New Friends

Tags

adulthood, driving, friendships, geography, life, living, moving, new york, NYC, relationships, teens, wine

Making new friends is awkward, touch and go like learning to drive a car as a teen. Already uncomfortable in the skin you’re in, slamming the brake when you know you shouldn’t, but you’re scared, so you do, this is how it goes.

Making new adult friends is this but with coffee, cold from the afternoon, still in hand as a prop. It’s this with wine in plastic cups like Dixie, like the teeth-brushing rinser-outer cups for me and my brother, but see-through and bigger. More room for more wine for the silences.

But I’m new here so making friends is what I’ll have to do, always slamming on the brakes with Dixie cups of wine.

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8.Row 10

Tags

100 words, alphabet, character, city, DMV, driving, experience, eyesight, failure, Iran, life, observation, one hundred words, profile

At counter eleven, next to mine, folks were sent back to their seats for stepping out of line, coming before called, speaking on cell phones against the sign.

A man failed the eye test at eleven after hours of waiting in line. He failed when asked to read row 10. Gave Q’s instead of O’s. V’s instead of U’s. And two R’s instead of the letter H, even though with a good eye, they don’t look at all alike. In the end, after cleaning lenses and a thousand Iranian I’m sorry’s, he left with a temporary license, just like mine.

5. Contest Winner

Tags

100 words, cell phone, driving, exercise, http://ibecameashepherd.blogspot.com/, Kentucky Derby, London, one hundred, prompt, radio

The stop sign came  so quickly, the white line disappearing beneath the front tires with friction and force, pushing me toward the dash.  He’d nudged his cell phone from his front pocket, between  seam and seatbelt and was juggling it like a hot potato in his fat welding fingers now, driving, but not well.

The answer was Giacomo.  Dad would be the twenty-seventh caller.  “Oh my gosh, it’s ringing,”  he whispered.  “It’s never rung before.”  London, London, London, he breathed.  Held the phone to my ear, I nodded.

“Keep listening…” the radio boomed.  The flip phone clicked in Dad’s hand.

Moments that Make Marathons

Tags

coffee, conversation, distance, driving, future, life, love, marathon, marriage, moments, perspective, relationship, Starbucks, travel, waiting

Her coffee was too hot, she said. She usually tells them not to make it so hot. When they do, she can’t drink it right away and she hates that. I wondered, when she said hate, if she really hates it or if it’s just something she doesn’t like very much. I’m always wondering about things like that.

She stirred the whip cream, melted it into her coffee with a wooden stick from the coffee bar. Talked about how, today, differently than some of her yesterdays, she would shake nutmeg and cinnamon into her travel mug and see how her taste buds appreciated the gesture.

I hope it keeps me awake on my way to Flint, she said.

She invited me into her conversation, and I took a step I hadn’t planned on taking. The one on my map led me back to my table, to my isolation, brewing in mediocre circumstances, trying to grade papers. My map used terse words and fake smiles. But the step I took was off the map, it went beyond the hatred I feel for a commitment I must fulfill honorably, with excellence. It left papers ungraded. It spoke with patience for a relationship that must wait behind phone calls and weekend flights to spend forever. It worried not about me; it listened and found waiting unobtrusive.

Her husband, I learned, works across the state and she’s driving across to see him. They’ve been doing this for two years. And will do it still for one more.

I thought fleetingly, while she was sharing, of the eight-hundred miles that separate me and Brad, and how we struggle to appreciate this far-away time before being together, proximally, permanently. About how she was trying something fresh and new, something as simple as spices in her coffee, after two years of regular separation from her permanent lover. Her spices gave me perspective.

Good luck, honey, she said as she left. For what remained of our relationship between Michigan and New York, she meant. Even though she was the one driving to bridge the chasm in a marriage. Three-hundred miles, maybe. Between two that are supposed to be one.

Good luck to you two, she says, and climbs in the van on her way to Flint.

Always Home

Tags

Chicago, driving, friendship, Gina, grandma, high school, home, life, memory, Michigan, Mom, Nonna, parents, past, streets, suburbs, travel

I don’t live here now. I don’t suppose I’ll raise my family here. Though it would be nice to watch my girls, with baskets on their bikes, ride down to Grandma and Grandpa’s house for cookies and milk, wearing summer skin just like I did when I was a kid. Even still, driving down these roads still feels like coming home.

