Sunday, August 15, 2010

Summer Sundays -- Sunday drives

A car similar to ours

The first car I remember my parents buying was similar to the one pictured above. Occasionally we would take a Sunday drive. My parents, my little sister and me. No seat belts or car seats, you know. After all this memory was around 1953.
After my brother was born in 1954 we existed, barely,
all very tightly squeezed into our sedan. My brother would be seated in the new car seat. It was so fancy. It had a toy steering wheel with a red horn in the middle. The "car seat"  attached to the actual car seat with two large hooks.
You get the picture.
Then, when my youngest brother was born, my parents 
discovered station wagons.
 
My father on one of our family trips.

By this time my sister and I were entering out teen years.
Station wagons were so totally uncool!
My dad drove slower than anyone on the road and we nicknamed him "turtle".
He had almost total control over the radio. My sister and I wanted to listen to our pop tunes while my parents preferred the easy listening stations. On long trips we made a deal with our parents... for every two songs that my parents preferred we were allowed to listen to one of our own.
I remember my father's favorite expression,
"Good gosh!"
He rarely liked any of the music we listened to.
Never did I ever see my mother drive my father anywhere.
My father was the master, man in control, the boss, the head "honcho" of the road.
To allow my mother to drive him anywhere would have been so well... "unmanly".
Rumor has it that once he had a root canal and actually had to have my mother drive him home. I did not actually witness this. It is a bit of family lore, you see.
I've been thinking about my growing up years and our mode of transportation. While having our Suburban primped and ready for sale, my husband and I shared a vehicle for
Seven weeks!
Long story.
It made me realize that in my parents 60+ years of marriage, my mother never had her own vehicle to drive.
She and my father somehow managed to share a car.
Never, ever did I hear a cross word about it.
They meshed their schedules together and made it work.
Kudos to them as my husband I dealt with a daily
run-through of schedules in order to have wheels.
Amazing!
Well, such is life in modern times.
Hopefully I've brought forth a memory or two of
your family's mode of transportation when you
were growing up.




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