My Father's Car
In January 2010, my daughter and I left my father’s apartment for the last time in his 1994 Buick Century. We had packed boxes of his belongings into the trunk and the back seat, as well as a gold box that contained photos of each of the flower arrangements that had been delivered to the funeral home, as well as copies of the program at his funeral, his obituary, and his death certificate.
By the time we arrived, we had been away from Minnesota for several weeks on a study abroad trip to the island where my father was born. He died on our way back to the states. Although I can recount many details of the days following our arrival in Ohio, I don’t remember returning home. I remember only that my supervisor called me the next day to check in and see when I was coming back to work, and I told her I would be back in on Monday.
Monday came, and our lives went on as usual; I reviewed the notes the substitute had prepared for me and went on teaching my class; I rescheduled all the service-learning classroom visits and other meetings I had missed; I called a meeting to check in about the Martin Luther King Day of Service, which had gone fine in my absence. S went back to school, too, and managed by some miracle (and with a great deal of help from her tutors) to catch up quickly.
Since then, I have been trying, sometimes vigorously and sometimes half-heartedly, to figure out what to do with my father’s car. My sister and I made the decision that I should drive it back to Minnesota because I was broke by the time the funeral was over, and it was the cheapest way for S and I to get home.
My father had no belongings of any worth, and no will, so I drove his car home in good faith, assuming that somehow, the car would eventually be transferred into my name. I also drove it home illegally—the insurance and registration were still in his name, though I had done all the paperwork that could have been done in the time I was in Ohio, and my cousin was going to finish the job. Which she did, and as far as I understood, all I had to do was take the thick stack of paperwork she had sent me to the DMV, and I would get the title to the car.
So, the following January, I returned to Ohio for the holidays and went to the DMV. By then, the plates had expired, as had his insurance, and my daughter and I had been through the hardest six months we’d been through since we met. She’d managed to stay strong through his funeral, but a couple months later, all hell broke loose—but that’s another story altogether.
The long and short of it is there was no way to get the title into my name. My father owed money on the car, but the bank that owned the car no longer existed. I was caught in a loophole that every attorney I spoke with told me was impossible to untangle.
And so, the car sat. And sat. At first, I was faithful about starting it every day, driving it around the block, but in time, I began to forget it was in my garage, got used to scraping my car windows every morning. I started to stuff the garage full of other things, too—things I was too lazy to drag to the dump, things I didn’t need and was going to take to Salvation Army--someday.
Every so often, usually during a short break from my work, I would engage in a flurry of phone calls and letters to insurance agents and attorneys and title agents and banks. I managed to determine that Wells Fargo had bought out the bank that had bought out the bank that had bought out the bank that had owned my father’s car when he stopped making payments. And that’s where the trail ended; try to get a multi-billion dollar company to call you back about a 1994 Buick Century that belonged to your dead father and is now rusting out in your garage. Seriously, try it sometime.
Eventually, I called our local dump, and was told that unless I had a title, they couldn’t take the car from me. And, of course, I couldn’t sell it, not even for parts, since it wasn’t mine. Case closed.
And so, finally, I gave up. I got through two Minnesota winters without a garage. In fact, I began to avoid the garage altogether.
And then, just before S’s graduation, when our future plans seemed to be falling apart in a big way, I got the urge to clean. I hired students to come over and haul trash to the dump and belongings I no longer needed to Salvation Army—they filled two pick up trucks four times each. As they were hauling things away, another student was rapidly painting the side of the garage that faces our backyard—which had become a terrible eyesore. And, a friend approached me and said he and his buddies would fix up the rotting roof before winter (which will hopefully be happening yet this fall).
My home, for the first time in a long time, felt liveable. Around this time I was also doing other kinds of cleaning—I had cleaned the junk food out of the cupboards and started Weight Watchers. I was trying for the first time to stop my ongoing weight gain and slowly disintegrating health—and shedding pounds each week. I had finally let myself open up to another human being for the first time since the winter of 2010 when our lives changed course dramatically, and when I began for the first time to feel alone in the world. I had also returned to church about a year earlier, when an amazing new minister had taken the pulpit, and had started spiritual practices I’d long abandoned.
