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Sundays
meant church, and big noonday meals followed by the Sunday
drive. My father always drove, my mother in the front seat
beside him. I was nestled into the cocoon of the backseat, first
in the back of the 1957 Chevy Bel Air and later our brand new
1968 Chevy Nova. The radio would be playing the current country
and western tunes, Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn singing of
love and betrayal, and I would be staring out the window and
watching the world flash by. Sometimes I would remain seated and
gaze at other people, driving by on their way to their own
adventures. I would create lives for these people and stories
about where they were headed. The truth was that they were
probably headed nowhere. Like us, they were out for a Sunday
drive.
Sunday
drives were meant for destinations unknown. That is what made
them so special. When you entered the car, you were never quite
sure where it would take you. My family were explorers and
adventurers. We blazed uncharted paths at the whim of my father
who captained the expedition.
However,
these excursions inevitably involved twisting and turning narrow
country roads through the backwoods of Western Pennsylvania. A
drive could last an hour or sometimes several hours. We traveled
up large hills and down into the valleys, past farmlands and
cows contentedly chewing their cud as their tails swished at the
flies. We motored through small towns with their beer gardens
and churches on opposite corners and quite often followed beside
one of the mighty rivers where you could see the coal barges
going through the locks. We cruised past imposing steel mills
and coal mines and drove under trestles and coal chutes that
clanked and shuddered as we passed through. Sometimes we would
drive through the dazzling sunshine and other times the clouds
would roll in and the rain would begin to fall.
The weather was unimportant because I was safe
listening to the music and the quiet hum of my parents’
conversation. Every now and then, I liked to lie down in the
backseat. Of course this was back before the government decided
that parents should keep their children safely buckled into
seatbelts. When I was prone on the backseat, I was looking at
the scenery through the back window. This added a different
dimension to the drive. It was like entering a faraway magical
kingdom. Now I was looking at the tops of trees and telephone
poles. The shadows and the sunlight took turns shifting across
my face as my father drove us onward into our future.
Often on these drives, we would stop somewhere to
stretch our legs. My mother liked to stop at the family-run
produce stands that dotted the countryside along the way. My
father would get out of the car to produce one of his
hand-rolled cigarettes. He would lean against the car smoking
his cigarette, while my mother and I chattered and laughed and
picked Queen Anne’s lace from the side of the road until we
realized this made me sneeze. Sometimes we played “he loves me,
he loves me not” with the wild daisies that dyed our fingers
yellow. Then we were on our way again with the smell of the
tobacco burning my nostrils and sometimes with the hot ashes
from my father’s cigarette blowing into the backseat. Always
there was the endless drone of the miles ticking by.
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