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| On long road trips, Tori keeps a cooler stocked with food in the front seat and then straps a little screen across the seat backs for the special treat of a movie! |
The subject of this particular post is our family workhorse, the Honda Civic. We love this car so much. It used to be my grandma's car and she loved driving around the streets of Jacksonville, Texas and checking in on things around town. This habit of passing the time through driving intensified as she got older and a little lonely, but even when I was a kid some of my clearest memories are of driving around with her looking at certain houses while she told us stories about the people who lived there, or who used to live there. It's a small town and she had lived there for quite some time, so she had some pretty good stories to tell.
Since she worked as an assistant in an accountant's office, she also had special access to people's financial situations and I especially remember her pointing out the modest homes and old cars of people who she knew to be extremely wealthy ("oil money," she would say), but who never cared to show it. Those were my favorite stories, I think partly because I felt like she and I were in on some big secret that nobody else knew about (and to some extent we were since all the information she shared with me was highly confidential!).
Although my grandma wasn't driving me in the Honda when I was a kid (it's a 2000), I feel connected to those memories through this car. And I still logged many miles driving around Jacksonville with her in the Honda, which she loved dearly. In small town East Texas, it's big American cars that rule the road, so her Honda Civic really stood out (my uncle had taken her all the way to Dallas to buy it). Grandma was always talking about her "little car" and how she liked being able to zip in and out of places -- she couldn't imagine why people liked to drive those big wasteful cars. She was very proud of it and talked about it constantly.
When her children insisted she stop driving, my aunts and uncles were kind enough to gently nudge my grandma to give the car to me, partly as a thank-you for having spent a year living in Jacksonville with her. It was a very special gift, not only in the sense that it's a whole car (!), but also because I know how much my grandma loved it and how hard it was for her to give it up. I think we've done a pretty good job of getting the most out of it and cherishing it as much as she did.
Though she's now suffering from severe dementia, for the longest time talking with her about the Honda was the easiest way to connect with her -- she would always have a twinkle in her eye when she talked about that car. And although she was of course upset that she wasn't able to drive anymore, she seemed genuinely happy that my family was now getting so much use out of it.
In some ways, I think our little Honda Civic has a lot in common with my grandma, which I guess is kind of a funny thing to say about a Japanese sedan built in 2000, given that my grandma is an 86-year-old woman who grew up on a dairy farm in East Texas riding horses and milking cows. But both are about the most hard-working, no-frills, reliable, and "best of class" models that ever existed.
For about a year after we first got the car, I could still smell my grandma's make-up and face cream every time I got in. With time and children, of course, that smell has gone away. But I can still see some of her make-up smudges on the steering wheel and on the door, and whenever they catch my eye I always smile at the memory of my grandma driving this very same car. Grandma would probably be horrified at how dirty the car gets, but I think she'd really love to see our three kids squeezed in there like sardines and if she were driving around with me she'd probably point at the other cars and say that people didn't need those big old cars just for hauling around a couple of kids!
