We’re driving. Through hayfields and cotton. Because daddy liked to drive. Because that’s what families used to do before smartphones. Because there was little else to do except to watch lead paint dry.
So we took drives.
Blue collar Americans like my family drove all the time. We drove on Christmas morning, after opening presents. Daddy fired up the family heap on the Fourth of July, before the fireworks. On my birthday, we all hopped in the fifth-hand station wagon and drove until the earth ran out.
We drove whenever slight boredom overtook my father. We drove especially on overcast days, when the sky looked like polished steel, when the air was chilly, when the smell of woodsmoke was in the air.
I’m not sure what driving accomplished. But gas was cheap. And the world was so big.
We were big automobile-singers, too. Daddy and I sang duets as he drove. He would start by singing: “Well, I looked over Jordan and what did I see?”
My part was to answer: “Coming for to carry me home!”
Whereupon
he’d sing: “I see a band of angels, coming after me…!”
“Coming for to carry me home!”
I sang harmony. Which was no small chore when singing with my father. If you were going to sing with my old man, you had to give it all you had.
Because Daddy was deaf in his left ear. So he sang like a 180-decibel rocket launch. As a result, one thing I have never struggled with is quietness.
We’d sing until we reached some far flung filling station, way out in the sticks. We’d stop. We’d walk inside and see a man about a dog.
Daddy would ask the man at the counter about this and that. They’d laugh together. Shoot the bull.
People always liked my father. He always asked how their mothers were doing. Daddy always knew how to draw people out…