August, 1989

August 1989: 

Bombing down country roads I’d never seen before or since, driving a car that took my family and I from Michigan to California and back again and Michigan to Virginia and back to Michigan.  When it rained, water inexplicably filled the back-seat passenger’s side foot well.  The dusty light blue upholstery on the ceiling sagged around the dome light.

The car I drove in wooden shoes, very briefly, just to see if it could be done, the Tulip Time we taped the fortune cookie fortune “A thrilling time is in your immediate future” to the dash with band aids.

The car that when it was cold out, made you wonder every time if it was going to take off again when the light turned green

The car I rode in the year I was seven, when in the middle of the journey cross country, I saw snow for the first time in two years, when at the end of the journey, we were greeted by the same ice plant ground cover we’d left on the other side of the world just months before

The care I drove and drove and drove, almost never filling the tank back up.  (Sorry, Mom and Dad.)

The car I learned to drive in, early on Sunday mornings, past the mall where I would later to duck to avoid my (almost) first kiss

The car with an after-market cassette deck that I was ever grateful for because almost all the radio stations were crap in my teen aged opinion

The car, weeks before, I’d ferried around friends from Washington, D.C. and Detroit, showing them the corn fed, tulip-bedecked wasteland I now called home.  (What else did we do that week besides dye my hair red with McCormick food coloring?)

The car I drove when I accidentally lost Lake Michigan that spring when I was a miserable square, dark-minded peg in a school of round, pure-minded pegs who’d known each other forever.

The 1979 Malibu station wagon I grew up in from Michigan to California to Virginia and back to Michigan,  we took one last long ride together, bombing down roads I’d never seen before or since, windows rolled down, open to the blue August sky, blasting Disintegration.