Taking the back roads, the way our Moms always used to go, past the library and the convenient store. Past the corners where we stole, smoked, swore. Past Nonna’s apartment, where she’s lived for years, had trouble recently to just get up the stairs. Not even my Nonna, but yours. You, my high school best friend. No where but here, our memories, every one, still fresh, dear to me, clear in my rear view mirror.

Right Lane: Unless Passing

Tags

driving, expressway, freeway, highway, left lane, Michigan, new york, Pennsylvania, potholes, right lane, road rules, traffic, travel, Wilkes-barre

I’m a chronic obeyer of one road rule. Not only one rule, but especially this one rule. I drive in the right lane always—unless passing.

It bothers me when people drive casually, carefree, talking on their phone with no hands on the wheel, in the left lane. That’s not what the left lane is for, in my understanding. The right lane is for all of that. For eating burgers, dripping grease and ketchup and those little onions that look like rice into your lap. For texting your friends paragraph messages and roaming onto the rumble strips and back onto the road. For creating a playlist for your drive during your drive instead of before.

The left lane is only for your temporary occupancy, while passing. Then right back to the right lane, where you belong.

During a long drive East from Michigan, five states in one sun-up, sun-down day, I came across a crucial exception to my hard-and-fast rule about the left lane. Somewhere along I-80, in Pennsylvania, after Youngstown but before Wilkes-barre, I was driving in the right lane, as per usual. My car was being adulterated by the condition of the road.  My tires were screaming for smooth, the cushion in my axles was giving me all it had but still the vibration in my thighs was making my legs itch. I was miles from another car—before or behind—so I [gasp!] shifted to the left lane and drove comfortably, without regret.

This new exception with go to the jury for approval: potholes.

Cultivating Patience

Tags

car, character, Christ, circumstance, driving, gas station, God, life, patience

A few months ago, the gas tank quit working properly on my car. At the gas station, when I set the little helper-notch contraption inside the pump handle so that the pump would self-fill and I could conveniently put my gloved hands into my pockets so they wouldn’t freeze off, the notch began to unhook after the fuel counter had only climbed to one or two dollars. I don’t usually pull into the gas station if I only need one or two dollars worth of gas, which, at this point, would hardly get me down the block, I reckon. And so began the pattern of re-setting the helper-notch, politely asking the gas pump to self-fill on behalf of my desire to retain these frozen little fingers of mine and, consequently, the gas pump’s denial of my requests.

You see, I also don’t like to touch the handle with my winterized hands in case the handle smells like gas because I’m not interested in my gloves smelling like that. Whenever I wash my gloves, I never remember to bring my gloves back to the car. The gas smell is such a lingering smell. It’s fine in the summer because I can wash my hands and the smell is mostly gone, and I usually don’t have as much difficulty remembering to bring those back to the car.

When I bring my car into the shop, I never ask about my obsessive refuse-to-fill-itself gas tank because I’m not interested in paying for whatever the problem might be. Because, frankly, it’s not actually a problem. Just a bit of an…inconvenience. All it really requires is standing and manually holding the handle until the entire tank fills to “F”. And, although slightly absurd, it’s not negatively affecting my life. Not if we’re talking “big picture” here. Maybe just increasing my capacity for patience. And who, namely me, couldn’t use a touch more patience cultivated into her hasty, assuming character?

More and more like Christ, but not all in one day.  Not all today.

Everything

Tags

Arkansas, Chicago, community, driving, gentleman, love, once, oxford, past, relationship, Southern

I didn’t love you.
I tried and couldn’t feel it right.
We drove together back and forth.
I felt your warmth from my seat, on my side.
Always disbelieving your passenger seat stares
when there was a road ahead, ignored.
We floated, still, between the white lines.

Your I know how’s and Let’s do this.
So sure, confident, traces of leadership.
Your nervousness in our silences.
I was comfortable in your care.
Had gotten used to standing outside the car,
waiting on your Southern hand around my side.
Used to your fingertips on my shoulder blade,
guiding me around corners, up the stairs,
when I knew where to go but not how it would end.

The day we shopped for suits, you held my hand
between the shops, on bricks like cobblestones.
My fingers lied and said they were fine.
The suit you wore, the Oxford shirt,
the tie that was my second choice.
I pulled at the shoulders, like the tailor had done
finding myself attracted to your reflection.
We hemmed the pants, I asked the lady please,
and we had them back today.
After you bought me dinner, wouldn’t let me pay.

We went home to our friends, and shared like each week.
Maybe they thought we were falling in love.
Maybe we did, in fleeting summer months.
Maybe you were.
I wanted to be.
Because you were being everything I should need.