My work life was getting more and more hectic and less and less satisfying, but other aspects of my life were looking up—I was starting to take control of my propensity to stop dealing with the messes in my life.
That’s not exactly true. I was very proactive at dealing with all the messes that involved S; but, in the meantime, the other messes were going unchecked. I didn’t have time to invest in friendships or relationships or to even notice how unhappy I was at my job. But as my heart started to open again in the summer of 2011—as I started to feel better about myself, both physically and emotionally—something in me shifted.
And so, a year later, in anticipation of the graduation party I was going to have come hell or high water, whether or not my daughter actually walked across the stage, I took two weeks off of work and went on a cleaning spree.
The only thing left was my father’s car. It was covered in dust. The tires sagged. Rust was creeping up from the bottom of each doorway. The battery was dead—turning the key didn’t even elicit a little cough anymore. And, there were paw prints belonging to an unknown animal and splatters of bird shit all over the hood.
And so, on Monday, which was Fall Break at the college where I work, I got to work and, instead of starting on my to do list right away as I had planned, I called the junkyard, on a whim. I told them the whole story. Not surprisingly, given the size of our town and the fact that my story is likely relatively unique, they remembered that I had called about two years earlier.
“It’s been a helluva long time you’ve had that car in your garage,” the man said to me. “I don’t give a damn no more if you don’t have that title. I’ll come get it on Friday.”
This was what I had wanted for so long—and yet, the news left me feeling totally empty. I thanked him rapidly and hung up before I could change my mind and tell him no, never mind, I wanted to hold onto it a little longer.
The next day I decided to make sure I hadn’t left anything in the car. I had to unlock the door manually—luckily, one of the keyholes was not rusted out. I gasped when I opened the door. The car still smelled like my father—who was a closet smoker most of his life, and whose skin had a distinct scent that reflected cancer treatments, long years of smoking, and dark, stale coffee.
The googlemaps directions from my father’s address to my address were on the front seat, with some rapidly scribbled notes about a cheap motel I had apparently called from the road when I got too tired to drive anymore—I don’t remember that, either. There was a bag of half-eaten snacks and a half-drunk cup of gas station coffee molding in the front seat. I opened the glove compartment, and it was full of Sweet and Lows and creamers, as well as a half-smoked pack of cigarettes. My father’s blue and gray striped umbrella was perched in its customary place on the back windowsill. In the cupholder was the cover to a Greek music tape with a scantily clad Greek woman on the cover (the tape itself was nowhere to be found). And, on the floor of the backseat were three cans of Ikarian honey—souvenirs from the trip which had never made it inside—only one of which had not exploded from the more than 100 degree changes in temperature we experience in Minnesota.
Last but not least, a small, wooden bouzouki with missing strings was sitting on the seat in back—not a real bouzouki, but a cheesy souvenir that had always been on a side table in my parents’ living room.
How I had gone nearly three years without realizing the mess the car was in is beyond me—or, rather, it seemed beyond me at first. I felt the familiar shame I feel at work when I get so overwhelmed that I lose an important document or miss a meeting—or when I get too overwhelmed to balance my checkbook and bounce a check—both of which have been happening more and more as my work responsibilities continue to increase dramatically every year (while my pay and the hours of assistance assigned to me do not keep up).
And then, I realized something: I didn’t need to feel any shame about this. I’d done the only thing I could do: parked my grief in my garage for nearly three years because I had no choice. S needed me. I had a job I needed. I hadn’t had any time to feel anything—anything, that is, except for the ups and downs associated with S’s dramatic journey through high school, and, more recently, the surging relief of finally having a partner and best friend who loves and understands me.
In a panic this afternoon, I called my daughter’s caretaker and asked her to check the trunk for any belongings I might have left there—she couldn’t get it open. I let it go. I know there are four large boxes of my father’s belongings in my closet—the only place in the house that survived my cleaning frenzy—and maybe, just maybe, I’ll tackle those during my next work break over the holidays.
