll wait.”  Karla ran ahead. My dad held Karyl in one arm, draping the other arm around my shoulders as we walked back into the house.  I let the screen door slam behind me.

“Shhhh,” Dad said, “Let’s not wake Mommy.”

When A Word Chooses You

Last week, I wrote about trading in the idea of new year’s resolutions for the simplicity of adopting a single word for the year (What’s Your Word?). I got insightful feedback from people who shared what their words would be: trust, dedication, participation, choice, refrain, joy. It was, and is, an excellent conversation. I just didn’t realize that I hadn’t finished the conversation with myself.

When I wrote the post, I thought I had already chosen my word for 2012:  breathe. It made sense. My kids know that I tend to be a bit of a worrier, and a word that reminded me to take a deep breath, to let go seemed like a good idea.

Apparently, however, the word didn’t choose me. All week long, in various ways, a different word kept sounding and resounding:  warrior. I kept hearing it in whispers. Warrior. It showed up all the time, while watching a YouTube video of Ira Glass on storytelling,when reading a Steven Pressfield book, The War of Art, while skimming a couple of other random blog posts. I even went to yoga and was startled to remember that some of the most familiar poses are called Warrior I and Warrior II. Seriously.

Warrior? You’ve got to be kidding, I thought, and rejected the word outright. No way could I be a warrior. I have never been much of a fighter. From an early age, my personality seemed determined to plant itself firmly in the “turn the other cheek” camp. I’m a conciliator, a compromiser, a peace keeper, and I’m very happy with that. I like looking at all sides of situations and consider my ability to build win/win solutions one of my greatest strengths.

But warrior kept nagging me, however, so I wondered if there wasn’t something more going on. As I’ve told my kids for years, our greatest strengths are often the flip-side of our greatest weaknesses, a package deal of sorts. We don’t get one side of the coin without accepting the other. For me, the flip-side of being a peace-keeper is that I am sometimes blind to the times when it is appropriate to be a warrior, to fight for something I believe in.  And that’s the thing about blind spots–we are blind to them, so they are often hard to see. Sometimes we need help. I wondered if this word was creeping out from a blind spot, trying to get me to pay attention to an area I’ve neglected. That’s when I remembered an event from my childhood.

I was five years old when my family moved from Colorado to Texas at the end of my kindergarten year. To me, Texas was an exotic, new country. I was a shy, observant child and soon felt overwhelmed by the strangeness of the place, the differences from Colorado. It was flat for one thing, and humid, and the occasional rainstorm emptied the sky and flooded the streets. And did I mention the scorpions and tarantulas? Plus, all the people there had strange accents that took a while for me to understand.

When I started school the following September, my district didn’t offer kindergarten, so the first grade was really a repeat of everything I had already learned the previous year. I was bored, I didn’t fit in, and I’m guessing my teacher thought I was a nuisance. I’m being charitable here. At the time, I just assumed that my teacher hated me, further proven by the fact that she placed my desk in the middle of a circle of boys!

How My Dad Was Right

 

River Teeth and Nanny Jo

It’s been about twenty years since that night when I felt things couldn’t possibly get worse. I was tired, over-committed, and a single-mother. In the midst of my life’s uncertainties, I somehow decided that it would be a good idea to get a kitten for my four-year-old daughter, Katie Bess.

I know. What was I thinking?

I ran the idea by Nanny Jo, a feisty, fine Southern Belle of a woman. Also, my former mother-in-law. Even though her son and I had divorced the year before, I was grateful that she had staked out her corner in my life and intended to stay. She also loved animals, and I knew I could trust her opinion on what I thought of as The Cat Decision.

“A kitten would be good,” she said, “but get two. They’ll be able to keep each other company while you’re at work.”

So Katie Bess and I fixed up the small basement of our house as a cat haven, bought a litter box and cat food, and then one evening went and picked up two balls of fur–one grey and one pure black–which my daughter named Ashes and Bo. We played with them for a bit until they fell asleep, snuggled in their little cat bed. I put Katie Bess to bed–a struggle in those days–straightened up the house, did the dishes, and then went to check on the cats.

