Life in the Car

Do you ever wonder what your epitaph will say? Inevitably, something will be chiseled in granite. Unless you think about it ahead of time, you won’t be consulted on the last say you will ever have. Ideally, mine should chronicle my life in the car. It’s when I’m at my best.

As a solo act, being alone in the car trumps them all. The universe between the windshield and the back window is yours alone to govern. You can play any song you like on your CD player, and you can play it as many times in a row as you like. I always I end up listening to one or two favorite songs on a CD, over and over. I do this in case life is shorter than I expect it to be. I don’t want to wake up on the other side and find out that I invested too much time on tracks that I didn’t really like. Listening to music is not about being polite. At present, Dust in the Wind and Carry on My Wayward Son have the exclusive rights to the airwaves in my car. They bring about a cosmic atmosphere. Dust in the Wind laments on how ephemeral life really is, and Carry on My Wayward Son excuses all my transgressions on my way to laying my weary head to rest.

There’s a lot of stuff to do in the car, other than the obvious activity of driving it around. First of all, even though I don’t have an especially fancy car, there are a lot of controls to be adjusted. If I’m on a long trip I like to adjust the air conditioning about every one to two minutes. It keeps me sharp. In the winter, I adjust the heat even more frequently, switching it from blowing on my face, to my feet, to the back seat. I can never seem to achieve an ideal temperature for more than 30 seconds. It’s the main reason I insist passengers sit only in the back seat. That way they can’t touch the temperature controls.

Eating in the car is also a pleasant pastime, especially since drive-thrus are so plentiful. Coffee never tastes better than when you are driving around, the sun in your eyes, the tunes blasting, and the coffee stains outnumbering the buttons on your coat. If you are kind of clumsy like me, you might end up wearing as much of your coffee as you drink, but the battle scars on your coat don’t matter. You know the cup holder is in even worse shape than you are.

Often, when I’m driving around and my mind is roaming free, I will have a great idea about something I want to write. I keep a note pad in the map pocket of the door to jot down these jewels. I like to be safe, though, so I wait until I come to a traffic light that’s red. Then I begin writing furiously. Sometimes I can tell that I’m making the drivers around me paranoid. They think I’m recording their license plate numbers to report their driving errors. Occasionally, I try to reassure them by rolling down the window and yelling “Don’t worry – I’m just having ideas!” Usually they pretend they haven’t heard me and drive away quickly. They don’t even wait for the light to go green.

There are even more exotic things you can do while driving your car than eating and drinking coffee and deafening yourself with 35 year old rock music. Some people apply makeup, read books or maps, brush their teeth without the benefit of water, or catch up on their cross-stitch. These are all fun car activities, but I try to indulge in them only if the traffic light is long enough to allow me to fill in my income tax forms. At other times, when the red light lasts interminably long, I toy with the idea of changing my oil, but I never do, because I would actually have to get out of the car to do this.

Last summer Highway 11 kept interfering with my perfect life in the car. I spent more time stopped by construction than I did driving. Each waiting period stretched out longer than the previous one. I can tell when drivers’ tolerance for waiting has reached the limit. They start getting out of their vehicles and visiting up and down the long chain of cars to see if the other drivers know why the delay is so long. Of course, they cannot possibly have any additional information, but any kind of waiting is a good excuse for socializing. Pretty soon people start opening their coolers and slapping on sun tan oil as they pump other drivers for the details on what life is like in Cobalt, or Albuquerque, or Moonbeam. Eventually, just as Joe from Greenville, Alabama gets his BBQ lit, the line begins to snake ahead.

On my last trip up Highway 11, I finally tired of socializing with the same drivers at every delay. I decided to indulge in some light housekeeping in my car. I cleaned the dashboard and the windshield, and mucked out the cup holders. I re-folded about twenty crumpled maps. I alphabetized the travel pamphlets, restrung my tennis racket, and I had enough time left over to haul water from a nearby creek and swab down the passenger seat. It was suffering from some sort of encounter with spilled Chinese food. I considered re-warming the leftover food on the engine, but I was worried that I would run out of time.

I don’t like to be parted from my car. So perhaps my epitaph will reflect this. Maybe it will even be shaped like a car. And with all the advances in solar power and audio devices, I’m pretty sure that I can look forward to having the haunting strains of Dust in the Wind follow me and my car into eternity.