The Slow Way: Red Car, a Birthday Reflection
Even in all that aches, the stuff that marks our seasons comes and goes. We pick each other up and move along from place to place.
Two weeks before I turned twenty-three my dad and I took a ride to the used car dealership near his office. He’d noticed a two door red Mitsubishi that had just shown up on the lot. I was moving across the country in one week and we weren’t sure that my 1991 Ford Taurus was up for the journey.
My dad’s parents were of their generation in the best ways. Both had finished high school and been forced into hard laboring jobs. But the GI bill and my grandpa’s service in World War II had set them up with a life outside of rural living. And my grandmother “Memaw” was one sharp tack of a woman. If she had been given the education, she could have been a CEO. She was made to be in charge. She eventually worked at a bank and learned how to invest money, got her kids to college, and started saving for her grandkids. “Memaw’s scholarship” kept me from going into debt in undergrad. And when I was accepted into a Masters degree program and given enough aid and a TA job that I didn’t need her scholarship, she handed it to me in the form of that little used red car.
We bought it off the lot and drove straight to her house to show it off. The next week I drove it from Amarillo, Texas to Syracuse, New York. My other grandmother, Deenie, rode alongside me, not complaining as I plugged in CD after CD and sang to 90’s folk-rock, music she’d never heard in her life.
When I was engaged to Chris two years later, his white Acura died, and neither of us had the money to replace it. We were living in different apartments, which meant that I started waking up early in the middle of the unmerciful Syracuse winter, trekking through the snow to drive to Chris’s place, pick him up, and drop him at his Barnes and Noble job. We were pretty swoony then, so more time together was amazing anyway. Who needed a second car?
That red Mitsubishi had some major collapses—one that same year on the side of the road in Rhode Island. We got married, finished my last year in Syracuse dropping each other and picking each other up in that red car. We moved to the Philadelphia suburbs, where eventually Chris took the train to Philly for work and I drove the route to the construction company where I put my Poetry MFA to work by answering phones and filing.
We bought a house. We had a baby. And we sold the red car in favor of a four-door Volkswagen. It was the kind of car responsible parents owned. I turned thirty. We moved that car and ourselves to San Francisco. We had another baby. Chris took the bus to work. I walked with the babies to the park and drove to Trader Joes on Tuesdays. When Ace came around we traded the VW for a minivan. Y’all, it had to be done. And that’s what we’ve driven the nine and a half years since. A silver Honda. We moved to New Jersey in a pandemic. Chris worked from home and then worked in New York. He took the train.
It’s been twenty years of sharing a car, so the decision to get a second car has been a weird one. I mean most of the time I believe it’s good to get a little creative, to take public transportation, to get an uber, to save some money. And also? We’re in the suburbs. Our kids need to go places and be picked up. Our minivan has been through some things.
So we did it. Our thirteen-year-old, who loves cars way more than anyone else in the family, helped. And so we made him choose the color. He chose red.
It just so happened that the car showed up this week, the afternoon before my 45th birthday, twenty-one years after Chris and I began sharing, twenty-two years after my dad and I drove the first red car off the lot. It felt like something, but I wasn’t sure what. I jumped in it and drove to the grocery store. I felt like that twenty-three year old scooting across the country in her sporty Mitsubishi mirage, sunroof open.
I treated myself to a facial on my birthday. The technician asked if I have any “concerning” areas of my face. “Oh”, I said, “my neck.” I’ve worried about how many wrinkles have shown up this year, how loose the skin is. She looked at me and nodded her head, as if to say: Yeah, I’d be worried too.
The girl who drove the red car all the way across the country is still in me twenty-two years later. I can sing the same songs I knew then, the ones I belted out with my sweet grandmother in the car beside me. That girl was there thirteen years later when I picked Chris up from the bus stop in San Francisco in the pouring rain, dinner left on the stove, my three babies loaded in the car so he didn’t have to walk the twenty minutes home at 7 pm.
I’m 45 years old, a woman who has been married twenty years, mom of teenagers. And I’m grateful. I’m grateful for my body, which is stronger than it has been in twenty years. Grateful that this year I committed fully to exercise for the sake of loving myself, not trying to flatten my belly, or trying to change my pant size. And I love being strong.
I’m grateful for my small joys, morning snuggles with Ace, and evening snuggles with Richmond the dog. My imperfect garden. The books I’ve read this year, and my discovery after years of slowly reading serious fiction, that I really like quickly reading fun fiction. I’m grateful I wrote a second book I’m proud of. I’m grateful that I still believe that God is a force of love at work in the world, at work in the people around me. Even my ability to love at all is a gift from the Source of love, and that is something to hold dearly to, even when I can’t control the pain that comes with loving.
It’s been a hard year, and this summer has been even more so. And still, there are flowers cut from my garden in the vase on the entry table. There are walks to get froyo with my kids, there are strolls with Richmond and Ace in the air that’s already cooling towards fall. There is a red car in the driveway that reminds me of a moment in my life when I was terrified and wonder-filled and ready for everything to happen to me.
On my birthday, I have a tradition of listening to my favorite childhood album, Amy Grant’s Unguarded. Ace is a fan of eighties soundtracks, so he jammed all morning with me, and when we picked sixteen-year-old August up from cross-country practice, he jumped in the cool red car, rolled his eyes and smiled knowingly at me. “Amy Grant?”
“Uh yeah, of course,” I answered.
He leaned back and let “Wise Up!” and “Love of Another Kind” wash over him. He let me have my birthday moment, in the red car, windows down. Ace sang along in his own way. August appreciated my motions when I reminded him along with our girl Amy to “use your head to guide your heart!”
My grandmothers are gone now, and these children are mine. My neck is wrinkling up and the facial lady doesn’t deny it. And my legs are strong, my belly is still soft, and the world is full of heartbreak. My oldest baby is six-foot-four and listened to Amy Grant’s album from 1985 with me on the day I turned 45.
And even in all that aches, the stuff that marks our seasons comes and goes. We pick each other up and move along from place to place. I think that’s what I’m saying. Not the cars, the people in the cars. The years and the love and the ways we carry each other.
So beautiful 💕
I love your writing, Micha. So beautiful and lyrical and yet down to earth.