They were missing.

I scrambled around the basement, emptying the laundry basket, shifting boxes. I couldn’t find them. And then I heard a faint mewing coming from–of all impossible places–the ceiling. They had somehow climbed the stairs and found their way through a crack into the space between the ceiling tiles of the basement and the floor joists of the room above it. They had crawled to a far back corner and I couldn’t reach them. They were stuck and scared and crying. It was 11:30 at night and I was at the end of my last nerve.

I called Nanny Jo. She answered the phone even at that late hour, and I sobbed my story to her.

“I can’t do this,” I cried. “I have to give them back. How am I going to tell Katie Bess?”

“Well, darlin’,” said Nanny Jo, “Anything worth doing takes work.”

That’s all it took. Something about her message and the way she shared it was all I needed to hear. I don’t remember anything else about the conversation, but I hung up, went back downstairs, somehow coaxed the kittens down from the ceiling, and went to bed. Nothing changed overnight. My life was still hard. Kittens were still a lot of work. But I believed this message, given by a woman who loved me.

The story of that night and Nanny Jo’s simple statement has stuck with me over time. It has a special endurance that escaped many of my other memories. It’s become a story I live by, and my own personal parable. Countless times since, when I’ve faced difficult situations, I’ve dredged those words from my past to help me take the next step.

Anything worth doing takes work.

It is, for me, a “River Tooth” story.

Let me explain. David James Duncan is one of my favorite authors. He’s written smart, funny novels, many of which are set in Oregon, where I live, including The River Why and Brothers K. He also wrote a somewhat lesser known book called River Teeth, a collection of short stories. In it, he introduces a concept that I love. He writes:

“When an ancient streamside conifer falls, finally washed or blown from its riverbank down into the water, a complex process of disintegration begins. The fallen tree becomes a naked log, the log begins to lead a kind of afterlife in the river, and this afterlife is, in some ways, of greater benefit to the river than was the original life of the tree.”

He goes on…

“There are, however, parts of every drowned tree that refuse to become part of this cycle. There is, in every log, a series of cross-grained, pitch-hardened masses where long-lost branches once joined the tree’s trunk. ‘Knots,’ they’re called, in a piece of lumber. But in the bed of a river, after the parent log has broken down and vanished, these stubborn masses take on a very different appearance, and so perhaps deserve a different name. ‘River teeth’ is what we called them as kids.”

River teeth stories are the ones that have persisted over the years. After all the other details and activities and events of your life have washed away or been forgotten, these are the ones that somehow stick, the ones that really matter. And just as the afterlife of the fallen log can be, as Duncan writes, of greater benefit to the river than the original living tree, so too can the memory of an event reverberate even more powerfully through our lives than we imagined when we lived through the event the first time.

So what are your River Teeth stories? How can you decide?

Often, they are stories of choice, about a time when you met a forked road and had to choose one path over another. It could be a major choice such as where to go to college or a decision to marry. Yet it is just as likely to be something you imagined at the time to be fairly minor, like whether or not to get (or keep) a cat. How did you choose? You will know you have a River Tooth because it persists and remains, while other stories fade away.

Sadly, Nanny Jo passed away this summer, and I’ve thought a lot about her and that long-ago night in recent weeks. She was a wise woman, a devoted grandmother, a fearless friend, and one of my favorite people. I appreciate the unfailing way she pulled me — and my extended family — into her circle. I’m so grateful for her life and for all the vivid color she brought to mine. And I’m especially grateful for the gift of a story that endures.

A Daughter Walking Away

Almost five years ago, Katherine, our oldest daughter and a recent high school graduate, decided she wanted to go live in Boston for a year between high school and college. She got on Craigslist, found a job and an apartment, and acted on her plan to move as far across the country as she could possible get from our home in Oregon. Katherine had always had an independent streak, so this was not a shocking decision. To be fair, we supported the idea. I’ve always felt that it was a good idea—especially for a woman—to spend some time living alone at some point in one’s life. I just thought it would have been nice for her to be independent a little closer to home.

