My Mother the Car

We step outside to get in Mom’s car. A bomb of a car that smells like cigarettes and rusting everywhere. Needs a paint job. Needs an upholsterer. Needs a muffler. Needs to go to the scrap yard. I am pulling the brim of my cowboy hat over my eyes so as not to be recognized in it. My Dad would have a stroke if he knew it was parked at the curb along side his beautifully manicured lawn all weekend. Between the car and the caricature that is my mother, I feel like I am on a movie set and something heinous is about to happen in the plot.

A turn of the key, and the engine literally roars to life with a puff of smoke. And we are bombing to the high school at neck breaking speeds and in total disregard for driving conventions. My fingernails are dug deep into the dashboard.

I manage to convince Mom that she doesn’t have to come all the way around back to the band room parking area. I have to go adjust my uniform anyway and can whip in the side door right into the lavatory if you just swing in over here where you can make a quick lap around the library and be gone before anyone notices!

She sticks the cigarette back into her mouth, now Penelope Pitstop Pink because she applied at the light. She screeches to a stop and I climb out of the wildly vibrating vehicle to dash to the side entrance, head down, collar up, brim still encroaching the bridge of my nose. A clean getaway.

Inspection goes fine. I am uniform perfection and will be marching that day…right behind the adorable Scott in his grand poobah hat and spats with his jazzy silver trumpet. The football field is lined and the team is warming up. So must we. We take to the Junior High field to practice one last time or two.

Always a perfectionist, Mr. Skitch is stopping us every few bars to correct a formation, or a rhythm or some darn thing. We are out on that dewy field for ages before we are dismissed in sections. The woodwinds. The brass. The drum line. All step off the field to hear the rest of our last minute instructions.

When out of the corner of my eye, I see her car. THE car. The burned-out Pontiac I had exited an hour before reeking like a teachers’ lounge. And then I hear it. Incredulously, it is inching its way through the Junior High teachers’ lot toward the crowd of band members.

I am pitting out my ill-fitting uniform.

What I know now, but I did not know then, was that my mother had gone home to find my practice flag, the one you wave around at practice and drag across the field 100 times a week that gets all muddy and grass stained, sitting in the dining room. Thinking I might need it but not knowing for sure, she’d have to bring it to me just in case.

Now remember, this is way before the invention of the cordless phone, much less the widespread prevalence of the cell phone. She’d have no way to take the low road and just ask me.

She’d have one decision to make – forget that she saw it and let me sink or swim in my inspection OR light up another Kent 100 and bomb her way back to the school to give it to me.

And now here she was. God only knows what I was in store for.