The Joy Menu #56: Drive II

As we made our (slow) way into the countryside, I marveled at his fragility and tried not to let fear of it harden in my belly.

Dec 12, 2021

Dear Creators,

By winter, my father was less charmed by Ohio, less hopeful about the course of his treatment, more burdened by the short, dark days. When I’d visit, he’d have me drive to the hospital for tests, down the road to pick up pizza or ice cream, outside the city to my sister’s on weekends.

While I wasn’t used to driving in the snow, on ice, on the thin country roads, what really felt strange was driving next to my father. In my twenty years as a driver I could only remember one time he’d willingly sat shotgun and allowed me to take the wheel. He’d even driven me home from my driver’s test — the day I passed.

Ever since the first seizure, he’d been advised not to drive, but that hadn’t stopped him. For nearly a year, he’d driven anyway, to LA and back, to doctors appointments, across the country from California to Cleveland, confident in his ability to make sense of the roads he’d been navigating for nearly fifty years. Or unwilling to cede control, to loosen his grip.

Now, though, suddenly, I was told to take the wheel.

We’d leave the city early to get to my sister’s — air crisp, sunshine bright, ground thawed. Still, at every stop sign, I could feel his body tense. If the car moved too close to a painted line, he’d squirm. If the road got slick, if a snowflake fell, if wind pressed against us with the sound of bedsheets snapping, he’d visibly cringe. Every time the speed limit changed, he’d mention it. “You gotta watch out here,” he’d say every time we got to the edge of the reservoir, a spot where a patrol car often sat — or he’d seen one sitting once.

I was unused to this energy coming from my father. Unused to it and uncomfortable with it. But I took it in stride — if this was what he needed, if this was who he was now; such was my mantra in those days: “let him experience his dying the way wants.” What could I do, anyway?

I would drive, as slowly and as carefully as I knew how, and I’d feel this new nervousness emanating from his body like waves from a space heater in an already heated room. I’d focus on the smooth line of the road, and in the corner of my vision, try to ignore his fingers, perched on the ledge of one knee, flexing and unflexing, thrumming against his thumb, picking at the nail, dancing over a ledge of frayed skin.

As we made our (slow) way into the countryside, I marveled at his fragility and tried not to let fear of it harden in my belly.

Once, as a kid, as we made our way around the Yale Loop, the circular spoke that girdled our suburban village, I’d seen a cop car and said nothing. Minutes later, we were pulled over and my dad was issued a ticket.

“I saw him,” I told my dad afterwards. “Parked alongside South Lake.”

I could feel his disappointment, his frustration, his helplessness.

“And you didn't say anything?”

Had I known he was speeding? Had I known I should speak up?

I did. Or so I told myself.

I felt guilty about it for years. For not saying anything. For not warning my father.

After dinner, as the evening would settle around us, rather than spend the night in the guest room upstairs, where my parents had spent many summer and fall nights, he’d insist we head home. It wasn’t in his nature to worry, to capitulate to discomfort, to shift uncomfortably in his seat, to clench. But here we were; what was nature worth at this stage of the journey?

It wasn’t about the light — the morning would be brighter. Safer, even. Objectively so.

It was about the darkness — and a darkness that wouldn’t be lifting, not that night and not in the morning.

Yet this new anxiety did not blunt the force of his dominance. We could cajole, complain, protest. But in the end we did what he said.

I drove us home after dinner.

Focusing on the smooth line of the road, not on his visible discomfort, not on his worry. I grew to accept this otherness which had settled upon him and which I did not recognize — there’s no good way to die, so let him do it as he pleases.

Years before, my father drove a Ford Pinto from Chicago to New York, back and forth, dozens of times — 800 miles each way.

He’d just met my mother in Indiana, when visiting the only person he knew in the States who wasn’t his ex-wife or her relations — and now, with her in New York was the only place he wanted to be, aside from the classrooms where he studied art, or the printing studio he had access to and which was nearly always empty.

I have this image in my head of him driving straight through the night, only stopping once for gas, another time to pee, the windows rolled down, his thick arm resting on the sill, long, black hairs dancing in the wind, like a dog sticking out its tongue to suck up the wet midwestern air.

When I drove up to college, from Irvine to Portland, seventeen hours, he told me about his drives from Chicago to New York. Later, when I left New York myself — and drove through the South toward home — he told me about them again.

Now I wonder: when, years later, he lapped the Pacific coast, from Mexico to Canada, up and down and up, peddling fertilizer from farm to farm, did he think of them, again, too?

Or when, for fifteen years straight, he woke before dawn to sluice the arteries of LA County, meeting with principals, contractors, builders, did he think of those drives himself? Or did he think of others? From Haifa to Tel Aviv, from Herzliya to the Gaza Strip, from Michigan to Flushing, from Long Island to Boston and back?

Driving in all weather, on all terrain. Stopping for gas, and a pee. He drove me to college — more than once. He drove me home. He drove me to school, and soccer practice, and In-n-Out, and Chick’s Sporting Goods. He memorized every route. You could call him lost from anywhere, and he’d explain, by rote, how to get where you needed to go.

I wonder now, on those long drives from the Chicago of study, of divorce, of immigration, toward a New York of opportunity, of my mother, of new love — when the chill set in, did he ever close the window? Did he pull on a jacket? Did he bring his arm inside to warm? (Seems likely, and yet, my father was not a likely man.)

What did it mean for him to let go of driving? To accept, a year after the doctor advised it, that his brain could no longer handle the task, a task which had defined much of his life: driving officers from post to post, driving from the Midwest to New York, driving up and down the West to create new business, and every day to LA to feed his family and build a future for us all?

What did it mean, in the end, to worry over snow flurries and lakeside speed traps? What did it mean, then, to ask me — his son — to take the wheel?

Onward toward creative joy,

Joey