I have two distinct sets of memories of driving to school with my dad. The happier set is from my college years, when he lugged me back and forth from campus. He would leave work on Friday, sometimes before 5:00 pm, sometimes after, depending on either the time of his last court appointment or whether a client might show up with money. One thing my father’s clients all had in common was their debt. For years my father operated without a billing system of any kind, relying on clients’ memory and goodwill to resolve their open balances. Once a biller was finally hired, however, little changed and he still continued to practice essentially for free, with an occasional remittance for services delivered months, if not years, previously. My father practiced law for the love of it; making a living was a tertiary consideration.
But, no matter how late he had to work, he always retrieved me on Friday evenings. I believe this was as much from a desire to see his eldest daughter as it was to avoid having to make the drive on Saturday, when he would rather be in the office, working. He would return me as early as possible on Sunday, typically within an hour or two of the end of Mass. This trip was not scheduled around work, however, but instead around dinner. In our house, my father did all of the cooking on weekends as well as for holiday meals. My mother did not care too much for cooking, whereas my father said that cooking relaxed him. Performing physics experiments also relaxed my father, as he said it allowed him to concentrate on laws “that do not change.” I believe cooking relaxed my father as it allowed a chance to focus on something with tangible results.
My father’s humor was dark and absurd, and what I loved about our long college drives (approximately 90 minutes each way) was the thematic “journey” conversation. This conversation started with our first trip to campus when I was a visiting high school student. As both of my parents religiously avoided highway driving, my father drove most of the trip down Dempster: an extremely congested, often two-lane road which ran almost the entire way between my house and campus. On our first trip my father compared our drive along Dempster with Huck Finn’s rafting expedition down the Mississippi. The metaphor held strong through over four years of commuting, and would likely be picked up again today, had we any reason to make the trip.
The two common phrases from our journey were: “Ah, the mighty Dempster,” which usually opened the conversation, and “There, there be dragons” which could get employed at any time and which referred to the semi-mythical “end” of the road (if I recall correctly, Dempster essentially runs right into one of the Great Lakes.) We had many different scenarios involving the mighty Dempster: ideas of what the first settlers must have thought when they came upon the great road, discussions of the different attractions one might see along its shoulders, theories of the origins of the road itself, and how it had been carved out through the passage of time. Construction was compared to bad weather or large waves wrecking havoc to small craft sailing along the mighty road. In every discussion my father would mention that he thought of the mighty Dempster in terms of Huck Finn’s story, as though he hadn’t mentioned it on every trip before. Whenever we were close to campus, our discussion also included reference to the varied campus creatures with whom I was matriculating, and their peculiar appearances and habits. The mythical “dragons” lay somewhere beyond the campus creatures, and to this day have never been seen.
So profound was the effect of these trips on me that I can still hardly say the name of the road today without throwing a “mighty” in front of it; otherwise it feels like referring to it by only a partial name. I realize that these trips were some of my most significant bonding time with my dad. Driving to and from campus was his dedicated time with me, when we could converse in terms of a shared story in addition to his regular narratives about his work. Education is one of the only topics outside of law that holds any interest for my father (the other is the military), and during these trips he would listen to me discuss my classes, my professors, and short humorous stories about campus life. Life at college was one of the only topics on which we could equally provide input, and our narrative of the mighty Dempster could flow into a genuine conversation, during which my father spoke to and listened to me.
My other set of driving memories comes from my high school years. My father drove my sister and me to high school daily, and picked us up whenever my mother’s car was broken beyond drivability. These commuting memories are far less warm than my trips down the mighty Dempster. High school trips involved embarrassment, frustration, annoyance, and occasionally hypothermia and fear.
My embarrassment stemmed from being a teenager, and arriving at my private school’s front doors – never the parking lot or the side doors – daily in an ugly loud wreck of a car. I realize every teenager alive is mortified beyond reason by some quirk of their parents, and exiting at the main entrance of the Academy from a vehicle that was one minor repair away from turning to scrap caused me to attempt invisibility every morning until graduation. At the very least, however, my father was consistently on time for our morning arrival at school. The afternoon pick-ups were far less regular.
Every afternoon, my sister and I played a game called, is mom here? We would never be notified ahead of time if one or the other car had stopped working, or if some alternate reason had kept our mom away. If mom was not in the parking lot, we never knew when someone might be arriving to pick us up. A call home could confirm whether or not mom was there or elsewhere, but questions as to when we could expect dad to arrive were invariably met with exasperation, as though we were nagging toddlers. Calling our father’s office was pointless, since unless he was physically onsite – a rarity – then we’d only be able to narrow down his whereabouts to “in court” or “probably in the car somewhere,” which we could deduce on our own.
So, we stood on the front stoop of the school, and waited. Or stood in the front hallway, and waited. Or paced up and down the main drive, and waited. We could not wander very far, as if our father did not see us out front as soon as he arrived then odds were very good he would drive off. Trips to the bathroom were taken at a running pace, so as not to miss him. I believe the longest we ever waited was four hours; typically it was closer to two. Occasionally it was less than an hour: we did not know when a junkard would belch up the main driveway, piloted by our father. When he did appear, we knew better than to express our frustration, as that would incur at the least sarcastic belittling, at the most violent anger. What annoyed me almost more than the waiting itself was the fact that we were expected to do so, and it seemed unfathomable that this should bother us. Why on earth would we want to know when we were heading home, or with whom? What could we possibly have or want to do, other than remain in one spot for hours? What kind of ungrateful, spoiled, stupid children were we, to be annoyed by this when the family had more important problems, such as up to two broken vehicles?