When I got home from work, the car was gone. I stood in the center of my empty garage and breathed in the lingering scent of cigarettes and stale coffee—I swear his scent had permeated the entire space—and then I turned around and walked into the house, where S was waiting for me, excited for our weekly visit to the diner down the street and to tell me about her volunteer shift at the Humane Society earlier that day, and I was back in the present again, totally with her until she went to bed about an hour ago.
My relationship with my father was, to say the least, not an easy one. It was marked with violence and missed opportunities for connection and anger and grief and the worst kinds of misunderstandings. But it was also marked by forgiveness and tenderness, especially at the end of his life.
And, many of my memories of him, for reasons that now seem obvious to me, happened in a car. Partly this was because that confined space meant we had to interact; partly it was because we spent so much time in my childhood driving to and from the hospital to visit m my mother; partly it’s because some of the scariest moments—and therefore the most memorable—happened when I was a passenger in one of a long line of Buicks my father owned over the years.
My father was a terrible driver. Once, when he was telling me a funny story, he almost drove us off a cliff; he simply swerved back toward the center line, over into the other lane, which fortunately did not have any traffic, then yelled at me when I gasped out of a fear for my life.
When he was angry, it was even worse—I remember several near-misses during rages in my childhood, as well as a more recent hit-and-run when I, for some unknown reason, agreed in my late 20s to drive with him from Ohio to my new hometown so that I could bring some of his old furniture with me.
Nobody died in any of these near misses, by the way—but a gas pump and a parked car somewhere in Indiana were pretty badly damaged the last time I rode in a car he was driving. In his rage, he insisted I either jump into the car to make a quick escape or get left there forever. I chose, in that moment, to jump into the passenger seat and ride away with him, complicit.
I always chose to go back to him, to attempt to reconnect, probably because I knew how deeply he loved me, despite everything he did and said to hurt me over the years.
In September, he would have turned 79. He became gentler as he aged, but he never lost the persistent belief that he a) could succeed at anything—such as starting a new business in his late 60s even after losing our childhood home and running three into the ground; b) could live through anything—even after losing his wife to the most aggressive cancer and then, some 25 years later, being diagnosed himself; c) was never at fault for anything—except for one brief moment shortly after a mental health breakdown when he told me in what was maybe the first and only authentic moment between us that he was sorry he’d been a terrible father.
Now, in my 40s, I have to face the fact that I am like him, a little bit prone to being in denial, as well as prone to taking on too much and getting overwhelmed, then having a hard time finding my way out of the overwhelm. For years I’ve believed I could add more and more to my plate at work without any consequences—and have been too proud to admit I was overworked and overwhelmed. In two weeks I will have a heart-to-heart with my supervisors about this, and I am working hard to be careful not to fall into the trap that was my father’s—not to think too highly or too little of myself, to be as honest and authentic in that interaction as I can possibly be.
Unlike my father, however, I never believed I was invincible—instead, I was plagued with a deep-seated belief that I would die young. I decided it didn’t matter much how much I spent or ate or whether or not I exercised, as long as I was doing whatever I could to make the world a better place in the brief time I had--until I began to realize that such a life is not sustainable. Self-care is critical, not just for the long haul, but in the short-term, also. But I have lost more than 60 pounds and feel better now than I did in my 20s; I’m working out every day and eating healthy. All of my symptoms have gone away. I know I can’t stave off bad health totally through my choices—but my choices can certainly make a difference.
Like my father, I don’t always take responsibility for the things I’ve done to make my own life more difficult, and I am prone instead to blaming everybody else—daughter, supervisors, students. The truth is I never set any boundaries at work, never insisted on what I needed from my friends—every rejection felt overwhelming, and if someone did not bother to respond when I asked for what I needed, I would write them off. And every challenge also felt overwhelming—so I would take it on and try to prove to myself and others that I could do it, while at the same time wondering how it would be possible to stay up just one more hour or keep all the details straight on one more project.
