Wheels for All Occasions

and dad driving blind

“Mom.”

Silence.

“Mom.”

Silence.

“Mom! Put down the phone and look out the window.”

She looked up, blinking.

“Oh, wow, it’s beautiful!
(pause)

“Can you turn the music back up?”

Then she went back to her phone, although now at least she was taking pictures out the window.

There was something both hilarious and unsettling about this. It wasn’t just the weird sensation of role reversal – though no one has ever told me to put down any viewing material in a car, because I get carsick. (I know, me and the dog. But at least one of us has never puked all over the floor.) It had suddenly occurred to me that it was probably the first time in more than 50 years that mom had been able to sit in the passenger seat or put her feet up on the bed in the back while someone else drove.

Dad was legally blind, though you wouldn’t have been able to tell if you didn’t know him well, since he moved through the world as though he could see it clearly. He acted as though it didn’t particularly bother him, but it did. He was resigned to working with 10 percent vision, but I think it always ate at him that he couldn’t see any color at all.

Still, dad made it look easy. He loved to tell the story of the time he was at a restaurant with several co-workers when a woman came in to tell them she had gotten her car stuck on the shoulder of the steep driveway and didn’t know how to fix the problem. Seeing that dad was the only man in the group she handed him her keys and asked if he could move the car for her. (I know. It was a different time.)

Dad walked out to assess the situation. Fortunately it was dusk and the sides of the road were well-marked, because he got into the car, started it up and slowly backed it down to the bottom of the hill and onto the road. When he went back inside to the sound of applause and general hilarity, someone asked, “Ron, did you tell that woman you’re blind?” He just grinned and said, “I can still tell the difference between the dark tarmac on the inside of the white lines and the light gravel on the outside of them.”

So. Mom always drove. She had driven family around in everything from a Mustang convertible with doors that swung open every time she took a corner at speed, to a 1957 Triumph TR3, to a VW camper van, to a 38-foot Winnebago. There was also a motorcycle that they finally sold because it was bigger than she was, and a souped-up, highway-legal scooter that had a sidecar for dad. The two-wheelers were strictly commuter vehicles, though. The sight of them helmeted, goggled and barreling down the freeway, mom driving and dad in the sidecar holding a battered suitcase in his lap, was enough to make more than one unsuspecting commuter wonder if they might be hallucinating.

(On a side note, you may think the TR3 was basically a tiny two-seater with what could generously be referred to as an excuse for a bench in the back, but I can tell you from experience that it’s fully capable of transporting two adults, four children and an oversize dog all at the same time. However, I’d advise against trying it for yourself. That was also a different time.)

Whenever anyone in the family needed to go anywhere, mom drove. And this was a family that, depending on the year, included as many as ten foster kids with special needs in addition to my parents’ two biological kids and our adopted brother.

There were a lot of appointments.

After 50 years of playing family chauffeur, mom finally decided she was done and sold her last vehicle. