The Cars of My Life: From Rattle Trap to Hatchback

Thanks, Donna, for posting about the cars of your life. It inspired me to do the same, as I was only just thinking fondly about my old cars the other day.

When I was a little boy my favorite toys were Matchbox cars. I liked Matchbox better than Hot Wheels because the latter were just too unrealistic. Cars that looked like lizzards, school buses painted blindingly silver, rocket ship cars, no thanks; I've always preferred verisimilitude. I used to fantasize about the type of car I'd get when I was a teenager. I remember being in love with VW Beetles, and right around the time I was getting ready to get behind the wheel, the New Beetle was introduced. I wanted a green one so badly, I could taste it. I remember telling my aunt when I was around 14 how I wanted my first car to be a New Beetle. She just scoffed. "You'll get a rattle trap piece of shit, just like we all did," she said. Boy was she right. I started driving in October 2000 when I was 15. My first car was a 1989 Toyota Tercel.

My Tercel looked exactly like the one in the above picture: 2-door sedan, mud flaps, maroon. It had a carburetor instead of fuel injection, and the damned thing took forever to warm up. I was the first of my friends to have a car, and I was on top of the world in this little Dr. Pepper can. I loved driving around listening to low-quality home recordings of my angry girl music c.d.'s on the Tercel's tape deck and pumping my own gas. Momma bought it from a used car lot in Nesbit and it had an amazing new car smell, mixed with the satisfying stench of motor oil. Daddy made me keep a half a quart of Penzoil in the trunk because the Tercel "only burned a little oil."
Sadly, my love affair with the maroon Tercel was short-lived. After being a licensed driver for a mere two weeks, I totaled the car on my way to school one foggy morning. I couldn't see a thing, swerved into the left lane, and hit a mini bus for Phoenix Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church head on. To make matters worse, I was dressed as a Spartan cheerleader for costume day during Homecoming week at school. Luckily, the only thing that got hurt were my feelings, and I went on to school late that day after the car was towed and my mom and step dad lectured me endlessly about being a responsible driver.


My next car was a 1986 Toyota Camry. Unlike the zippy red one above, mine was the color of dirt and it went dead in the rain. Daddy found the car for $2,500 at a used car lot in Memphis, and upon discovering its low mileage and that it had only had one owner, he lovingly scooped it up for me. I hated that car at first. I remember when I got it. It was the first of November my 10th grade year, and Momma made me ride with her down to Daddy's house, but she didn't tell me why. When we got there, he was standing beside the ugliest car I had ever seen. Boxy. Dirty. Old womanish. My heart sank, because I knew this was to be my new car.
My response to the car was not as joyous as he had hoped for, especially since my father had spent his afternoon washing, waxing, and scrubbing its tires. At times, I could be a bratty teenager.

I learned to love that Camry, though, and I still think about it fondly. I loved the way its gear selector fit the palm of my hand, and I haven't had a car since that has fit as well. The damn thing had a leaky distributor cap and it would go dead every time a hard rain came. Even when I was driving down the road. More than once I was certain I would be killed when my car stalled out in the fast lane with a redneck in a pickup truck zooming up behind me. Luckily, the only incidents I had in that car were minor. Once, it went dead on me on I-240 way out in East Memphis because the timing belt broke. Once I had to have the muffler replaced. Jeffrey backed into the driver's side door early one Christmas morning on his way to the deer woods. But it was only a minor dent and the door still opened. I drove that car until almost the end of high school, when after working and saving for 3 years I bought this beauty out of a man's front yard for $4,500:

This beauty is a 1996 Geo Prizm LSi. Mine looked just like that one, those same hub caps, that same beautiful baby blue. It was the car of my dreams when I was 17. That Prizm had everything: power locks and windows, a factory c.d. player, cruise control. I had the nicest car of all my friends until Candi's daddy bought her a brand new Pontiac Grand Am, but I always rectified the situation in my head by saying at least I bought my own car. I burned up the roads in this baby. It took me to New Orleans and back twice. I got my first speeding ticket in that car. And my second. And my third. All within the same month. It got me through my first two years of college, making the 180-mile trek across I-40 from Horn Lake, MS to Conway, AR many, many times. Only mishap I ever had in it (besides the speeding tickets) happened the weekend before I was to move away to college. I was 18 and always in a hurry. One night, I was leaving the tennis courts at the park by my old high school and backed right into a lamp post. It knocked a big dent in my bumper and broke out a tail light. Daddy got the light fixed, but he made be pay for it.

Dent and all, I loved that car and was really sad to let it go. But Muffy made me a deal that I couldn't pass up. She told me she'd sign one of her cars over to me if I let her sell mine to my aunt. Muffy's car was older but in better shape with less miles and no body damage. So I switched, but I still hate to see my aunt in my old car when I'm back home. She doesn't keep in clean or love it the way I did.

