Joey

Driving and dreaming

My first car was a red Volvo sedan. It was the closest thing to a tank that we could find, and my parents urged me to get it because I was not a good driver. As a subway kid with a terrible sense of direction, I had no intuitive sense of how to drive a car. I failed my road test twice, but in the end I passed and took off for college in my little red armored car. I named that car Joey, in honor of my friend Ellen’s father’s childhood imaginary friend (it made sense at the time).

During my sophomore year of college, Joey and I regularly navigated up and down the Merritt highway between Middletown, CT, where I was in school to the NYU Langone hospital on the East Side of Manhattan. My father was diagnosed with Leukemia at the beginning of that year, and died at the beginning of my junior year. My fear and then grief made my driving even worse, but Joey and I continued careening around New York and New England in the hard years that followed.

I spent those years after college in Somerville, Massachusetts. They were hard years for me. I was mourning my father, and trying to figure out how to be an adult. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, or who I wanted to do it with. In my memory, it was always freezing cold and snowing in those years. I was always driving on icy roads, gently careening into parking meters and lane embankments and curbs - never a human, thank god. I knew the car body shop guys all too well, visiting them almost as often as my therapist. I dreamed about driving too - about being lost and out of control behind the wheel. I talked about writing a book about that time of life: Jobs I’ve Hated, Men I’ve Dated.

The driving dreams lasted past my years in Somerville. They came back when I was feeling especially lost, or out of control. I found my dream self again clutching the steering wheel while I slid out of control in the snow on Somerville Ave. That driving dream alternated with the one where I had to take the exam I hadn’t studied for, and the one where I tried to put in contact lenses that grew way too big for my eyes. My car, my brain, my eyes - all betraying me in my dreams.

I was in Somerville last weekend, there to visit friends and family. I have been back many times since I lived there - but all of the snow this last time triggered a nauseatingly nostalgic experience. I found myself zoning out in the same low grey light of a long Saturday afternoon, feeling the same cold in my bones, experiencing the same impossibility of finding a parking place that was not “saved” by someone’s chair plunked in the middle of it. We drove across the city and I stomped down on an imaginary break, turned into the skid, even though I was not the one behind the wheel and we were not slipping.

Happily, this visit I was not in my early twenties. As I got to each friend we visited, I found that their homes were warm, and that the snow was kind of pretty out their windows. More than that, I realized that I had not had a car dream in many years. I still miss my father - both my parents, now and forever. I still have questions about what I want to do, but they are more nuanced. And I am pretty well secure in who I want to do it with. I am still a terrible driver, but now I can hand the driving over to someone else - and given that I am now the shortest person in my family, I am often kicked out of the front seat all together.

There are so many hard things about aging, and I was pleased to be reminded of the ease it can offer too. As I watch my children and their friends navigate that same moment of life, they seem to do it with more ease and elegance than I did. But I do not envy them.

Also this - less weighty, but more practical: if you ever want to drive from Boston to NYC on a Sunday afternoon - do it during a Super Bowl when the Patriots are playing. Fastest drive ever.

And this….a winter-inspired tiny landscape, by Maria: