Drive time

 Have you checked the mirrors? 

“Yes, mom.”

The boy was sitting in his father’s car, making the finishing adjustments on the driver’s seat. It is a slow and methodical process that requires patience. Unless one has the sequence committed to one of the car’s digital memories. 

“There are so many buttons and knobs, and they move so sllllllllooooowwly.”

As he lowered the seat and eased it backward from where I’d had it set, the whirring of the mechanisms seemed almost comical. 

I tried not to laugh. 

Driving is a serious business. 

He’s almost ready. Maybe just a titch more arch in the lumbar region. 

My car isn't that fancy. But what it lacks in bling and built-in safety features, it makes up for in precision: notably a manual transmission, which ratchets up technical (and psychological) difficulties of learning to drive at six whole speeds. 

He's ready now. He starts the car. Shifts into gear and eases off the brake. The car inches out of the carport at the speed of seat position. 

He flexes his fingers and tightens them around the wheel. “This is the way you do it, right? Ten and Two?”

That is the way we do it. But we learned on our grandfather’s clock. 

“Yeah. The new standard is to grip around 5 and 7 or 4 and 8.”

“Why? That seems too low?”

“Airbags.”

“They come out of the steering wheel?”

“And when they do they might break your arm if it gets in the way. Also, you don't have to use as much force to crank the wheel as you did in the olden days thanks to power steering.”

He’s cleared the garage and is straightening from the hard left turn into the driveway. And with the swiftness of molasses, we are heading toward the open road. 

A part of me wants to hurry this along. We might rack up the 50-hour minimum drive time required to schedule the licensing test before we get home from the ice cream run. But the part of me that understood the mission, to navigate two stop signs, three traffic lights, and one traffic circle, between the end of our drive and the grocery store five miles away, I would wear out my welcome as the passenger seat driver.  

As I had more than three years ago when his

sister rushed to the end of the driveway as she'd witnessed my counterpart in motor vehicle instruction doing countless times.

Her face tensed and her lips would disappear into a thin line as I breathlessly called suggestions and gripped the closest armrest. 

“You're too close to the shoulder …

“You should speed up here 

“Slow down there!

“Ohmygod! what-are-you-doing? You are turning into oncoming traffic!”

It took her years to get over the hassle of driving with me. 

I needed to do better this time.

Up until then, I had always loved driving my kids around. 

Whether I was toting them to their friends’ houses, doctors’ appointments, or to far “away games,” the drive has always proven to be a real trip.

I suppose it’s time to get used to being driven.

The die is cast

Breakfast was almost over, but the smell of bacon and eggs hung in the air. It mixed with the sweetness of maple syrup and a second course of waffles that its cook had dealt like cards toward any newly vacated plates. 

This breakfast bonanza is as much of an indicator of our typical vacation as the wall-to-wall humidity and the games that have piled up at the end of the table.

I said no thank you by selecting one of the five decks of cards and started to line up seven little stacks in front of me. My lips move silently as I count: One up, Two down, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven … Two up, Three down, Four, Five, Six, Seven …

On occasion, the cards stick together as I deal them out or as I try to shuffle to the third one to reveal my next play. Ordinarily, this would cause some perturbation, but the gift of being in proximity to sea air is something one really shouldn't grouse about.

Hardship, it is not. 

Also, I figure, I’ll use the adhesions to apply little cheats until it becomes evident that I will not win the game of solitaire this round.

I scoop the cards and start again.

I will play until someone asks to gets dealt in and we parlay into a new game.

This is the ritual in the dwindling days of a holiday: table games are usually the things we can all agree on as a family as we try to pass the time until the next meal.

Dominos used to be favored. It was an easy game to learn and  satisfying to handle tiles, hiding them from the gaze of opponents or clicking them noisily, as we awaited our next turns.

Lets play Dominos?

Anyone?

Anyone? …

Somehow it lost its allure.

Each game has had a season of play and a season of retirement: Go Fish, Rummy, Hearts, Crazy 8s, Kings in the Corner, and Euchre. When the season ends, we can't rest assured that we won't outgrow it, or that our grasp of rules will remain. 

We know we will never be ready for Bridge.

This year, we’ve just rolled the dice.

“We are playing Yahtzee,” says the girl after she clears the table of breakfast dishes.

The game is her favorite and consists of five dice, a printed piece of paper that helps you keep track of your rolls, and a plastic cup that MUST generate the most noise possible as players shake and dump the numbered cubes onto the table.

The last one, of course, makes for the most excitement. Bonus points awarded to the adult who requires headache remedy before the final scores are tallied.

Luck has everything to do with it, but we still employ strategies.

I go for the “specialty” rolls first: The Straights, the Full Houses, and the Threes and Fours-of-a-Kind. I like to get them out of the way so I can relax in the idea of just rolling for Yahtzees that never materialize.

My daughter focuses on the top-tier rolls: The Ones and Twos, she admits are throwaways, but the Fives and Sixes can set you up for a bonus that would obliterate any Yahtzees that do float out of the ether …the ones that often roll up for her father.

 

Not that we are truly competitive despite our tendency to groan at the roll that spins the number we gambled on and settles on the number we gambled with originally.

I think we are getting better at celebrating the wins and ignoring the losses.

At least it feels like there are fewer hard feelings.

“Bye-Bye Mr. Four-of-a-Kind,” she sings. “This will be the day that I die.” 

Closer to fine

 

As we walked through the lobby, clad in a wardrobe one could rightly call drab, my daughter and I passed true believers: People for whom Barbie measured 10 feet tall. People who would wear pink and be gleeful as they watched a slice of their childhood light up the silver screen. 

