Ten times around the planet

Bid farewell to my car. My beloved 2010 Honda CR-V.

I’m not a car person. Never have been. I grew up in New York City in an era when a nice car was an invitation to be broken into or stolen. Maybe its that.

Nonetheless, there I was yesterday in the alley behind a garage sprawled out across the hood of a beat-up old car all misty-eyed and holding a selfie stick. And that was the exact moment when a mechanic decided to sneak out back for a cigarette.

But we’ll get to that.

When I first got that car, I was married. We had two cars: an old Altima I was actively working on driving into the ground and an older SUV. The new car was to replace the latter so most days I drove the old Altima and left the CR-V for my son’s mother. But then we separated and she inherited a car that had been her mother’s and there were still payments to be made on the CR-V and it made more sense for me to be the one making them, so I kept it.

I did an absolute ton of driving those first few years. When I wasn’t driving my son around I was driving off somewhere distant to fill the time by filling the time. That is just a thing you do when a quiet house shifts from being comforting to hard.

By the time the lease ran out, I was 30,000 miles over the mileage limit. It would have cost thousands to turn in and walk away. So, I bought it - and with that, I tied myself to a car that had never really been meant for me and I had never meant to own for another five years.

When they were up, my finances were already well into a cataclysmic freefall, so the CR-V stayed and on I drove. And drove. And drove. All while wearing out pieces and parts along the way.

The brakes went out and needed replacing. The window broke and then broke again. Tires came and went. Headlights and taillights burned out and were replaced. Batteries died. The key fob stopped fobbing. It got hit and then hit again. And then hit again.

A few summers ago, the air conditioning slowly lost its interest in cooling air and then quit entirely. I didn’t have the money to fix it. So, for the rest of that scorching summer, we rolled down the windows and sweated buckets and got a lot of ice cream and Italian ices and colored ice pops like I used to get when I was a kid.

The following spring, a belt snapped. Its replacement somehow awoke the AC from its long slumber reinvigorated and keen on a second act. And, for a time, we again new the glory of climate control. But then the compressor died and there would be no resurrection after a second last rites. So it was back to rolling down the windows and bringing a shirt to change into if I had to arrive somewhere looking like I hadn’t just emerged from a Native American sweat lodge.

Things wore out. Things broke. But through it all, that damn car got got me to work and the store and away to fish and back. It got my son to school and soccer and camp. It got him to practices and lessons; parties and sleepovers. It got us all over our own state and through another eleven on a 4,000-mile roadtrip.

That car carried my son and me around for over over a decade of our life together. Through his toddler years and adolescence and into his teens. Through more than three-quarters of his life so far.

I loved that damn car for that history. And now, the day had come to bid it one last goodbye.

I had been putting it off. I had my reasons.

It had been sitting behind my mechanic’s garage for weeks. A salvage guy was going to take it. I just needed to clean it out. Finally, I could kick that can down the road no farther. So, I drove over with coat pockets full of plastic bags big and small to make at least semi-organized work of the cleanout.

And because I am ludicrously sentimental about things like this, I had the way the clean-out would go loosely planned in my head in what I now realize was absurdly similar to the program for a memorial service.

There would be a moment of silence and then some ceremonial songs and finally a parting photograph and a final melancholy goodbye. It was to be a funeral… for which I had only 45 minutes before needing to rush home to get my son.

In retrospect, I should have maybe planned a program of events slightly shorter than a Catholic Mass but that is not my nature when sentimentality is on the table and there are wistful farewells to be said.

Ill-planned or not, a program is a program and once planned should be adhered to, so in accordance with the agenda, I opened ceremonies by getting in the car and just sitting for a minute. There was a significant amount of heavy sighing.

Then, I put in my earbuds and moved on to the ceremonial music. Important moments need a soundtrack. For this one, it was to be the holiest of my playlists - the one I cue up each year on my son’s and my annual trip out to the lake where he caught his first rainbow trout.

The tracklist is an absolutely cloying tour de force in sentimental dad songs. On it are songs I used to sing to him to lull him to sleep when he was a toddler and songs about fatherhood and raising a son and watching them grow up. Its newest additions are songs tied to specific moments and memories.

