I wrote a couple of months ago about my car not running. It sat in the driveway from December until two days ago, long enough for mold to accumulate under the wheels. I finally got it together to have someone come and tow it away. I had a brief hope, not really, that someone would be willing to pay something for the non-running carcass of a 1991 Chevy Corsica. But in the end, I called junker service I found online and on Thursday, sometime after noon, a guy came by, took the title and took the car.
It was my dad's car. My father died back in 1998. In January. He died of a heart attack, but it would probably be more accurate to say that he died of years of drinking too much. He died in his favorite chair, the last of a series of recliners that sat in the living room of the apartment I grew up in. The location never changed, The chair was well positioned in front of the tv set and a nice distance from the speakers. My dad probably had two great pleasures as he aged, music and movies. I have his reel-to-reel tapes of 78s and his videos of movies that he caught on cable. He liked things like Shogun, the complete Smiley series on PBS, Forrest Gump (though he bought that), My Fair Lady (mainly because he was a big fan of Henry Higgins, uh, Rex Harrison), practically anything with Cary Grant in it, and movie musicals. My dad loved movies. He told me years ago about how he'd gone to some matinee as a kid and that he liked the movie so much he stayed and saw it three times. My grandmother was wild, worrying about what might have happened to him. I see him, a small boy happy, sitting in the dark, watching the fantasy unroll in front of him.
I understand that in him because I love movies too. There's a lot I don't understand about my father and that I never will. I think, when I look over the movies he collected, by buying or copying, when I see his Calvin and Hobbes collection, the Pogos, and the other odds and ends that I've kept after he died, that he had a hard time figuring out how to be a man. He wanted the authority of maleness, but he wasn't attracted to being a brute. We watched The Wizard of Oz every year when I was a little kid. My sister and I loved it, but he did too. I think he was essentially gentle and liked being silly, but felt that wasn't ok for a man, especially a black man of his time. He was a geek before there was a name or a place for it. I think he'd have been happier growing up now. I miss him.
He died not long after I got my PhD. He was so proud of me. When the tow guy took the car away, I was trying to remember different drives in it. Although I was reaching for times after my dad's death, I remembered one time before he died when I was finishing up on my doctorate. I had to drive to Princeton to get a signature. He offered me his car, although I hadn't asked for it. I drove down to Princeton and back to Ithaca on a rainy day, listening to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. It was a kind thing for my dad to have done. It was his constant and unobstrusive support that I remember now. A support that I didn't appreciate enough at the time and that I wish I'd thanked him for back when he could have heard it.
At the end, the car had more than a hundred sixty-three thousand miles on it and oil was leaking into the engine. I got it the semester after I started the job at XXXX university and now that the job is at an end, it's only right that the car is going, going gone too.
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