I was worried I'd be the one who would only see the tarnish. 

I pictured myself hunkered down in the cool embrace of a resplendent reclining chair with no small amount of regret, not because I didn't have a personal relationship with Barbie but because I worried I may not have allowed my daughter to have fully realized hers.

Between trailers and teasers and wink-and-nod reviews of Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” I couldn't imagine how a movie about an 11-inch doll could ever measure up to all the hype. 

Not gonna lie. 

I expected a lot. 

I had so many questions.

Was Barbie a feminist? An anti-feminist? Was she worthy of all the love or any of the ridicule? What message would she have for us now and would it be transformative?

The narrator in my head laughed as she reminded me that these are the items we have to bring to the table, they aren't even sold separately.

But deliver, it did. 

Though at first, it delivered like a gut punch. 

“Do you remember how I wanted a Barbie?” my daughter asked as we settled in for the previews.

My shoulders gently lift toward my ears as I fumble to find the recliner’s controls and an answer with a positive spin: “I remember you being a Barbie CheerleaderTM one Halloween.”

She smiled and tilted her head, pointing at the button partially hidden by the dimming light. 

I couldn't mod-podge over the moment she had just uncovered. 

“You got me a Barbie cake for my birthday and one of my friends told me it wasn't a real Barbie. You must remember.”

I hadn't forgotten. She has been a Barbie girl in my tomboy world.

I also hadn't realized until it was too late that the star of the party - a cake-skirted doll - had only a flesh-colored spike stabbing into the frosting instead of legs encased in a cylinder.

“Don't feel bad, I was more of a Calico Critter kind of kid than a Barbie Girl.”

And surprisingly I didn't feel bad. Because for the next 114 minutes, I could only marvel at how much Gerwig was able to pack and unpack into the trunk of this candy-colored vehicle. 

 

It not only passed the Bechdel test, it felt like it managed to devise a similar rubric to apply to cinematic representations of Ken; perhaps future viewers might even call it a Ken-del test. 

“Am I making that up,” I asked my kid as the credits rolled and we uprighted our recliners. 

“That was the part I liked the most!” She exclaimed. “Right from the beginning - when Ken crashed on his surfboard and the doctors were fixing him you knew they weren't going to turn the tables.”

She was right. Even as Doctor Barbie explained that his body would heal in the time

It takes to explain that he actually had no injuries, Stereotypical Barbie never once diminished his feelings or told him that it was all in his head. She just let him know she thought he was brave.

The film not only centered her in security, it allowed us to bring our experiences and meet the same gentle understanding.

Barbie seemed all-encompassing and there was no wrong way to be in her world.

And as we were making our way back to our oversized car in the parking lot, rehashing the movie and all the moments that stayed with us for the next several hours, I felt something pleasant and unexpected: the realization that I may have been a Barbie girl all along.

“You do know Mattel is releasing a Weird Barbie, right? I think it's right up your alley.”

Alive and kicking

Upon hearing I would be retiring to the state of Maine for the last gasp of summer (unofficially and increasingly known in these parts as the season when you can only buy swimwear from a big box Halloween store that has just taken up residence, albeit temporarily, in one of the many unoccupied warehouses that sold groceries for a generation before it up and split) a friend drew my attention from the cool-down portion of our mid-week run to an amazing news item out of the aforementioned Vacationland.

“It's the craziest story: a woman from Brunswick, Maine, awoke in the wee hours of the morning to find a teenager standing in her bedroom with a knife, saying he was going to cut her.”

Blink. Blink. 

Now, I must say, I believe my eyes may have widened and protruded from their sockets as confusion clouded them when the delightful story I was expecting pushed sideways and teetered over a rabbit hole of horror. when

 

My friend assured me that the take she was about to tell would forever endear me to the land in the upper-east corner of our mainland where women only grow more powerful as we age. 

And I listened raptly in the middle of the street as she recounted from memory: “The victim, an 87-year-old woman, said to herself, ‘Well if you're going to cut me then I'm going to kick you,’ and she jumped out of her bed and into her shoes, grabbed a chair as a shield and the two battled for so long  the boy became weary and wandered into the kitchen where he announced he was starving.”

So, according to this retelling, our lady hero made the attacker a snack of cheese and crackers and said he could have the whole box if he'd leave, which he did, and which somehow helped police and search dogs find him later for a resistless arrest. 

My friend marveled at the pluck of this woman saying she'd do it all again if, for some unfortunate reason, history were to repeat itself. And before I headed for home I agreed salt water must run through her veins. 

And just a little honey, too, as the woman said she hoped the kid got the help he needed to turn his life around.

It wasn't until later on when I searched for the news article that I learned how truly bonkers the story was: in addition to the chilling discovery and violent attack, the half-dressed intruder turned out to be a teenager who had mowed the lady’s lawn a few years prior and by her contemporaneous accounts “had done a darn good job, too.”

And that he had gained entrance to her home through a window by shifting the accordion slats of air conditioning to create an opening through which he could wriggle past.

In addition to providing safety tips for other central-airless homeowners to beef up security for these vulnerable window conditions, she also noted how having a rotary phone slowed her ability to contact police, 

“I dialed as fast as I could,” she told the reporter as the memory of the mechanical sounds of the carousel rotating and releasing came flooding back. 

As did a reminder that whoever wrote this story is a gem of equal luster. A reminder, perhaps, that journalism is alive and kicking. 

Turns out the most important thing she had in her time of crisis (besides ready access to shoes and a bedside chair shield) was having her wits about her. 

For this and so many other reasons, I hope to be a Mainer when I grow up