Which brings me to my current car, a 1992 Honda Civic hatchback. Mine's white, and that's the single thing I don't like about it. I can't keep the tree sap off of it, I can't keep the fenders clean. But I do love the zippy little car. I have been driving in since 2005, and it has been an invaluable asset in moving me from all the apartments and dorm rooms where I've lived. Seriously, y'all: fold down the backseats and you can fit a small island nation in the back of my car. My Civic is sixteen years old and only just now has 100,000 miles on it. It gets great gas mileage and has low emissions. That car has pedaled me all over I-40, West to East, from Conway to Knoxville and back again. I recently had to put a new muffler on it, but the folks at the shop gave me a deal because I told them I teach at UT. People really do bleed orange up here, and now so does my car with its Volunteers vanity plate, courtesy of my father. I plan to drive this baby until it absolutely falls apart, which might be a while because I hear Hondas last forever. Which is good, seeing as how personal cars are an endangered species, or so I hear.

My Mother's Handwriting

I was a writer long before I knew how to string words together to form meaningful phrases. Even before I could tell a good story, I could write with the prettiest penmanship any four-year-old trailer trash boy has and will ever have. I thank my momma for that. Of all the things she's taught me, most important are always to say yes ma'am and no sir and that pretty handwriting is testament to a pretty soul. My momma has the prettiest soul. It blooms in the curlicues of her S's, the precision of her cursive T's.

When I was a little boy about to embark on kindergarten, my momma sat me down at the dining table and taught me cursive handwriting. On tablets of lined paper, she would write words in luscious script--dog, car, Timothy--skipping a line between each so that I could mimic her cursive underneath. This was our after supper ritual for weeks before school started, a sort of call and response akin to Catholic prayers. My mother bidding me beauty, and me reciprocating. I learned cursive writing before I was adept at writing in print.

Once I started school, my kindergarten teacher, bless her heart, didn't know what to do with the too nice, too sensitive little boy in her class who always wrote in cursive. I remember being constantly told that I'd learn that kind of handwriting in third grade, that in kindergarten I must print. But I liked the curlicues, the connectedness of cursive letters. I liked how it bound me up in my mother.

Things came to a head when my teacher, having had enough of my haut couture penmanship, escorted me into the hallway for a private scolding. I cried uncontrollably for the rest of the day, because until that point I'd never been scolded at school. My momma told me from day one of my academic career that if I ever, ever got in trouble at school, things would be even worse for me when I got home. She assured me she'd know if I had gotten in trouble so there was no point in keeping my transgression secret from her. A precocious but overly-dramatic child, I was certain my mother would kill me for writing in cursive.

But she didn't. Instead she made cursive handwriting special , by creating writing time with me each night at home. I was to print at school, but at nighttime, after my bath and before sleep, I'd lay across her bed in an over-sized t-shirt with a pen and pad and we'd write. Not stories or poems, mind you, but words. Cursive words, usually names, family members', pets'. That's how I know all of my aunts', uncles', and cousins' full names, from writing them out with my momma each night.

Years of schooling have deteriorating my beautiful hand. Exquisite penmanship is an art form that takes patience and leisure that in-class notetaking doesn't afford. When I leave notes for my momma back home--short things telling her where I've gone, when I'll be back, what I'd like for her to pick up at the store--she scowls at the disrepair my handwriting has fallen into. I've taken her gift and thrown it by the wayside, she thinks, my mother whose handwriting still flourishes and flicks across the page.

Young Marriages Don't Make Adults: On Friendship, Distance, and Hometown Blues

Robin called me upset the other night. Like normal, I was out having some beers with the grad school crew, and like normal she was jealous. "I am afraid of my future, because I'm afraid of my present, " she said. What a precarious situation to be in, I thought. I told her that I'm so damned excited about my future because each moment of my present only gets better, and she told me I need to grow up and move back home. "I need you to live closer to me," she said.

I told Robin what I should have been telling myself for a couple years now. I'm not prepared to go back to our small Mississippi town because I don't know how to be an adult there. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm new at it, but I'm doing alright with this whole adulthood thing: I pay all my own bills on time, I have my own health insurance, and I know how to penny pinch. What I meant when I said that is this: I have never lived as an adult in my hometown. I packed off to college when I was eighteen, and spent my summers in transit between Mississippi and Arkansas, then eventually exclusively in Arkansas. Now I'm in Tennessee, an adult living my life in a way I don't think I could back home.

I have so much freedom living away. I don't feel compelled to come in at any certain time or restrict what I say (or what I write) certain ways. I'm not looking to get married and I don't care to father a child any time soon. I don't have to constantly look over my shoulder to see who is going to report back to my grandmother who they saw me out with and where. This seems to be the life that I would have to lead if I answered Robin's call and headed back.

