Before I jump in, I want to celebrate a milestone. A happy consequence of therapy and patience and luck.
Not only can I now pick up Elijah again, I can carry him a little bit, too.
Though I've grown quite good and fond of walking, it's not ideal for getting around town. This might have sufficed a century ago. But not more than a century into our reliance on cars.
It's amazing how much the car has changed us.
(And it's amazing how some of the greatest breakthroughs with cars--Henry Ford, El*n Musk--have been overseen by the worst of us. Palmer Luckey will probably come up with something car-centric soon. But I digress.)
Growing up, I loved cars too. At least, the Hot Wheels kind. We'd go to Toys R' Us every now and again, and add a few more to the collection.
When I was in Kindergarten, we were each asked to draw a car. I drew the car that used to be my father's--a Plymouth Volare. It was brown--"shit brown," I'm told he would say--didn't have air conditioning, and I vividly recall my parents calling it The Vomit. That's a lot of excrement.
He replaced this eventually with an '86 Honda Accord, which accompanied my mom's Plymouth Voyager--a blue minivan she vulgarly nicknamed The Blue Bitch. I cannot recall why it earned such a name. My most precise memory in that car was in the fall of 1989, when we were attempting to drive to a high school football game in Dublin. I was sitting in the backseat, and Dad took a sip of Diet Coke. I was alarmed. "You're not supposed to drink and drive," I told him, well informed by some advertisement I'd seen on TV. "Oh, it's okay to drink Diet Coke when you drive, Mikey," my mom said while my Dad surely suppressed laughter.
(Elijah is a first grader now, and if we're watching TV (or YouTube), we are constantly helping him avoid advertisements these days. No, Eli, Sherrod Brown does not punch dogs in the face. No, Jon Husted does not pour his milk in the bowl before his cereal.
And now there is a new, uniquely heinous ad forthcoming from the first person to be fired by DOGE, Vivek Ramaswamy. We will work particularly hard to avoid those. But I digress; this detour has gone on long enough.)
At some point during junior high, I inexplicably got very interested in cars. That doesn't mean I knew a lot about them, other than which cars were the bestsellers in the U.S. and which ones might be in the next year. Going to the Columbus Auto Show was an annual dose of joy, and it came amidst March Madness, our favorite time of year. I'd collect dozens of pamphlets about a wide range of cars, hope having sprung eternal that Dad might upgrade to a fancy convertible like a Mazda Miata.
(He chose a Chrysler Concorde instead. And wrote one of his columns in Columbus Bar Quarterly about it. And he used that as a vehicle to poke fun at which cars people of certain professions should drive--astronauts should drive Saturns; jockeys should drive Mustangs; and his punch line, proctologists should drive Probes. Digressing again.)
Dad didn't care about cars. "I just need one to get me from A to B," he'd say.
But when it came time for me to drive a car, he and my mom were scrupulous. As my 16th birthday approached, he would tell everyone within shouting distance that they wanted to get me the safest car possible. They wanted me wrapped in steel. It wasn't legal for me to drive a tank, they'd concede, but a garbage truck would surely do.
My mom taught me how to drive in her Plymouth Voyager. We zipped around empty parking lots after school and on weekends, and through residential streets and freeways, building up my confidence in what had long ago been dubbed the Coreymobile, because Mom was such a frequent volunteer to drive me and my friends to practices and games, to movies and playdates--wherever we wanted to go.
By the time I'd passed my real driver's test, my parents were ready to surprise me with a car. I had no idea how priviliged I was. I'm not sure it was the safest, but it was certainly about as big a car as they could have gotten me: A Dodge Durango. I absolutely loved it, and it took wonderful care of me even if it only got a few miles per gallon, to and from college, and in those first years after Dad passed away.
One day in January 2008, my car spun and skidded as I acclerated onto the freeway. I crossed three lanes of traffic before hitting the concrete median, my car coming to rest facing the oncoming traffic. The driver of an AT&T van saw what had happened, and slammed on his breaks. But he still collided with me, destroying the wheelbase of my car. Somehow, our cars were otherwise unharmed, and so were we drivers.
Dad saved my life, I thought, all those years later.
The next day, I got into his old new car. He got the car days after being admitted to the hospital, early in his six-month bout with esophageal cancer. Mom drove it home from the car dealer, while Dad was navigating brutal effects of chemotherapy. He never got to drive it; Mom chose not to either. It was ready for me when my Durango was totaled.
It served me well, taking me back and forth to law school, to various jobs, to dates with Lori, to and from Toledo when I worked on the Clinton campaign--that was a wreck, too, it turns out; or what came after was, at least.
I drove it well beyond 100,000 miles, and would have continued driving it well into this decade. But on the cusp of Elijah's birth, Lori made a convincing argument to me: Would your Dad want you driving his grandson in this, or in a newer and safer one?
So I went out and bought a 2019 Accord Hybrid, and it was a wonderful car to all of us. And I loved fewer things more than when it was filled with Lori to my right, and Elijah and Teddy in my rearview mirror. And on so many rides, they were playing with Hot Wheels along the way--many of them my old ones, wisely saved by my mom and passed down to them accordingly. The rest were from Target. We'd always pick up a few for the boys any chance we got. They loved Hot Wheels as much as I did. Teddy couldn't go to sleep at night unless he was surrounded by a handful of his cars.
~
I didn't get the chance to tell that '19 Accord that I loved her; it's somewhere in a lot managed by the Columbus Police, squished by the driver who didn't see that traffic had stopped ahead of him.
That was the last thing I remember. That car, heading toward us, unaware that everything had slowed but it. There was nothing I could have done to stop it. I don't know that any civilian's car could have withstood the collision. I still don't know how I did. I still don't know why Teddy didn't instead.
Three months later, I'm far enough along in my recovery to be able to drive again. Or, one hopes--my first driver's test since age 16 was supposed to be the subject of my celebration today, but as fate would have it, that car is in the shop. My triumphant return to driving is delayed at least a week.
But I find myself in the fortunate position of shopping for a car again. I've joked with anyone who will listen, that I just want something that can safely get me from A to B. And that can wrap me and my loved ones in steel. And that can help me find my way through whatever comes next--for myself, our family. Our country.
My Dad would surely suggest a Pathfinder or Explorer.
But then I remembered the Hot Wheel that Teddy was playing with in his car seat during our final morning together.
It was a Volvo.
So it shall be.
