Every afternoon I drop everything to idle in a line of vehicles outside my kid’s school.
The lifted diesel trucks with “Rig Wife” bumper stickers lead the way; the Yukon Denalis with bucking-horse decals bring up the rear. And here I am in the middle, hunched in my little blue Honda Accord, sporting a film of dust I gleaned from driving up and down a dirt road three times a day.
And on the trunk of my beloved Honda, happy – and angry – finger-drawn emojis tell their own story through the dust.
I blast some angsty 90s rock and watch for my middleborn son (fair-skinned, ginger-haired; aspiring graffiti artist) to emerge from the same school I attended at his age.
He strides through the door in that greasy Rockies hat, gripping a clarinet case in one hand and a can of spray paint in the other. And when he plunks himself way down in the subterranean front seat of my car, he frowns.
“Bad day?” I ask.
“Nah. I just don’t know why you gotta get me in this CAR,” he says.
My jaw unhinges. “This CAR?”
“It’s soooo UGLY,” groans Middleborn. “Why don’t we have, like, a nice truck or a Charger or something?”
The strange new thought bursts my brain like a crashed UFO. I never thought I was anything except spoiled to have my little car. I revel in its reliability. I race the clouds home without stirring their roots.
“This is a Honda ACCORD,” I explain.
Middleborn grimaces. He does not see what I see.
I inhale. “It is SLEEK, it is QUICK. It turns and stops on a dime. I can get to Rawlins in 90 minutes FLAT.”
Middleborn chews off a hangnail.
“Look how small and innocent-looking this thing is,” I sputter. “And stealthy. Efficient. Compact. Do you even know what you’re SAYING?”
Middleborn gazes at some cows throw the window. He does not know.
This time, I dig way deep. “Did you know, the Honda Accord is consistently within the top-10 stolen cars every year?”
That gets his attention. He raises one soft eyebrow, or at least I think he does, in the black shade of his hat brim.
“Why?” asks Middleborn.
“Because there’s nothing that can get you across the Canadian border with your loot as fast as a Honda Accord can, without breaking down or attracting attention,” I say, mindlessly.
Middleborn says nothing.
I try to put myself in his shoes. I remember saying the same thing when I was his age.
I never did get over the high of that time my dad picked me up from kindergarten on his Yamaha V-Max motorcycle, because I missed the bus.
He was FURIOUS at me for missing the bus, because he believed the back seat of a highway-borne V-Max in Wyoming’s windswept hills was no place for a 5-year-old.
I disagreed.
By the time I was 12, my mom drove an ugly brown minivan that my grandparents handed down. I was mortified.
“Oyy, Mom,” I whined. “Can’t you ever pick me up in something cool?”
Instead of launching a lecture, my mom shot me a strange look.
“Haven’t you wondered what your dad does every night in the garage?” she asked.
I hadn’t. I knew my dad liked to flip cars and listen to Collective Soul. I didn’t think much about what model the cars were – they were his investments and his projects. He’s always had a good eye for heaps of garbage that only he could rescue.
They’d bring a little cash, a little attention ahead of the next project.
My mom shook her head, got onto the highway and sang “King of the Road” while everyone passed her.
The next time I missed the bus (how sparkly are the scattered shards of my time-management skills!) I sat on the curb and hugged my knees, waiting for that roving Sears box to come pick me up.
My dad pulled up in a Mitsubishi 3000 GT, pearl white with the slightest rainbow sheen.
My jaw came unhinged.
“Where the heck did you get this CAR?” I bellowed.
My dad shot me a weird look.
“I… built it while you were shouting Collective Soul lyrics at me in the garage,” he said mildly.
I was stunned.
Back to the present, I have no idea how I’m going to top the random Tuesday when the Mitsubishi picked me up, for Middleborn.
Maybe tomorrow I should grab him in our new minivan instead?
Middleborn lifts his hat, scratches his head and snaps his hat back down before I can remember what his eyebrows look like.
“This is a top-10 stolen car, really?” he asks.
“Yep,” I say. “And in the early 2000s, it was the number-one top-stolen car for like five years in a row.”
Middleborn straightens, sitting up higher in his underground seat.
“Wow,” he muses. “Now that’s cool.”
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