But I also want to claim and practice my father’s deep-seated optimism, and his courage. I may never jump ship and start a new life in another country. I may never (I hope) lose my home or drive three businesses into the ground and believe, in my late 60s, that it’s not too late to start another one. But, I can look at my current situation and both appreciate all that I have—an amazing kid, an amazing partner (who may be far away at the moment but will be moving back this summer), and a rewarding job that has simply gotten too overwhelming in the last two years—something that is, in the end, totally fixable.
I am going to be OK. The one time in my father’s life when he wasn’t sure he would be was during his mental health breakdown about ten years ago. He made it through that, and losing his home and his second wife and his business. Whatever happens to me, surely I have inherited some of his courage and persistence.
Tonight, after supper and a show on campus and a stop in a town 20 minutes away where S had a petsitting job, I pulled into my garage for the first time since January 2010. We got out of the car solemnly. I pulled down the garage door.
“You’ll never have to scrape that car again,” my daughter said. “We have our garage back! Isn’t it wonderful , mom?”
A few minutes later, as we passed the political signs littering our front yard while walking the dog, she added, “And now things are turning around for us. I know you’re worried, but I know that Minnesota is going to vote no on the marriage amendment, and also re-elect Obama.” She said it with the same confidence my father used to announce the most absurd possibilities—how he was going to build bungalows in Ikaria and make a fortune, how he would just rename his contracting business and regain his old clients…
I laughed.
“What’s so funny?” S asked me.
“I’m just thinking about Papou’s car, and it seems funny that it was in the garage for so long, and now it’s just suddenly gone.”
“I cried when they towed it away a little,” S confessed. “It was the last thing we had that reminded me of Papou. Also, I thought it was going to be my car someday.” She paused, choked up again.
“I know, honey,” I said. “It would have been nice to keep the car. I liked that it was there, reminding us of Papou. But it just wasn’t meant to be.”
“Well, maybe when you get a raise you can teach me how to drive and buy me a used Prius. I mean, I want an energy-efficient car anyway. I know they’re more expensive, but think of all the money I would save on gas.”
I laughed again, and again, S wanted to know what was so funny.
I could have told her there is no way in hell I will ever allow her behind the wheel of a car, and also no way in hell I’ll ever be able to afford a Prius. But instead, I said, “Who knows?” Maybe things really are looking up.”
By the time we arrived, we had been away from Minnesota for several weeks on a study abroad trip to the island where my father was born. He died on our way back to the states. Although I can recount many details of the days following our arrival in Ohio, I don’t remember returning home. I remember only that my supervisor called me the next day to check in and see when I was coming back to work, and I told her I would be back in on Monday.
Monday came, and our lives went on as usual; I reviewed the notes the substitute had prepared for me and went on teaching my class; I rescheduled all the service-learning classroom visits and other meetings I had missed; I called a meeting to check in about the Martin Luther King Day of Service, which had gone fine in my absence. S went back to school, too, and managed by some miracle (and with a great deal of help from her tutors) to catch up quickly.
Since then, I have been trying, sometimes vigorously and sometimes half-heartedly, to figure out what to do with my father’s car. My sister and I made the decision that I should drive it back to Minnesota because I was broke by the time the funeral was over, and it was the cheapest way for S and I to get home.
My father had no belongings of any worth, and no will, so I drove his car home in good faith, assuming that somehow, the car would eventually be transferred into my name. I also drove it home illegally—the insurance and registration were still in his name, though I had done all the paperwork that could have been done in the time I was in Ohio, and my cousin was going to finish the job. Which she did, and as far as I understood, all I had to do was take the thick stack of paperwork she had sent me to the DMV, and I would get the title to the car.
So, the following January, I returned to Ohio for the holidays and went to the DMV. By then, the plates had expired, as had his insurance, and my daughter and I had been through the hardest six months we’d been through since we met. She’d managed to stay strong through his funeral, but a couple months later, all hell broke loose—but that’s another story altogether.
The long and short of it is there was no way to get the title into my name. My father owed money on the car, but the bank that owned the car no longer existed. I was caught in a loophole that every attorney I spoke with told me was impossible to untangle.
