BACK ROADS
On Saturday afternoons my dad and I would take drives
through the country in one of the antique cars he restored with my
grandfather. There was no
radio. No electronic entertainment. We found stories in the landscape, the
clouds, and the abandoned buildings that peppered the back roads of South
Alabama. My grandfather loved Fords,
and in his collection was a Model T, a Model A, and a Model S. But my father was an Anglophile who
parked his 1961 Rolls Royce Silver Cloud among my grandfather’s collection of
American made cars. It had white
leather seats and little picnic trays in the back that folded down. The smell, a combination of wood,
leather, and oil, is still ingrained in my memory.
The car was majestic, with the Flying Lady adorning the
hood. You might assume my father
had money, but he didn’t. He
usually drove a 1973 Pinto hatchback and was known to take clothes from the
lost and found at the YMCA. When
we went to Godfather’s for pizza on Friday nights he would send me around to
the empty tables to grab the leftover pitchers of beer. Frugal would be a generous description. But in the Rolls Royce, dad was
transformed into someone else; someone who was ostentatious, gregarious,
important.
When my grandfather died suddenly the car barn, which housed
their prized possessions, was locked and our Saturday afternoon drives came to
an end. My dad was heartbroken;
the connection that he had to his otherwise distant father had been
severed. My father died just ten
week later, and the Rolls Royce remained locked in the barn. For reasons I never completely
understood, the car had been signed over to my aunt; although, I suspect a
bankruptcy my father filed for years earlier was the culprit.
With my father and grandfather gone my mother made a valiant
effort to keep me connected to my grandmother. But the visits were difficult and awkward. We had little to talk about. After one particularly unfortunately
encounter involving what was left of my father’s belongings, my mother and I
drove away. I assumed I would
never see the car again.
But then just as I was returning home for Christmas my
senior year of college, my mother called to tell me that my grandmother had
passed away. It had been more ten
years since my father died and almost that long since I had seen her.
My grandmother and I had always had a difficult
relationship. She had grown up in
a house with no running water or indoor plumbing. A product of the depression, she hoarded food and
fabric. But she was also a skilled
seamstress and a master gardener. Through sewing we found our common
ground. I spent hours cutting out
squares for what would become my first quilt, then stitched them together on her sewing maching with her guidance.
When I arrived home I went to pay my respects. My aunt was now living in the house
that I had grown up in, a smaller house on a large piece of property where my
grandparents also had a home. It
was strange sitting in the living room that once held my father’s things. It was there that my aunt told me that
she was returning my father’s Rolls Royce along with what remained of his possessions.
ZELDA IN THE BACKYARD
The car was removed from the barn and hoisted on a flat
bed. The Rolls had been wrecked
years prior; the front bumper was dented and the grill bent. My heart broke when I stepped into the
car barn and saw so many of their beloved cars deteriorating. A friend’s father generously housed the
car in his garage and was able to rebuild the brakes so that I could drive it
once again. When it was in working
order my mother and I had a picnic in the backseat. It was there that I rechristened her Zelda, in homage to
Zelda Fitzgerald and the insanity in which the car came back into my life. The
first time I took Zelda out for a drive on my own I followed the same route my
dad and I took all those years ago.
With the windows rolled down, I was bathed in the warm summer air.
For a while the car was stored in a barn behind the Creek
Indian Bingo Palace, but after it was damaged during a hurricane, I sent it off
to a restoration shop run by a Brit in South Carolina. Money would go out. Reports would come back in
periodically. After awhile, I
heard nothing.
When I got engaged I knew that I wanted Zelda there. If my dad couldn’t walk me down the
aisle, then Zelda would take his place. When I inquired about the car, I got no response. The car was eventually located in a
shed in Liberty, South Carolina, where she sat disassembled in hundreds of
pieces. Reassembled, Zelda was there to stand in for my father.
But Zelda wasn’t the only car in my life at that time. Perhaps if she was the story would have
had a different outcome. The details
of our estrangement are long and complicated, but like everything else in the
family, it centered around a car; this time a 1908 Model S Ford. When my grandmother died I fought for
the most rare and cherished of my grandfather’s cars. It was a fight that drove the division between me and my
dad’s family even deeper.
I’m sure they have their own version of what happened. After all I hadn’t been an active participant
in their lives for many years. But
my fight for the car wasn’t selfish or greedy, but rather rooted in my desire
to salvage the work of my father and grandfather. Rather than leaving it to deteriorate, I wanted the car to
be enjoyed. After a legal fight,
the car was mine. With the Model S
in my possession, my mom and I fulfilled my dad’s dream of taking it to the
national car show.
I was not prepared to care for the Model S, so when a
collector offered to buy it, I accepted his offer. The car now sits in the private museum where a full time
staff is able to care for it.
Zelda stayed in my life for ten more years, but eventually I had to
accept that I didn’t have the resources to maintain the upkeep. With the sale of each car I paid off my
student loans; the Model S paid off my balance for undergrad, while Zelda paid
for graduate school. My mother
would have been happy knowing that in some roundabout way my father paid for
college after all.
THE LUNCH THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN
When you lose a parent as a child, you lose the opportunity
to get to know them as a person.
The people who knew my father are quickly disappearing, taking with them the
stories and memories that I crave.
I reached out to my aunt – my father’s sister – in hopes
that she would have lunch with me.
I was hoping to piece together a few stories from his childhood. Unfortunately, she declined. I’m not surprised, but I am
disappointed. I feel like those
stories are slipping further and further away. I know she has her reasons for saying no, just like I
had my reasons for walking away all those years ago. I don’t regret that decision; it was an act of self-preservation. There are stories from his life, from
the years before I was born, that only she can tell. Those stories are now lost to me.
When my grandmother died I wasn’t sure how to grieve the
loss. What I discovered is that I was left to grieve the possibilities, the
loss of the chance to get it right.
I’ve also learned that we re-grieve the deaths of those we love at
different stages in our lives. Now
I grieve for my daughter’s loss, the loss of an opportunity to have her
grandparents here to teach her, to tell her stories, to build their own
memories together.
Many of my memories are rooted in conflict, but there are
so many others. I’ll always have
the memories of our drives in the country, of ice cream sandwiches and Cokes in
a bottle. There are the forts I
built with my cousins, the hot summer days running around shirtless, eating
watermelon and fresh blackberry cobbler.
There is the quilt I made with my grandmother and the memories of making
biscuits with her on Saturday mornings.
There is knowing that while all of them were incredibly flawed people,
they possessed an impeccable work ethic.
For now, those are the stories I’ll share with my daughter. The others will come later.
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