While some people dip only gently into their sentimentality as if it were butter to be lightly spread across toast, I use a damn spatula and lay it on like a kid icing a cake. That is just who I am.

So, there I was listening to Leon Redbone’s “Lazy Bones” singing along in my head in the gentle baritone I used to channel as my son laid his head on my shoulder at bedtime and drifted off to sleep.

But like Leon asks “Lazybones, sleepin' in the sun... how you ‘spect to get your day's work done?”

There was work to do and it was time to attend to the business at hand: cleaning out the mountain of accumulated stuff in that car, so I got started.

Out came all of the things I knew were in there. The clothes and sporting goods and chairs and rain gear.

Then came the things I had once known were in there but had forgotten about. An umbrella, a tripod, winter hat and gloves, tools, an unnecessary volume of flashlights

Then came the ones that were unearthed as if by archeology from between the seats and underneath.

They were the artifacts of a child having once sat in those seats at age 4 and 6 and 8:

Pencils and stickers. Bracelets. Things won as prizes or found in stockings. A little box of Crayons emblazoned with a character from what had once been a favorite movie. Things packed in bookbags or given by teachers.

I tucked each of them into the bag of things I was keeping and moved on until there was nothing left to find.

And that was that.

And then I just sat there in the now empty car thinking back about all of the time spent in it. All of the trips and conversations and moments. Their impact on my life and on my son’s. Their importance.

When my son was little, we almost never turned on the radio. We talked. We always found something to talk about. When I hadn’t seen him in a few days, by the time I picked him up again, we would have each amassed a little backlog of things to tell the other about and catch up on.

From the very first days of being separated, when the time away from my son was the hardest, that little window – the drive home - was always among my happiest hours of the week.

That hasn’t changed. It still is. We still amass our little running lists and catch up on them on drives home. I still look forward to picking him up each and every time and still love that precious little window – maybe even more so now as his own life gets busier.

Since he was two years old, those little windows in the car together have been important to me. They have been important to our relationship. All of our time in the car together has been, to be honest.

That damn old car with its broken air conditioning was the place where so much of my closeness with my son came to be.

It is where we talked about hard things and values and what really matters. It’s where he told me about his first crush. It’s where I told him he had made his first soccer team. It’s where we had arguments and then resolved them. It’s where I consoled him after losses and sat eating ice cream with him to celebrate wins.

All of those things could have happened in any car. I know that. We could have traveled through most of his childhood and still gotten to this place, this relationship, in some other car.

But it wasn’t some other car. It was this one.

And now it was empty and we were down to the place in the memorial program for a final melancholy farewell. So, I shimmied up on the hood, leaned back against the windshield until the last track on the playlist began and then pulled out my phone to take a last selfie.

And that was the exact moment when a mechanic decided to sneak out back for a cigarette and found me, a grown-ass man, lying on the hood of an old Honda looking moody and taking a selfie.

This was not in the program and I was not quick with an alibi – not that there really is one when a man in his 50’s both owns a selfie stick and has deployed it behind a garage while on the hood of a 2010 Honda CR-V - so I just blurted out “It’s heading off to salvage. I’m just taking a last picture.”

The mechanic let out a heavy sigh, took a deep drag of his cigarette, and said “I get it, man.” And then shook his head almost forlornly and said again “I get it.”

That man has said goodbye to a car or two in his day.

Anyway, now late, I quickly took my last picture; turned off the music even though the last song hadn’t finished playing; and hurried off.

Rushed home, picked up my son, got back in the car, and started it back up. On came the radio automatically and then the music as it found the connection to my phone… and with it, on came the unfinished last song from my playlist right where it had left off: Zac Brown Band’s “Free”.

That song had become the sort of unofficial anthem of my son’s and my roadtrip together two summers ago. Now, I can’t hear it without remembering that trip and that time together. I love that song for that.

My son heard what was playing and just looked over at me with a bemused eye-roll and head-shake. He knows me well. He knows I drip with a sentimentality thick as syrup and he knew exactly why I had been playing that song while off cleaning out the car.