And so, the car sat. And sat. At first, I was faithful about starting it every day, driving it around the block, but in time, I began to forget it was in my garage, got used to scraping my car windows every morning. I started to stuff the garage full of other things, too—things I was too lazy to drag to the dump, things I didn’t need and was going to take to Salvation Army--someday.
Every so often, usually during a short break from my work, I would engage in a flurry of phone calls and letters to insurance agents and attorneys and title agents and banks. I managed to determine that Wells Fargo had bought out the bank that had bought out the bank that had bought out the bank that had owned my father’s car when he stopped making payments. And that’s where the trail ended; try to get a multi-billion dollar company to call you back about a 1994 Buick Century that belonged to your dead father and is now rusting out in your garage. Seriously, try it sometime.
Eventually, I called our local dump, and was told that unless I had a title, they couldn’t take the car from me. And, of course, I couldn’t sell it, not even for parts, since it wasn’t mine. Case closed.
And so, finally, I gave up. I got through two Minnesota winters without a garage. In fact, I began to avoid the garage altogether.
And then, just before S’s graduation, when our future plans seemed to be falling apart in a big way, I got the urge to clean. I hired students to come over and haul trash to the dump and belongings I no longer needed to Salvation Army—they filled two pick up trucks four times each. As they were hauling things away, another student was rapidly painting the side of the garage that faces our backyard—which had become a terrible eyesore. And, a friend approached me and said he and his buddies would fix up the rotting roof before winter (which will hopefully be happening yet this fall).
My home, for the first time in a long time, felt liveable. Around this time I was also doing other kinds of cleaning—I had cleaned the junk food out of the cupboards and started Weight Watchers. I was trying for the first time to stop my ongoing weight gain and slowly disintegrating health—and shedding pounds each week. I had finally let myself open up to another human being for the first time since the winter of 2010 when our lives changed course dramatically, and when I began for the first time to feel alone in the world. I had also returned to church about a year earlier, when an amazing new minister had taken the pulpit, and had started spiritual practices I’d long abandoned.
My work life was getting more and more hectic and less and less satisfying, but other aspects of my life were looking up—I was starting to take control of my propensity to stop dealing with the messes in my life.
That’s not exactly true. I was very proactive at dealing with all the messes that involved S; but, in the meantime, the other messes were going unchecked. I didn’t have time to invest in friendships or relationships or to even notice how unhappy I was at my job. But as my heart started to open again in the summer of 2011—as I started to feel better about myself, both physically and emotionally—something in me shifted.
And so, a year later, in anticipation of the graduation party I was going to have come hell or high water, whether or not my daughter actually walked across the stage, I took two weeks off of work and went on a cleaning spree.
The only thing left was my father’s car. It was covered in dust. The tires sagged. Rust was creeping up from the bottom of each doorway. The battery was dead—turning the key didn’t even elicit a little cough anymore. And, there were paw prints belonging to an unknown animal and splatters of bird shit all over the hood.
And so, on Monday, which was Fall Break at the college where I work, I got to work and, instead of starting on my to do list right away as I had planned, I called the junkyard, on a whim. I told them the whole story. Not surprisingly, given the size of our town and the fact that my story is likely relatively unique, they remembered that I had called about two years earlier.
“It’s been a helluva long time you’ve had that car in your garage,” the man said to me. “I don’t give a damn no more if you don’t have that title. I’ll come get it on Friday.”
This was what I had wanted for so long—and yet, the news left me feeling totally empty. I thanked him rapidly and hung up before I could change my mind and tell him no, never mind, I wanted to hold onto it a little longer.
The next day I decided to make sure I hadn’t left anything in the car. I had to unlock the door manually—luckily, one of the keyholes was not rusted out. I gasped when I opened the door. The car still smelled like my father—who was a closet smoker most of his life, and whose skin had a distinct scent that reflected cancer treatments, long years of smoking, and dark, stale coffee.