Robin is a different kind of adult than me. She got sucked into the perils of small town life, and I regret that for her, because she was too smart to let it happen. But I imagine she had a harder time being a girl with parents who didn't really support her going too far away to college, who pressured her to get married when she was 22, who never seem to be satisfied with what she does with her life unless she mimics their lives. Robin has been my best friend since we were in 10th grade, and I remember she had big dreams. She wanted to work for the FBI, wanted to investigate alien abductions like on the X-Files. She went off to Ole Miss and got her bachelor's in Forensic Chemistry, even went on for a year of graduate work, only to get scared, drop out, and move back to Horn Lake and in with her husband's parents. To top it all off, she got a job next year teaching at our old high school. None of this is what she ever wanted to do.

But she did it, and now she's unsure. I try to tell her that she'll be fine, that's she's doing great, that everything happens for a reason. I want to be there for my friend, at least emotionally, but I don't know how to help her out of the hometown rut, because in many ways, I never experienced it. She has her life planned out for her: high school teacher, wife, SUV driver, soccer mom in the same town where her parents did the same things. It's different for me. I don't know where I'll end up, because I'm not giving up my dream of the writer's life. After taking a year or so off after this MA degree, chances are I'll end up in a Ph.D. program somewhere, then enter the job market and take employment where I can find it. Used to, the thought of spinning out of my hometown's orbit scared me to death, but I'm dealing with the encroaching reality of distance much better now. It's thrilling to think I might wind up half way across the country.

As for Robin, well, bless her little heart. I'm not prepared to be her neighbor again in the foreseeable future, but I know I'll keep on answering the phone when she calls for me to put her back together then school me about being an adult.

Taking the Right Way Home

I got a little weepy when driving through Memphis back to Knoxville yesterday. At the I-240 interchange past the Brooks Rd. exit, the right lane takes you to eastbound I-40 towards Nashville, and the left lane takes you to westbound I-40 towards Little Rock. After resisting the temptation to give UT, my final (unfinished) papers, and the assistantship the finger and hightail it to Central Arkansas for better or worse, I chose the right lane, followed I-240 around to the the Nashville exit, and once again was presented with the same choice: West to Little Rock, East to Nashville, then on to Knoxville. I lost my bearings for just a second.

See, I'm one of those people who (halfway) believes in the power of signs. Not like stop signs, but signs from above (which is problematic for me because I really don't believe in god) that lure me toward a certain....something. Usually when confronted with the same decision more than once, I freak out a bit, nearly convincing myself that something out there is giving me another chance to make the right decision. However, I invariably stick with the choices I've already made, signs be damned.

I guess I can convince myself that choosing the Nashville exit, which was the right lane after all, was the right decision. I did make some significant progress on one of my papers today, and would have made more had I remembered to dress appropriately for the arctic environs of Hodges Library. Besides, I'd stand to lose a lot by giving up and going back to Conway: free school, teaching experience, newly budding friendships. And all for what? A memory of a perfect time in a perfect place with perfect people when I was perfectly happy. Only it wasn't, they weren't, I wasn't. I was a basket case for most of my undergraduate career, over-extending myself with classes and RSOs and student publications because I learned a long time ago that if I keep myself impossibly busy, I don't have time to think about what's bothering me. Repression has been a key factor in my coming of age, I tell you, and it took me getting away from what I know to realize that.

But nostalgia has a way of skewing the truth of matters. For a little longer than a split second, I thought I might actually go AWOL from McClung Tower and back to a time that will not exist again in a place with people that surely have changed since I made my departure that weepy day at the end of July 2007. Of course they've changed. I've changed. And I'm glad I had the good sense to realize these facts before I merged left.

Stay with me. Go places.

Well, I'm officially going to New York. December 13-21, 2007. Flying out of Memphis nonstop to Laguardia. $340 roundtrip.

I feel this trip will mark some sort of milestone in my life. It will mean I'm becoming cultured, I'm going places. Two years ago I went to San Francisco. Now I'm going to New York City. Growing up poor in a small Southern town, I always entertained ideas of seeing California and New York about as wholeheartedly as I pursued notions of being an astronaut or runway model. These places seemed just so foreign for me, so out of reach. Had I been asked five years ago if I ever thought I'd go either place, I'd have said no, that I never figured I'd make it to a city bigger than Memphis. And I was content with that, too. I didn't know any better. My family doesn't travel, short of a trip down Highway 61 to the casinos in Tunica, or a little further south down to Vicksburg to see the Civil War battle sites. I come from practical people, who spend their money on car insurance and new glasses, not whirlwind tours of Broadway.
When I went to college in Arkansas, my momma and daddy didn't know what to think. Neither of them had ever been there, so for them I might as well have been packing my bags for China. Three hours from home is much like going halfway across the world for people who have never lived anywhere except the same small town. Since then I've spent a summer living in New Brunswick, and now I live in Knoxville. Seems like I've become more adventurous. Here I am, forever a Mississippi expat, girding my loins and gathering my bearings to see the Big Apple.

It's an exciting time, folks.