Call

Tags

advice, call, caution, community, crash, death, driving, friendship, love, story, storytelling, wreck

Being cared for is such a funny thing. Such a wonderful thing. I believe, a necessary, healthy, human thing. Such an almost-manipulative thing, though, it can be blurry.

Call us when you get there. My mom always says. To let us know you got there. I’ve always feigned strength, like nothing can stop me from getting here to there. Like there are no mistakes, no dangers, like the course of my life is in my control. Yet I always called or sent a text, because otherwise Mom would worry.

I had a friend, from a wonderful community of believers, who was on the way to loving me, if not already there. I couldn’t make myself feel the same, and we had to part ways. He always wanted to drive me home. I was out of the way and it angered me so, but I often let it go. On nights that I drove myself home, he made me call and confirm my safety. I always fought, saying it was fine, saying I’d be fine.

My strong will in this was a mistake. He had a past with the complexity of travel. Some of his closest friends had died in a car crash a few years back. He was from the South―the most charming gentleman you can imagine―so instead of crash, like us, he said wreck like other Arkansans do. The wreck nearly broke the man, I learned over coffee and late nights out. But it helped bring him fully to the Lord, I reckon.

His story, the truths, these gals, those friends who held his heart strings, all together, it confirmed that a drive home is never just a drive home. There are mistakes, and dangers, and deaths waiting on the sides of the road. And if I don’t call when I come home, it’s reason to worry, because it’s happened to him before.

I never said no again when he said Call.

This Must Be Fiction

Tags

adventure, automobile, automotive, car trouble, cars, driving, expressway, fiction, highway, Illinois, Indiana, life, Michigan, midwest, night, roadside assistance, story, tow truck, travel

Car skids on the wet pavement, hydroplanes, the wheel shutters and shakes but only a little. She turns the music down. Drives, drives, drives. The car rumbles, she worries. Doesn’t know, but decides to pull off at the next exit. The roads are long, the night’s been dark for hours now. Mile marker, tree, reflector pole-thingy, where are the exits on this highway anyway!? Something shifts, the rumble turns to a grind.

Panic.

She pulls over immediately, as fast as she can get her Taurus over that solid white line, not 200 yards from the exit ramp. As the car slows, she hears the uncomfortable sound of metal to asphalt. Oh no.

Guilty that she doesn’t know more, that she didn’t pull off sooner, that she didn’t see it coming, she breathes heavily and her face feels hot. Fearful that the problem is bigger because of her ignorance, she waits a moment. Afraid to be alone with no answers, she fishes for her phone. Plus, she used to be afraid of the dark. Used to be, right.

She calls dad, calls the insurance helper people. Someone’s on his way. Wait, wait, wait. She drank coffee and ate popcorn all the way here and she has to go. But she has to stay and wait for the man who will fix her tire. Wait, wait, wait. It’s taking a while. He’s going to be late. An hour goes by. She prays for her students with notecards stuck in the mirror. She practices her sign language. She checks the rearview mirror obsessively, but doesn’t mean to.

The driver calls and they figure out that he’s searching for her in Indiana. She’s in Michigan. That’s not going to work out, she thinks. And says. More calls, lots of apologies. A new truck goes out in search of her blinking hazard lights. One in the same state this time.

By this time, she can’t wait; she absolutely has to go. Kleenex, hand sanitizer, a break in the oncoming traffic. She runs up the embankment, out of sight. Two steps out of the car, a ditch. It’s been raining all day, so a muddy ditch. Maybe a foot of muddy water. She nearly loses her shoe, soaks her sweat pants. Anger. The hill is much steeper than she realized. Halfway, she can’t stop to pee; she can hardly stand. Her hands are muddy, her feet are soaked. At the top of the hill, she can hardly stand it. She goes and runs back down. But the hill is steep, and the only way back. She falls, slides down the hill in her clothes, caked in mud, twists her arm to catch her fall.

She has a suitcase full of clothes, but no pants to put on. Distressed, she stands outside the car before getting in and getting everything muddy. Her shoulder throbs from the fall. At least it had stopped raining.

The man finally comes, changes her tire, tells her to drive 50 on the highway marked 70 with the spare. Be careful. She turns the car on and slides back onto the highway. Warning lights pop up all over the dashboard. Emergency break, antilock brakes, transmission something bad. Dad is annoyed with the problem, two hours old by now, and offers no help via phone. So she drives slowly, burned by semi trucks through three states and all the way home with warning lights burning her retinas.

She waits to wake up, to snap back to reality. There’s no way this is real. This just must be fiction.