The googlemaps directions from my father’s address to my address were on the front seat, with some rapidly scribbled notes about a cheap motel I had apparently called from the road when I got too tired to drive anymore—I don’t remember that, either. There was a bag of half-eaten snacks and a half-drunk cup of gas station coffee molding in the front seat. I opened the glove compartment, and it was full of Sweet and Lows and creamers, as well as a half-smoked pack of cigarettes. My father’s blue and gray striped umbrella was perched in its customary place on the back windowsill. In the cupholder was the cover to a Greek music tape with a scantily clad Greek woman on the cover (the tape itself was nowhere to be found). And, on the floor of the backseat were three cans of Ikarian honey—souvenirs from the trip which had never made it inside—only one of which had not exploded from the more than 100 degree changes in temperature we experience in Minnesota.
Last but not least, a small, wooden bouzouki with missing strings was sitting on the seat in back—not a real bouzouki, but a cheesy souvenir that had always been on a side table in my parents’ living room.
How I had gone nearly three years without realizing the mess the car was in is beyond me—or, rather, it seemed beyond me at first. I felt the familiar shame I feel at work when I get so overwhelmed that I lose an important document or miss a meeting—or when I get too overwhelmed to balance my checkbook and bounce a check—both of which have been happening more and more as my work responsibilities continue to increase dramatically every year (while my pay and the hours of assistance assigned to me do not keep up).
And then, I realized something: I didn’t need to feel any shame about this. I’d done the only thing I could do: parked my grief in my garage for nearly three years because I had no choice. S needed me. I had a job I needed. I hadn’t had any time to feel anything—anything, that is, except for the ups and downs associated with S’s dramatic journey through high school, and, more recently, the surging relief of finally having a partner and best friend who loves and understands me.
In a panic this afternoon, I called my daughter’s caretaker and asked her to check the trunk for any belongings I might have left there—she couldn’t get it open. I let it go. I know there are four large boxes of my father’s belongings in my closet—the only place in the house that survived my cleaning frenzy—and maybe, just maybe, I’ll tackle those during my next work break over the holidays.
When I got home from work, the car was gone. I stood in the center of my empty garage and breathed in the lingering scent of cigarettes and stale coffee—I swear his scent had permeated the entire space—and then I turned around and walked into the house, where S was waiting for me, excited for our weekly visit to the diner down the street and to tell me about her volunteer shift at the Humane Society earlier that day, and I was back in the present again, totally with her until she went to bed about an hour ago.
My relationship with my father was, to say the least, not an easy one. It was marked with violence and missed opportunities for connection and anger and grief and the worst kinds of misunderstandings. But it was also marked by forgiveness and tenderness, especially at the end of his life.
And, many of my memories of him, for reasons that now seem obvious to me, happened in a car. Partly this was because that confined space meant we had to interact; partly it was because we spent so much time in my childhood driving to and from the hospital to visit m my mother; partly it’s because some of the scariest moments—and therefore the most memorable—happened when I was a passenger in one of a long line of Buicks my father owned over the years.
My father was a terrible driver. Once, when he was telling me a funny story, he almost drove us off a cliff; he simply swerved back toward the center line, over into the other lane, which fortunately did not have any traffic, then yelled at me when I gasped out of a fear for my life.
When he was angry, it was even worse—I remember several near-misses during rages in my childhood, as well as a more recent hit-and-run when I, for some unknown reason, agreed in my late 20s to drive with him from Ohio to my new hometown so that I could bring some of his old furniture with me.
Nobody died in any of these near misses, by the way—but a gas pump and a parked car somewhere in Indiana were pretty badly damaged the last time I rode in a car he was driving. In his rage, he insisted I either jump into the car to make a quick escape or get left there forever. I chose, in that moment, to jump into the passenger seat and ride away with him, complicit.
I always chose to go back to him, to attempt to reconnect, probably because I knew how deeply he loved me, despite everything he did and said to hurt me over the years.
In September, he would have turned 79. He became gentler as he aged, but he never lost the persistent belief that he a) could succeed at anything—such as starting a new business in his late 60s even after losing our childhood home and running three into the ground; b) could live through anything—even after losing his wife to the most aggressive cancer and then, some 25 years later, being diagnosed himself; c) was never at fault for anything—except for one brief moment shortly after a mental health breakdown when he told me in what was maybe the first and only authentic moment between us that he was sorry he’d been a terrible father.
