Cars

Tonight, driving back to my parents' house from my sister's birthday party, I sat in the back seat of the car. I haven't sat in a back seat for quite some time; I either drive or sit in the passenger seat when we go places as a family, as the van that fits all of us is ours. Sometimes I feel as though I spent half of my childhood this way: leaning into the corner, on the right side always, my cheek pressed against the cool glass, my feet flexed up. Sitting there a few hours ago, next to my sleeping mother and child, listening to my father and grandmother talk quietly up front, so as not to disturb the baby, I thought about this: the hours we logged together in cars.

I grew up in the suburbs, and in the suburbs, you drive. There are few places you would want to go that are within walking distance of the house I grew up in, where my parents still live, and even those we drove to. Occasionally, in a fit of industry, I would ride my bike to the candy store, before I got my license. Once, when I was about 18, I remember walking there with my friend Nicole, but it was not my idea: she is from California, and even in the suburbs, people there walk. During the blizzard of '78, my father pulled me and my sister to the grocery store on a sled, which must have taken Herculean effort now that I think about it, but we must have actually needed groceries; this is not the sort of thing we did for fun.

It's funny, you hear and read so much these days about the hazzards of our automobile culture. Cars isolate us from each other, prevent us from walking, which is excellent exercise, are terrible for the environment. City dwellers tout their systems of public transportation as well as the fact that surprising studies show they are healthier that suburban dwellers, thanks to all that walking. They bemoan SUVs, the lack of carpooling, and what they see as the unecessary 1/2 mile drives that increase a person's carbon footprint with no real purpose. And on all these counts, they are right. I have said these things myself, and meant them.

However. The interior of a car, especially at night, can be a whole world. Some of our best moments as a family happened like this, as we sat close together, close enough to hear each other breathing, with nowhere else to go. The involuntary act of listening to the radio can become a unifying experience inside the steel walls of a vehicle; if you have ever found yourself singing along with your parents and siblings without having planned to do so, you know what I mean. Inside a car, it is easy to tell who is happy and who is sad, who is tense and who is giddy. Emotions have no exit route so they bounce off the wall and intensify; when they are good, when everyone's are, you find yourself thinking: these are the people I love. There is nowhere else on earth I would rather be right now than in this moment, in this feeling, on this highway, in this car.

I have had this feeling outside of my immediate family, the one I was born into. I have had it with the family I have made, although we are such a fledgling foursome that the feeling is not yet quite the same. I remember so many car moments that would never, could never, have happened in any other context--or did not, anyway, which has the same end result. In high school, when driving was so new as to be frightening in a good way, like watching The Shining when you at least know when to expect the scary parts, I formed one of my most important friendships in my father's car, driving to and from school, or literally nowhere, in circles, to an incessant soundtrack of one particular Beatles song. One ride back from a vist to my sister at school in Providence, my father, Nicole and I sang together, unselfconsciously, for a hour, and I knew something about this friendship that I had not before. We rarely spoke of it afterward, and it never happened again, but I will never forget it somehow. And in the enormous front seat of the Country Squire stationwagon my father bought us in college, I drove here, to my parents' house where I am now, with Ben, and at some point, maybe halfway through the drive, I moved from the far right side of the seat to the middle, where there was also a seatbelt, so our shoulders would touch.

I fear sentimentality, am catching a whiff of it, so I will wind this down by saying I would not trade in my suburban childhood car rides for anything--or give up their modern day, rarer equivalents. Tonight, as I sat in the warm, small world of our minivan on the way back from Boston, my father murmured to my grandmother, as he so often has to me, "The rest of them are sleeping." Behind them, two full rows but as close as we ever get, I smiled, sleepily, but I wasn't asleep.