Something new is reminder of something old
/The Boston Globe
Beverly Beckham
Is this what happens as you age? Does everything new always bring back the memory of something old? Is the past both a minefield and an archeological dig only to those who have lived 40 or 60 or 80 years? Or does this happen to 20-year-olds, too? A puppy makes you think of your old dog young. A birthday brings back other birthdays. A perfect October day makes you think of other October days.
I turn on the computer and there's a story about a self-parking car and I watch the video because of course, I'm interested. There in the corner of my screen is a Lexus backing itself into a parking space - look, Ma, no hands! - and though the commentator is tsk-tsking, insisting that it's far easier to park yourself, I like that a car can do this.
Next is a Mercedes, price tag in the six figures, driving itself down a highway adjusting its speed and leaving a safe distance between it and the car in front of it. It's equipped with night vision, too, which allows a driver to see 500 feet in front of him. "This car has more technology than Apollo 11 had when it landed on the moon," the commentator says.
And I think, this is amazing.
And then I think - this is the mine exploding or the perfectly preserved artifact, I don't know which - of the blue/green 1957 Chevy Impala my father bought when I was in sixth grade. And how proud he was of it. And how he washed and polished it once a week, winter and summer. And how, even when it got old, it looked new, a big spaceship of a car, but a chariot in its day.
And that car is so close and so real that it's not just in my head. It's as if I am 10 again and standing next to it, peering in the window, opening the door, smelling the car's new smell, gaping at the length of its long front seat, touching the steering wheel, feeling its texture, my father behind me, a young father with dark curly hair and strong white teeth and a lifetime ahead of him.
The car was in the driveway when I came home from school.
"Where'd it come from, Dad?""
I bought it," he said. "It's ours."
We never had a new car before. We couldn't afford a new car.
"Did our ship come in?" I asked.
"You could say that," my father said.
And that's it. The memory ends here. The tape runs out. The earth spits out sunlight and the color green, a steering wheel, a front seat, a child in a plaid dress and a father, forever young.And then it closes its treasure trove. And no matter how I dig, I can't get back to that day.
Did my father take me for a ride? Did we go somewhere? Was my mother in the kitchen and why can't I run up the back stairs and see her?
You walk along and you trip a memory, and it's painful because you can't really go back. All you can do is stand at a window and gaze. And piece things together. Isn't that what archeologists do? Invent the spaces between the bones?
Six months later we drove to D.C. in that car. It was our first vacation. Pat Boone was on the radio singing "April Love." We stopped at McDonald's in Maryland. And I stretched out in the big back seat and wrote postcards to my best friend, Rose.
My father taught me to parallel park, but not in that car; we had another by then. But I don't remember what kind or color it was. But that Impala?
For years, he posed my mother and me in front of it on Christmas, Easter, and Mother's Day. Even on the day I was confirmed. It didn't park itself or have night vision. And it didn't cost anywhere near six figures. But nothing we had or wanted back then did.
My father was 32 years old when he bought that car. He'd fought a war. He was a husband, a father, a police officer, and for the first time in his life he was also the proud owner - monthly payments aside - of a just-off-the-assembly-line sleek and shiny Chevrolet.
It was a beautiful thing, the car and my father's face when he was washing the whitewalls and polishing the hood and when he was behind the wheel.
I remember this. I remember that he was happy. And that I was happy, too.