Now, in my 40s, I have to face the fact that I am like him, a little bit prone to being in denial, as well as prone to taking on too much and getting overwhelmed, then having a hard time finding my way out of the overwhelm. For years I’ve believed I could add more and more to my plate at work without any consequences—and have been too proud to admit I was overworked and overwhelmed. In two weeks I will have a heart-to-heart with my supervisors about this, and I am working hard to be careful not to fall into the trap that was my father’s—not to think too highly or too little of myself, to be as honest and authentic in that interaction as I can possibly be.
Unlike my father, however, I never believed I was invincible—instead, I was plagued with a deep-seated belief that I would die young. I decided it didn’t matter much how much I spent or ate or whether or not I exercised, as long as I was doing whatever I could to make the world a better place in the brief time I had--until I began to realize that such a life is not sustainable. Self-care is critical, not just for the long haul, but in the short-term, also. But I have lost more than 60 pounds and feel better now than I did in my 20s; I’m working out every day and eating healthy. All of my symptoms have gone away. I know I can’t stave off bad health totally through my choices—but my choices can certainly make a difference.
Like my father, I don’t always take responsibility for the things I’ve done to make my own life more difficult, and I am prone instead to blaming everybody else—daughter, supervisors, students. The truth is I never set any boundaries at work, never insisted on what I needed from my friends—every rejection felt overwhelming, and if someone did not bother to respond when I asked for what I needed, I would write them off. And every challenge also felt overwhelming—so I would take it on and try to prove to myself and others that I could do it, while at the same time wondering how it would be possible to stay up just one more hour or keep all the details straight on one more project.
But I also want to claim and practice my father’s deep-seated optimism, and his courage. I may never jump ship and start a new life in another country. I may never (I hope) lose my home or drive three businesses into the ground and believe, in my late 60s, that it’s not too late to start another one. But, I can look at my current situation and both appreciate all that I have—an amazing kid, an amazing partner (who may be far away at the moment but will be moving back this summer), and a rewarding job that has simply gotten too overwhelming in the last two years—something that is, in the end, totally fixable.
I am going to be OK. The one time in my father’s life when he wasn’t sure he would be was during his mental health breakdown about ten years ago. He made it through that, and losing his home and his second wife and his business. Whatever happens to me, surely I have inherited some of his courage and persistence.
Tonight, after supper and a show on campus and a stop in a town 20 minutes away where S had a petsitting job, I pulled into my garage for the first time since January 2010. We got out of the car solemnly. I pulled down the garage door.
“You’ll never have to scrape that car again,” my daughter said. “We have our garage back! Isn’t it wonderful , mom?”
A few minutes later, as we passed the political signs littering our front yard while walking the dog, she added, “And now things are turning around for us. I know you’re worried, but I know that Minnesota is going to vote no on the marriage amendment, and also re-elect Obama.” She said it with the same confidence my father used to announce the most absurd possibilities—how he was going to build bungalows in Ikaria and make a fortune, how he would just rename his contracting business and regain his old clients…
I laughed.
“What’s so funny?” S asked me.
“I’m just thinking about Papou’s car, and it seems funny that it was in the garage for so long, and now it’s just suddenly gone.”
“I cried when they towed it away a little,” S confessed. “It was the last thing we had that reminded me of Papou. Also, I thought it was going to be my car someday.” She paused, choked up again.
“I know, honey,” I said. “It would have been nice to keep the car. I liked that it was there, reminding us of Papou. But it just wasn’t meant to be.”
“Well, maybe when you get a raise you can teach me how to drive and buy me a used Prius. I mean, I want an energy-efficient car anyway. I know they’re more expensive, but think of all the money I would save on gas.”
I laughed again, and again, S wanted to know what was so funny.
I could have told her there is no way in hell I will ever allow her behind the wheel of a car, and also no way in hell I’ll ever be able to afford a Prius. But instead, I said, “Who knows?” Maybe things really are looking up.”
Comments