Then the song finished and with it, so did my memorial for my fallen vehicle.

Now, with that whole portion of the story complete and the CR-V laid to rest, I believe I am statutorily allowed to speak ill of the dead.

I will not miss it. The car itself. I will not miss that actual vehicle.

I won’t miss the way its shock absorbers long ago ceased absorbing shocks. I won’t miss the way the one window button sticks because I somehow managed to spill an entire lemonade on it. I won’t miss the way its drowsy old headlights threw so soft a light at the road it was as if they saw no need to startle a potential deer just because we were careening towards it.

And I won’t even miss the memories made in it. Because those I keep.

Those, I have recorded in pictures, in my mind...

The years when my son sat in a car seat, his little legs dangling off…

The time when he was going through a rough patch at school, so I kept him out for a day and drove him to a distant aquarium because sometimes children need to get out from under the pressure adults are putting on them and just stand in front of a wall of rippling aquamarine and watch sharks swim by and marvel at the wonder of it all.

On the ride home, he gave the aquarium an A+ … which is a pretty good grade for an aquarium.

…or time I told him he could play hookie so we could go fishing but then came out of the house to find a car with a flat and a trunk full of 400 pounds of lumber standing between me and the spare. Took it all out. Put on the spare. Put it all back in. And off we went.

My son caught the largest bass of his life that day.

All of the moments that I remember, those, I keep.

And that is really the point of it all, isn’t it?

It isn’t about the car. It is just a car. But in it, my son and I have made memories out of miles.

Yesterday, before I even began thinking about what this post would be, I drove up to a scenic spot that looks out towards New York City. It’s the place I used to go when my son was a newborn.

As a premie, he needed to be fed every three hours. It was exhausting for his mother. So, I took the night shift. She’d feed him one last time in the evening and then head off to bed. I would bring him downstairs with me and stay up all night while he slept all swaddled up in my lap as I watched movie after movie. That was the only year of my life when I saw every Academy Award Best Picture nominee.

And then, every three hours, I would take him upstairs to be fed and then back downstairs afterwards so his mother could go back to sleep. As morning neared, I would bundle him up in his carrier, stop for coffee, and then drive to this same overlook to sit and watch the sunrise.

I loved those golden hours. My son all cozy and asleep in the backseat. Me just sitting in the quiet stillness as darkness gave way first to a gathering dawn and then to a sunrise over Manhattan.

I went there yesterday for reasons having nothing to do with this post.

I went because the weather was crappy but possibly just the right kind of crappy to make the view through the gloom a pretty cool picture.

Nope. The weather wasn’t cool-crappy. It was just crappy. It was cold and rainy. The sky was a flat gray without clouds or contrast. The city was entirely banked in. There would be no cool picture.

Still, I got out and walked around a bit. In the gloomy damp, I noticed a statue I had never paid particular attention to before.

It was a bronze cast of a man’s torso with one arm stretched aloft holding an illuminated lantern throwing off a deep yellow against the heavy sky. Took a few pics of it with my phone and hustled off.

Then I spent the rest of the day mulling over this post and what it would be while still waxing sentimentally over the memories unearthed during my one-man Honda CR-V Celebration of Life.

In sitting down to write this is, I began as I often do: by gathering up the pictures I would need so I could just insert them last and hit ‘publish’.

In looking through my camera roll, I saw the shot I had hurriedly taken yesterday at the overlook of the statue alit in a dreary gloom.

In the context of this story, it now seemed perfect in its own way.

The taking of that picture itself marked a chronological bookend. It was taken in the final minute of elapsed time covered in this post. A period that spanned from 2010 through yesterday.

And it was a fitting locale for an end-scene of sorts. A closing in the place where I spent so many early hours back when my son’s life was just beginning.

And lastly, it was a fitting metaphor for the meaning of all of this. The reason for it. The intention and purpose.

I have spent the last couple days reliving these past twelve years - the long journey from then until now – and all of the times that old car was part of the story. That reminiscence began with me seeing the car as a character in the story in a way. As if it were a player with a role who was now being written out of the script.

