At 5:40 this morning, in the dark and drizzle, we pulled away from the curb with my 15 year old daughter at the wheel. I sat in the passenger seat and watched the wet road, saw coppery leaves in a pretty drift under the tree they’d fallen from, undisturbed yet by cars driving over them.
Our daughter has 6am drylands practice for swimming on Mondays and Wednesdays. She’s gradually been adding more challenging drives to her practice: first around the neighborhood, then around other neighborhoods, then to the next town over by small roads, then on the highway. A few weeks ago, she graduated to driving to and from swim practice, during the daylight hours, on the highway. Then rush during rush hour. Then after sunset.
This morning, we went in the blackness long before sunrise. It had rained in the night, and was drizzling when we left the house. The brakes squeaked in the wetness — it’s been a long time since it’s rained here — and the drizzle was in that awkward phase where it is constant enough that you have to regularly use the wipers, but the lowest speed on the windshield wipers is too fast.
About halfway to the gym, we were swallowed by a fog bank. On the wet, hilly highway, in the dark, in the rain. She did great, but I, of course, worried. One day, she’ll be doing this without me in the passenger seat. Winter will come, and there will be snow and ice. When the kids were little, I worried about injuries. As they grow up and prepare to move out, I worry about their lives.
Our daughter loves bubble tea. If you’ve not had bubble tea, it doesn’t sound appetizing no matter how I describe it, but I’ll try anyway. Bubble tea, or at least the bubble tea we order at our local Ninja Café — Large Classic Kung Fu Milk Tea with Boba — reminds me of Thai iced tea, which is a milky sweet tea. The difference with iced bubble tea is that the bottom of the cup is filled with tapioca pearls (boba) that are chewy like gummy bears (though they don’t taste like gummy bears). You drink the tea with a fat straw, as big around as those fat pencils kids use in Kindergarten, to accommodate the boba, which you suck up the straw along with the sweet milky tea.
At least once a week, on our way home from swim practice, or if we’re just out and about, or even if we’re sitting at home and nobody is going anywhere or making any move to go anywhere, our daughter will ask if we can go get bubble tea. She frequently requests iced coffee as well, and the garbage can in our garage is filled with her discarded clear plastic cups from Starbucks, Panera, and Ninja Café.
Like most kids of her generation, she is rightfully alarmed about environmental destruction and climate change. She’s learning the connection between her actions and how they impact the world around her, and she’s trying to think beyond herself. She opted for a smaller car that gets better gas mileage once she considered that aspect of the SUV she first thought she wanted. And when she sees the plastic cups in the garbage (along with the dent in her checking account from all those $5 drinks), she feels bad for contributing to the devastating pile of plastic garbage that already exists in the world.
She’s been thinking for a while that she’d like to make her own bubble tea to take those plastic cups down a notch. But she needed two key components that don’t exist at our regular supermarket: boba and big fat straws.
There’s a world market across town that is not convenient to anywhere we ever go, but we’d heard they had boba. So last weekend, as part of her driving lesson, she drove us to Oasis, and lo, they had both boba and fat straws.
The package of tapioca pearls contained enough for five drinks. She was out of boba by the end of the week.
For her driving lesson this week, we drove from our house to the aquatic center, then on the way back home, we made a pit stop at Oasis. She practiced getting on and off the highway, lane changes, traffic, parking, and plenty of left turns. I got myself some marzipan at the market (without having to drive myself there!), she got practice driving to and from the pool, plus some extra exits on and off the highway, and we got her more boba so she can make bubble tea at home. This time, we bought two packages.
We are teaching our son how to drive. And I thought having a baby was stressful!
Driving lessons are going slowly. At first, we took him on Sundays to the Corporate Research Center nearby. It’s a large enough multi-building, spread-out office complex that there are a few ways to make large loops that involve getting used to accelerating, slowing, stopping at stop signs, turning left and right, using turn signals, navigating around the occasional bicyclist or pedestrian, and sharing the road with a few other leisurely Sunday drivers.
He was doing great on the loops and was growing bored with them. A couple of weeks ago he expressed interest in branching out and going places with more cars so he can practice adding the wildcard of other drivers to the mix. That day we drove through Virginia Tech campus, and he drove us all the way home, through traffic lights and everything.
Last weekend I suggested we drive over to the high school — the drive he’ll eventually be making every day when he gets his license. We went on a Sunday again, but I had forgotten how many lane changes the drive involved. We hadn’t practiced lane changes on the safe-bubble office complex loops. And there was more traffic than I had anticipated. Our hands were white-knuckles the whole way home, his on the steering wheel, mine clasped tightly in my lap. I wasn’t sure he’d ever want to drive again.
This morning, he got up and asked if I was going anywhere, because if so, he’d love some donuts.
“Uh, no, I’m not going anywhere,” I said. I gestured to my pajamas that I was still wearing. And then I had an idea.
“But if you drive to the donut shop, I’ll buy you donuts.”
He was not expecting this. He weighed his options — were donuts worth the stress of driving practice? After a couple of minutes, he decided yes, donuts are worth it.
So off we went, on another new route, with more cars, more traffic lights, cars going much faster than the speed limit, and a very small, very busy parking lot at the donut shop.
He did fantastic. He used his signals, anticipated what other cars were doing, made his turns safely, and pulled in and out of the small parking lot like he’d done it a thousand times. And at the end of it all, we all got donut rewards.
