Cars

The garage at my parents' house looks significantly different than it did when I was a boy. This one started earlier today at Caribou with Sarah, as we were trying to get some work done. It quickly became very different than what I had originally planned, like working on a story and seeing characters grow in different ways than you had originally envisioned. I thought it was going to be something about me trying to be a bohemian, and how I gave it a pretty good try for a bit before deciding against it. It seems like a pretty important part of my own story these past few years, so that may yet be revealed in a later post. What emerged from the work earlier was a picture of my family, through our cars. The brain can be fickle in the things it chooses to remember. I wish I had some say in what is held as important, but I really don't. However, I do think that the things we remember vividly aren't just there by accident. Whether we know it at the time, I strongly believe that each of these things will mean something and will be used, if they haven't yet already.

But I'll get there eventually. In the meantime, it's time to work on descriptive language, and the cars seem like a pretty safe place to start. Here's just about every little bit that I can remember about the vehicles. The earliest possible recollection I have of a car trip was sitting in the back of my dad's little blue car (I think it was a Plymouth Reliant), listening to the serpentine belt screeching on the way to church, unfamiliar with the noise but expecting the car to explode at any moment. That one didn't explode, but I can recall my dad still talking about it as the worst car they've ever owned, on account of all the money poured into the "blue toilet." From there, my dad moved up to an Oldsmobile Cutlass station wagon. Again, the color was the light blue that seemed to dominate those types of cars in the late 80s, like something Jerry Lundegaard would have had in his car lot in Fargo.

But the vans: the vans are the things that truly defined our family. The first to come along was a 1987 maroon GMC Safari. This held special significance for my parents, as it is to date the only actual new vehicle they have ever bought. The van was bought with inheritance money from when my grandma passed away, so this most definitely was a big deal. It was not, however, a cool van: it was boxy, like a plumber's van, the antithesis of stylish. The Safari was our method of transportation around much of the country on family road trips to Arizona, Washington state, and the East Coast. My brother and I would claim the backseat and busied ourselves with action figures, Legos, and putting ice-cold cans of pop from the coolers behind us onto the necks of our sisters in the middle seat. In between the two front seats was the cassette tape case, holding all of my parents' Christian music. One time, when we were in Colorado on a trip, someone broke into the van with all of our luggage and everything, and the only thing they took as far as we knew was the cassette tapes. I still like to think the joke was on him.

The maroon van also happened to be the first car I ever drove, at the tender age of 18. My less-than-stellar grades prevented me from getting my license in high school, which now I am very thankful for, since a big part of my life revolved around not having a license. When I finally did get my license, I hit the road in a big way with the '87 Safari; the two of us were so similar in age, we were like old friends. Over time, certain features of the van had ceased to work, such as the locks, the inside sliding-door handle, the back doors, and the transmission was a little temperamental as well. I cruised in style; the van was awarded the name "Clifford" by friends.

Thanks to all the road trips, Clifford had reached about 245,000 miles the winter of 2004. I had left on a high school retreat that weekend, leaving the red van in the church parking lot. When I arrived back at church on Sunday, the red van was gone. When my dad showed up in the other van to pick me up, he wordlessly handed me a picture of the red van, on the side of the road, with black smoke pouring out of it. Yes, our only new car went out in a blaze of glory.

The other vehicle after the station wagon was a brown Chevrolet Astro van; almost the exact same as a Safari, but with different branding. When that gave out, my hopes rose that we may, in fact, have a shot at getting something newer, cooler, with maybe a second door on the driver's side or bucket seats or maybe a CD player.

The Astro was replaced by a ’95 Caribbean-blue Safari.

We do have four kids in the family, I guess.