At the end of the summer, we all climbed in her Jeep Cherokee, packed to the ceiling with all her belongings, and set out for the five-day drive across the country. I did pretty well, I think, knowing that I would soon be letting her go. I was calm, cheerful even. We stopped at Mount Rushmore and Niagara Falls, ate ice cream and knitted in the car.  Still, it was bound to hit me sometime. The night before we planned to arrive in Boston, we stayed in a charming Bed and Breakfast in New York. I lay in a strange bed in a dark room, not even close to sleeping. After 18 years of paying attention to every detail of this person’s life, I was about to be downsized. I was no longer in control.

So, I did what I normally do in times of uncertainty or stress: I wrote. I dragged myself out of bed and found a little parlor where I could figure out what I was thinking. I pulled out my notebook and pen and scratched out these lines:

Dear Katherine—
How could I not know, when I first held you almost eighteen years ago, that this day would come. I wasn’t looking forward enough. And yet tomorrow we drive into Boston and help you move into the first place where you will live without me. We’ll set up your pink mixer in your kitchen, hang your pink shower curtain in your bathroom, and set up your desk. We’ll buy groceries and hang pictures on the walls. Eventually, after a bit of sightseeing and a few meals, I’ll leave and go back home. And you will stay in Boston, such a long, long way from where I live and work and sleep. I’ll have to get used to a life I haven’t known since before you were born. I wasn’t really prepared. But I don’t know how you prepare yourself for this. Maybe you can’t.

You have always had a way of pushing me faster than I felt I was ready to go. And yet, I have to say, it was thrilling, in the way that a roller coaster leaves you breathless but exhilarated; the terrifying turns, staggering drops, and dizzying views from the top. I realize now that much of my life turned around riding that roller coaster with you. Such a joy! You were always by my side, looking at me with those steady, hazel eyes, expecting good things, helping me believe that it would all, in the end, be all right. And now, the roller coaster has rolled into the station and I am stepping out of the car to watch your ride from the ground, and to participate from a distance. A great distance.

I guess I am both thankful and sad. I don’t really have any regrets (well, not too many at least). I’ve made mistakes that I hope you will forgive. Like not letting you read Nancy Drew books when you were eight. You are a great daughter, and more importantly, a solid, caring person. You have strong values, a big heart, and a good mind. You are beautiful and charming and fun. You seem to have a passion for your life, which is more than any mother can hope for. You will be fine, I know. More than fine. You have a great life in front of you and I am so excited to watch it unfold and know that I get to take part.

Now, just so you don’t forget:

• You are in charge of what you say, what you think, and what you do.
• You are ONLY in charge of what you say, what you think, and what you do.
• Floss, even though you don’t want to. Someday you will be glad you took care of your teeth.
• In dealing with other people, be respectful and honest.
• Drink lots of milk.
• You are being led toward your best life, even though the path is not always obvious.
• You become what you believe. What you focus on expands. So focus on the positive aspects of your life, and find good things to believe in.
• Drive safely.
• Find joy in little things—flowers in a vase, a nice candle, the smell of rain.
• And, to quote a movie line, “Make good choices.”

I love you always,
Mom

I finished writing, closed my notebook, went back to bed and fell asleep. The next morning, we drove to Boston and helped Katherine move in. I didn’t give her my letter. In fact, she never saw it until about three years later. I was about to publish the letter in a book I wrote with a friend called Half Past Perfect, and I felt she should see it before the world did.

I think I knew even then that I didn’t really write it for her, but for myself. It was a way to make sense of her leaving, and to remind myself of what I knew to be true, what I hoped I had taught her.  Periods of transition are often a mix of chaos, exhilaration, and hard work.  But they are also fertile ground to find out what we truly believe.  It’s nice to know that, even after five years, what I learned in that dark night in New York has held up pretty well.

This is probably the single most important and least understood benefit of writing. We think we are sharing with other people what we think or believe, and we are.  Yet the most powerful impression our writing makes is usually on ourselves.

What do you know to be true?

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