My best friend and me, 1992ish, with the Bug, parked on one of Savannah’s squares. I’m sure I just said something annoying.My first car was a convertible: a 1976 robin’s egg blue VW Super Beetle with a white top. I was the first of my friends to turn 16 and get my license, and we drove all around Savannah, Wilmington, and Tybee Island, Georgia in that car, top down, sun and sand.
Convertibles are the most fun cars, there’s no doubt about it. They are a sign of freedom and fun, they give the best experience of driving: wind and sun on a gorgeous day. They remove the barrier between you and the outside world when you’re on the road. I remember that feeling of wind on my face, of smelling the salt marsh on the causeway and the ocean at the beach.
Later, when my husband and I were courting, long after the Beetle was gone and I’d left for college and gotten a more dependable car, he drove a soft-top Jeep Wrangler, navy blue with a tan top. Taking the top down and having the doors off was even more wild and wilderness feeling than the Bug. Brian and I drove Jekyll, St. Simons, and Tybee Islands, we drove the Appalachians, we camped, we were carefree.
When we lived in Florida, convertibles weren’t as attractive as they had once been. It was very hot there. We’d see someone sitting at a traffic light with the top down in July, their bald spot burning, the heat rising from asphalt unbearable. I liked my closed up car with air conditioning in Florida.
But now we live someplace with seasons, someplace that more times than not has perfect convertible weather. I think how fun it would be to put the top down, pop in some Tom Petty, and go for a drive. Every time I see someone in a convertible on a TV show (Don Draper on Mad Men), I want one again.
For the month of April, I will publish a 10-minute free write each day. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Trying to get back into the writing habit.
1976 Super Beetle (left) and 2009 Jetta (right) keys
My car key is a rectangle of black plastic that fits in my palm like a rabbit’s foot, like any car clicker does these days. Only mine has no protruding key. The clicker is compact; I can wrap my whole hand around it, like a talisman. On my clicker, there is a shiny button I push with my thumb, and when I press it, a silver key pops out like a switchblade.
When we first bought our Passat wagon, I was giddy to have a Volkswagen again. My first car was a robin’s egg blue Super Beetle with a white canvas top. I was the first of my girlfriends to turn 16, the first to get a driver’s license, the first to be granted access to a car and the silver key that inserted into the ignition and (sometimes) made the car go. The key had the letters VW encircled on its round silver head: the logo that I maintain as silly an attachment to as hipsters do to that clean-edged apple with a crescent bite out of it.
My girlfriends and I push-started that car all over Savannah. We smoked cigarettes, laughed with the top down, drove to Tybee Island to go to the beach, not caring if we tracked sand in the Beetle because it just fell through the holes in the floor anyway: the holes that allowed water to splash up on my uniform shoes and my plaid Catholic school girl skirt when I raced through deep puddles on rainy days, in a hurry to get back to class after coffee at the downtown Daybreak Cafe.
So when we got that VW station wagon, my husband and me, and installed car seats in back for our two beautiful babies, I was pretty excited. The dashboard was edgy, lit in reds and cobalt blue in the dark night we drove it home. The engine was solid, the car black with silver details – sexy despite its family wagon-ness – and there, on the steering wheel, padded and filled with airbag (unlike the Beetle), was that circle that embraced those beloved letters: VW. The Passat, like its switchblade clicker, marked a milestone transition, a leveling up of sophistication over the the holey floor and plain silver key of the Beetle.
The key I have now, though it looks so like our station wagon key that we often confuse them, is not for the Passat. It is for the sporty six-speed Jetta we bought when my husband was offered his tenure-track position. For nine years he had lived without a car while we scraped by on student loans and his graduate school TA income. My husband walked to school in the sweltering heat and violent thunderstorms of Florida. He bought studded snow tires to bike to work in the punishing winters of Minnesota. We rented and bought houses based on proximity to his workplace so we could live on one car payment, one insurance payment, one gas tank, one repair bill. Though we owned a Passat, we still lived a Beetle life.
When all my husband’s hard work paid off, we bought him a shiny new-to-us car. And now I carry its key. Come to find out, it’s not just men who take to sports cars when they hit middle age. I love the supple feel of the steering wheel on my fingertips, the round head of the gear shift smooth in the palm of my hand. I love pressing the gas hard and releasing the clutch quick and feeling the car surge, zipping past all these college boys vroom vrooming their engines at traffic lights. I laugh with the sunroof open as our Jetta blasts past them.
I am responsible when the kids are with me, I promise I am. That’s why my husband wanted me to take the nice car and give him the beat up wagon. The sporty Jetta is the more reliable car now, the one that he feels safer about the kids and me being in.
This key I hold in my hand – this black plastic rectangle that fits perfectly in my palm, whose silver shaft snaps out like a switchblade – it carries all of my Volkswagen memories: that first robin’s egg Beetle with the white canvas top and holes in the floor, the Passat station wagon we drove from Florida to Minnesota to Virginia, moving our babies, and finally, the Jetta, the most grown up Volkswagen we’ve owned. And the coolest.
Vroom vroom.
My god, could I place more products here on my blog? WordPress last week, Volkswagen this week. I swear nobody’s paying me for this. Anyway, this piece came out of a prompt in our writing group: keys.
Butterfly Mind 