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.