My parents used to drive an old red hippie bus that is the home of some of my fondest memories. It couldn't make it up a hill without shaking, and I think it would have fallen apart if my dad hadn't kept fixing it with string and bailing wire. It never looked clean, even with a couple coats of car polish. And when we were actually driving it I was constantly embarrassed by it. But now it's ingrained in my memory, somehow symbolic of an idyllic childhood.
It was a hippie van any way you cut it, but my parents weren't hippies. My dad taught at a college and he was pretty ground-breaking in some ways, but he was as conservative as a Baptist preacher on Sunday. My mom has a monumental intellect, but it was far more Billy Graham than it was Michel Foucault. I've never been able to understand why every car they owned while I was growing up was an icon of the peace movement, but that's how it was.
The van never worked right, despite how hard my dad worked to fix it. It was always making funny sounds, and the sliding door would fall off at the most inopportune moments you could think of, smacking whomever was opening it in the head. Once after baseball practice in the roaring, cold wind, it came off in my mom's hands and almost knocked her out cold.
It was incredibly underpowered, too. Whenever we went to Seattle, it would shake and strain to make it over the hills between Sequim and the Hood Canal Bridge, slowing down every time we hit an incline. You could almost feel the pressure of my dad's foot on the accelerator as the line of angry motorists grew behind us and the horns started blaring, and I remember spending most of those drives ducked down in the seat to avoid being seen.
Today, people buy cars, keep them for a couple of years, and then get rid of them. But then people bought cars for the long haul, and cars were made to last. When we got it there were at least 150,000 miles on it, so in addition to all its other faults it was a mess. The paint was scratched and coming off. The seats were torn. There was rust everywhere.
It still ran, though. It slowed down and down and down and backfired on hills. It looked like it should already be in a junkyard. Everyone in the family got a bruise on the head from the door falling off. But we drove that van all over the country, from north to south and from sea to shining sea. There were easily 300,000 miles on it by the time my parents sold it, and the guy who bought it was still driving it years later.
I rode away from the ball field in that van the day I hit a home run. There's a picture of me sitting in the back seat with a trophy for being the best goalkeeper in my soccer league. I drove that van on my first date. My childhood was idyllic; the world was wonderful and full of promise. And somehow the memories of that van are filled with a naive and pleasant sense of possibility.
My dad fixed that van again and again. We tied the door on with chicken wire and didn't open it for a year at one point to keep it from hitting anybody. We washed it and coated it with car polish time and time again. It never looked good, and it never ran good, but there was something about it that, in memory at least, was essentially good.
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