100 When I Was Growing Up Stories Prompt# 33 The Family Car
Ah, The Family Car
A Time for Backseat Bickering and Bonding
My favorite family car story is about my dad when he was a boy. Cars had recently become more commonplace in rural New Hampshire, and my dad was fascinated with how cars worked. One Saturday, he was able to satisfy his curiosity when his parents took his younger siblings on the train to Worcester, Massachusetts, leaving the car at home. As his parents boarded the train, my dad began to take their car engine apart to see how it worked.
After taking it apart, he began putting the engine back together before his parents returned. He was having the afternoon of his life until he realized he couldn’t get the pistons back into the cylinders. He waited, filled with anxiety, for his parent’s return.
His father, known for taking the antics of his seven sons in stride, hired the one mechanic in town to put the engine back together. The only stipulation was that my dad worked alongside him as he reassembled the car. This resulted in my dad knowing how to repair any engine. A skill that would serve him well in his adult life, repairing farming machinery and keeping our dilapidated family cars running.
However, knowing how to keep family cars running did nothing to prepare my parents for a family car trip. Cramming five unruly, unseatbelted kids into a confined space often resulted in absolute chaos.
Most of our extended family car trips were to visit our grandmothers. Trips to see either one required two-hour car rides. So my younger brother Larry and I created ingenious ways to pass the time while simultaneously torturing our older brother.
We would look out the window and, in sweet sing-song voices, comment on everything we saw. “Look at the treeees…, look at the carrrrr…, look at the signnnnn…, look at the doggggg.” We continued doing this, knowing that eventually, it would get under our older brother’s skin, who had a short fuse on a good day. We would smile at each other with glee when he finally lost it and would get reprimanded by our parents.
We knew how to time our singing “Home, Home on the Range” to coincide with driving by a village commons in a town along our route. We would roll down the window as we finished the song, stick our heads out, and howl. But, of course, this embarrassed our older brother when the howling garnered attention from people on the sidewalks.
However, the most embarrassing ride in the car definitely happened to me one summer. I was finally old enough to begin showing cows at the county 4-H fairs. My older sibling’s full-grown cows were transported in the big farm truck to the fair. Because I was young, I showed a small calf instead of a full-grown cow. It was too dangerous for my calf named Merry Legs to ride to the fair in the big truck with the cows.
My father, ever the problem solver, decided to take the back seat out of the family car and transport Merry Legs to the fair in the back seat. It seemed like a fine idea until Merry Legs pushed against the rear window creating a spider web-shaped crack. Then as all cows will do, she pooped on the cracked window. The look of disbelief on the tollbooth attendant’s face as we stopped at the Hooksett Tollbooth on Route 93 is permanently etched in my memory.
As the years went by, our youngest brother Nathan was often the only child that went along on the rides. Honestly, he was the most well-behaved of our bunch and an easy travel companion. One year, he went with my parents to visit our “difficult” grandmother, who never cared for children. In yet another effort to please her mother, my mom spent hours trying to create the perfect cake for my grandmother’s birthday.
Somewhere between our house and our grandmother’s, my dad took a corner a little too sharp, and my brother’s hand landed in the middle of the birthday cake. Our grandmother didn’t find this the least bit amusing, even though they were able to salvage the edges of the cake. My mother felt like she had, yet again, failed to win her mother’s approval.
The following year my mother sought to vindicate herself when she made my grandmother’s birthday cake. She even added an edible flower garnish, hoping to impress. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, my brother hopped into the back of the station wagon. Coincidently at the same time, my mother recounted the story of last year’s cake kerfuffle. Nearing the end of the trip, my parents commented that my brother was even quieter than usual.
They discovered why Nathan was so quiet when they opened the tailgate to let my brother out of the car. When he had hopped over the back seat, both his knees sank into the cake’s middle. This time the cake was unsalvageable, symbolic of my mother’s relationship with her mother.
Growing up, Sunday car trips for my mother consisted of a drive to find a fishing spot for my grandfather. He fished while my mother, her sisters, and my grandmother were expected to wait for him in the car. Girls weren’t allowed to fish and were told that they would scare the fish away if they went exploring alongside the river bank.
So in the scheme of things, I prefer the fussing, fighting, and frustration of our family car trips to the car trips of my mother’s youth. My best family car trip memory is riding home after a long day at my grandmother’s house (the one who loved kids). We were all tired and happy from playing with our cousins and being coddled by our grandmother, aunts, and uncles.
Instead of fighting, we snuggled up against one another, feeling warm and cozy. Then, one by one, our eyes would close as our parents sang us to sleep while the family car filled up with love.
With Love & Energy by the Pond,
Laurel