After all, the car was the center of this week’s events. Surely it must be the subject.

It was not.

The car itself, really, may have been a location in the movie but it wasn’t in the cast. It was the scene for conversations and moments and events and then carted the cast to others.

The characters in the movie were as they have always been and still are: me and my son.

While the long, slow farewell felt to me like a bit of a memorial service, it was really me keeping green a garden I tend to with love.

Planted in it are memories, some new, some with deep roots reaching down deep into the soil, impervious to seasons, and impossible to uproot.

I put a lot of work into that little garden. I tend to its neat little rows of carefully cultivated plants.

I have always been that way. A memory gardener. I record and remember and revisit.

I document moments and capture pictures in my life with my son often less so for the pictures themselves but as prompts to remember. Taking them is like drying and preserving flowers.

And the impulse to do that is just my nature. Or is a product of my nature is probably more accurate.

It is my nature to see life as short, fleeting, and uncertain. That may sound ominous but it isn’t. It isn’t macabre or fearful or fatalistic.

I have just always felt the passage of time acutely, aware that even when it seems infinite it will someday have seemed brief.

As I have gotten older and my son’s childhood has roared through its first 15 years, that feeling hasn’t grown stronger as much as it has become present.

I have always felt it. Now, I FEEL it.

It is like the sensation of feeling the warm air of a summer night as you drive home with the windows down after a day you wish could have lingered a little longer.

We don’t know how many summer nights we will get. What we know is that no matter how many there may be, someday, the long summer of our lives will fade into fall. And as it does, what will matter will be the things we have tended to and kept, the things we have planted in our gardens and nurtured and kept green to harvest later.

All of the things we’ve acquired in our lives – the things bought and dispensed with or still owned - will be unimportant. All of the work we did and titles we held will be behind us. The houses we lived in, and all of the things inside them, will be reduced to mere staging for what was always the part that mattered: the scenes in our lives that played out in front of them.

Our material lives will someday come to be little more than painted stage backdrops in a production we either liked or didn’t, remember or don’t.

The things that will seem even more dear and precious are our memories. The things we have chosen to remember. The people we loved and who loved us. The time we spent together. The moments we shared. The things we savored. The places we went and things we did. The joys.

That will be our lamplight.

When our lives fade toward their twilight, what will hold us in a warm glow is a lantern that can be filled only slowly and over a lifetime. It’s oil is all of the things we hold onto. The things we remember.

And that is why I put on a sentimental playlist when cleaning out my old car.

It is why I added ritual to what could have just been a task.

It wasn’t an appointment to grieve a lost car.

It was a chance to sit in the warm light of moments I remember. That is how I keep them green. I pluck them like olives and then squeeze the oil from them. And then I carefully preserve that oil in tall glass bottles with paper labels marked in careful cursive with words and dates.

Over the past twelve years, that old car covered 270,000 miles. Enough for ten trips around the planet. And over that time, I have filled an entire shelf with glass bottles.

Among them is one holding the oil from among the most perfect days of my life.

A summer day in late August. A trip to a waterpark and then a long meandering drive through open country, the air heavy with lilac and wildflowers to get to our lake. My son looking back over his shoulder, fishing rod in hand, in the last light. And then a stop for peach ice cream and a long, slow drive home, windows down, my son asleep in the backseat. And finally, a car parked in a driveway, a red Honda CR-V. In the backseat, my little boy fast asleep. In front, me listening to the last of a playlist that would someday be longer, squeezing the last drops of oil from a day to preserve and someday bask in.

Thank you, old car. You’ve been along for a long ride.

I filled a lot of bottles over those miles.

Someday, I will take them down one by one and pour out their oil into a lantern that warms the room.

Until then, I will tend to them with care. I will take them down on occasion; rub the dust from their labels; remember the time of their filling; and keep fresh their memories.

That is what my little memorial service was really about:

Tending to my lantern, my shelf of glass bottles; gathering my oil; storing it well.

Fill your mantle with bottles. Someday, they will be what lights your room.