Before our parents split up, they drove us 1,046 miles from our rural town in Wisconsin to our grandparent’s rural town in New Mexico every year. Along the way, there were a series of magical gas stations called Stuckey’s, filled with chili dogs, a bevy of personalized souvenirs, and their signature confection, called pecan logs.
Sometimes, we got to pick out a small trinket. My name was unusual enough that I could never find it represented between Jennifer and Joelle on any of the racks of miniature license plates, but I always searched in earnest, anyway.
“Come on Jocie,” my dad said, one of these times, anxious to get back on the road. I might have been eight years old. I pivoted away from that rack and found myself eye-to-eye with the most beautiful bumper sticker I’d ever seen. It was an iridescent, glittery United States flag. My father, neither stingy nor extravagant, agreed to get it for me. It was probably 50 cents. In the parking lot, I happily peeled the paper from the back and leaned toward our bumper.
“Woah!” he said and pulled me back. “What are you doing?”
“I’m putting this on.”
“No, no you are not.”
“But it will look great, Dad!”
“Those things never come off. That’s just for you. We don’t put those on our cars.”
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In the back seat, once we were on the highway again, I crumpled the sticker in my hands, sulking. I was confused: why he couldn’t see how cool this was? And so what if it never came off? Wasn’t that a good thing for a bumper sticker? As far as I could tell, almost everybody had one of these. Reading them was a favorite diversion for me and my brother during those infinite cross-country treks.
I soon got over this affront, but after our parents divorced a few years later, it was difficult for me to connect with my father. I couldn’t understand his new life or accept that he’d chosen to move out. Regarding him, I was a flustered preteen, a bitter teenager, then an aloof young adult. Fortunately, in my adulthood, we’ve grown closer.
Whenever we speak on the phone, he asks how many miles my car has on it (now almost 110K), and how it’s running (pretty well). Cars have been a lifelong preoccupation for him, much like books have been for me. He sold cars as a young man and earned an associate’s degree in the 1950s from General Motors Institute in Flint, Michigan.
Right after he met our mom, while visiting her church in Ontario, he was drafted into the Korean War. The fighting was officially over but there were still a lot of American troops over there. Due to his top-secret clearance and his automotive savvy, he became the driver for a general. He drove him through sniper fire to the DMZ for ongoing talks between the North and the South.
When he came home, he and my mom got married. He resumed his job at the dealership, but according to him, in 1958 and 1959, GM and Ford were making the “worst cars this country ever produced” and he earned less than he had several years before. Dad eventually moved on to another career path but has always taken immaculate care of his cars, washing them in the driveway and buffing them until they shine. He likes to protect resale and trade-in value.
When I recently flew from New York to Wisconsin to help drive him to some doctor appointments, I found that, sure enough, his SUV was as clean as the day he’d bought it. I backed out of his garage slowly, careful to not scratch the side-view mirrors. “You’re fine Jocie, you got it,” he said with confidence, and I felt secretly honored he was trusting me behind the wheel of his car.
In all of his 89 years, my father has never affixed a sticker to a car’s bumper. But I have.
It is not a shiny American flag, but a sticker from one of my favorite bookstores. It says, simply, READ, and serves nicely as a personal manifesto. In the ten years I’ve had my station wagon, the sticker, much like the car, has lost its former sheen. Several times, I’ve attempted to peel it away with my fingernails. My father was right: it’s impossible to get that sticker off.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Flickr
