The Station Wagon

The day my parents bought The Station Wagon, they had taken us kids to stay at Mammaw's--at least us older kids. I think they took Scott and Deana with them. Scott was just a baby, which would have made me 6-ish. A while later, Dad came to pick Russell and me up. What struck me as odd was that he had our mother with him when he left, but not when he came back. He had taken her and the little ones home before coming to get us.

"Hey kids, I've got a surprise for you," Dad called as he walked into Mammaw's house.

Oh, boy! A surprise! I ran outside, opened the door of the car and there in the back seat was...

nothing. There was nothing there.

Confused, I asked Dad where the surprise was. "It's the car!" he replied. "We bought a new car. That's the surprise."

This is not actually our car, but it looked very much like this, right down to the color--Sea Foam Green.

Oh. That wasn't a surprise. I had known that my parents were going to buy a new car. I'm not sure how I knew. Maybe it was when they said, "You're going to go stay with Mammaw while we go buy a new car."

Yeah, that was a pretty big hint.

So I was a bit disappointed. I had been expecting a real surprise. But then...Daddy opened up the back hatch of The Station Wagon and lo and behold, there were seats back there! Two of them. They weren't like regular car seats either. They were sideways, facing each other. Not only that, but the window in the back hatch had a handle and it rolled down! Oh we had so much fun riding home in those seats with the back window rolled down.

When not in use, the seats folded down and made a regular floor in what came to be known in the family vernacular as The Back Back. We loved riding in The Back Back, but it didn't happen often, as our mother couldn't be bothered to raise the seats. Once we learned how to raise them ourselves, yeah, we rode back there more, but mother still wouldn't open the back hatch for us, and she certainly wouldn't let us crawl in and out of the back window! No, we had to get into the back seat and climb over. But that was OK with us. We still loved riding in The Back Back.

My mother is the younger of two children. Her brother, my Uncle Jack, and his family live in Alabama. Every year at Christmas, they would all come see us. Every year at Easter, we would all go see them. We didn't have spring break in my school. We got a week off for Easter and we always went to Alabama that week.

When I was very small, we would drive about half way--it was a 10 hour drive from Orange, TX to Grove Hill, AL--and spend the night somewhere in Louisiana. About the time we got The Station Wagon, all that changed. My parents decided they would make the drive all in one whack and save themselves a hotel bill. So they put the seats down in The Back Back, spread some blankets on the floor, and threw all us kids back there. You could do that back then and not get arrested.

That had to be the funnest car trip I ever took. We talked, we laughed, we cut up. When Scott and Deana needed naps, we all laid down and they napped. Russell and I had stopped taking naps long ago, but we had to lay down to get the two little ones to lay down. Once they were asleep, we could get back up.

At one point, Dad told us we were talking too much. We'd fogged up the windows! We were under an order of silence until the windows un-fogged. To this day, I suspect my Dad had somehow fogged the windows on purpose, just to get us to be quiet for a few moments. Another time, he called out, "Listen! Everybody listen!" We got real quiet, and listened hard. I couldn't hear anything and said so.

"I don't hear anything"

"That's the point!" replied my Dad.

Suddenly Dad started singing, to the tune of Dixie:

A way down South where the cotton grows
There was an old man picking his nose!

Now, to a little kid, there are two things that are always uproariously funny--nose picking is one of them. Passing gas is the other, but we won't go there. Not this time. We shrieked with laughter and sang that song over and over and over and over until

"All right! That's enough!"

My mother yelled at us, then she spent the rest of the trip fussing at Dad for teaching us that song in the first place. I'm sure beneath the "yes, Dear" and "You're right, Dear" Dad was laughing under his breath. He was like that, my dad was.

A year or so later, when Scott was maybe 2, and I was about 8, we were going to a family dinner at my Aunt Martha's. That is Dad's oldest sister. Russell and I were loading food in to The Back Back of The Station Wagon. Scott and Deana were playing inside the car. Russell and I had just set a couple of casserole dishes down when suddenly The Station Wagon began moving towards us! It was rolling! Out of the driveway! I jumped to the side--the passenger side--and grabbed the door handle, thinking I could somehow stop it from rolling. But, no. I was being pulled along by the car. I let go, and as I turned to run, I saw Russell had jumped into the driver's seat and was frantically jiggling and hitting the gear shift, trying unsuccessfully to get the car back into park.

I ran into the house. My parents were just inside the door, and I could tell they'd been arguing. Normally, I wouldn't get anywhere near my mother under such circumstances, for fear she would turn her fury on me. But this time, I didn't even think about that. I burst in on them and yelled,

"Scott's backing the car out of the driveway!"

I swear I have never seen my dad move so fast. He ran out of the house and mother and I followed him. By that time, The Station Wagon had rolled all the way out of the driveway, across the street, though the ditch into the empty field across the street from my house. It was stopped just a few feet from the gully in the field. Russell had finally thought to put his foot on the brake, and was able to stop the car.

He was just sitting there, pushing on the brake pedal, waiting for someone to rescue him. Dad reached in through the open door and put The Station Wagon into park. He made it look so easy. Russell got out, Dad got in, started the car and drove it back across the field, through the ditch, across the road and back into the driveway.

And no one was the worse for wear. Thankfully.

Not long after that, car companies started making it so that the keys must be in the ignition before anyone can shift gears.

For good reason.