I can remember very few months when we were in possession of working cars. The question was not if the car was broken, but how badly. My father had an amazing habit of literally wearing through cars: we could see the street below our feet in the backseat of two vehicles. I am not sure how many featured fabric literally falling from the ceiling down onto our heads. To this day I am not sure how one rips the ceiling fabric from the interior of a car, but I do know it can be done. I learned to be unaffected by the cosmetic strangeness of our vehicles. However, some rides with my dad were so unsafe that I literally felt afraid for our well being.
My most vivid memory was in a car that randomly seemed to lose power. We’d be driving along at 5 to 10 miles under the speed limit, which was consistent for my parents, when suddenly we’d coast down to 5 to 10 miles per hour total. As I said we never took highways so typically this was not instantly life-threatening, however even on local roads this was not a pleasant experience. My father’s strategy to address this malfunction was to hope that it did not happen too often, particularly not on the way to court. Another car from my high school years was entirely without heat. Since our garage door had broken during my grade school years and never been fixed, we parked in the driveway or on the street. Living in the Midwest, we experienced some mighty cold mornings, and I remember more than once riding to school under layers of winter clothes and blankets, wondering if the feeling of my face freezing pore by pore was real or imagined.
Although my father did not have exclusive claim to cold cars. When I was much younger, while my mother still regularly drove, I remember her explaining something to my sisters and I to the effect of – there was frost on her car, and either the windows, the ice scraper, or both were ‘not right’ and therefore the only option was for us to drive with the windows open in order for her to be able to see. So the four of us girls sat huddled in the back, with me playing lookout to help mom’s visibility. A man in a truck once yelled at my mother, “just get out and clean them off!” I was torn between wanting to cry on her behalf for him being so mean to her, and being furious at him for criticizing my mother.
And finally, there is one of my least favorite memories from my high school commute: holding my father’s coffee. We never had cars with cup holders, and my father liked his coffee in the morning. He often did not have time to finish his cup before leaving to take us to school, so as he got into the car he’d hand his cup to me to hold for the 45 minute drive. As the oldest I claimed the front seat, which usually meant I’d also be slightly warmer in the winter and would have access to windows in the summer, but the trade-off was playing coffee-cup-holder -daughter. After a year of holding the coffee, I tried passing off the chore to my sister, I believe even bribing her with access to the front seat. One day, I don’t remember exactly what happened, but some sort of argument ensued which ended with our dad getting out of the car, grabbing the full mug, and dumping the coffee on the driveway, all the while cursing us for being whiny little shits. Later that night I related the incident to my mom, who claimed to heard about it from our father and to have defended her daughters’ behavior with the following: “I told him, keep in mind – they are teenagers. And every teenager has a little rebellion in them. But overall they’re good girls.”
I take exception to this statement, as I was a nearly straight-A student, with a cumulative grade point average that always placed me on the highest possible honor roll. I took every advanced class that was available, brought home shining report cards, regularly turned in extra credit, acted as a writing mentor, performed in several plays. I never got a detention in my entire high school career. I outscored the vast majority of my peers in every standardized test I was ever given. I was even a lector in my church, for cripes’ sake. I volunteered for Special Olympics. I cleaned neighbors’ houses for pocket money. My favorite hobby was reading, and I probably baby-sat as many hours as there are in four years of summer vacations. Overall, I was a “good girl.” Just a tad rebellious, insofar as I protested spending a second year holding a cup of coffee early in the morning for the better part of an hour. Rebellious, I was called. The upside was, following my father’s tantrum we never had to hold the coffee cup again.
So, the memory of the coffee remains a lower point in my high school commuting experience. Although in the moment it was just a grumpy, hung-over father annoyed with his frustrated young daughters, in hindsight it has become bigger to me. The incident of the coffee displays, in one moment, how little anger I was ever allowed to express over the stressfulness of my daily life. My father threw a tantrum over a coffee-cup-holding squabble between sisters, while we were expected to sit in one spot for hours on end doing nothing but waiting, hoping eventually someone would show up to take us home. My father insisted we go to private school where we were expected to receive high marks, and our reward for being smart and good was to be treated as an annoyance or afterthought. It’s not the ugliness of the clunkers that affects me, but the message that my sisters’ and my daily lives – which involved almost nothing more than going to school – was an inconvenience which hindered my father’s ability to represent clients (unpaid!) in court, or my mother’s ability to sit at home. I tried as hard as I could to be as perfect as I could possibly be, and my act of “rebellion” was to complain about holding coffee for another year.
Luckily after another year or so my father and I discovered the mighty Dempster, and a better relationship began. I moved out of the house and was able to walk nearly everywhere I needed to go, and my stresses fell tenfold. I can’t imagine many situations where I would ever be a passenger in a car with my father again, and I believe we are both fine with that reality. Overall, honestly, I am not too affected by my past, since what is done is done, and it’s not worth my time to reflect or care. These experiences, though, make me who I am. Sometimes as I drive with my daughter to the grocery store I can’t help but think: please, let me be better to her than them. Please oh please, let me be better than them.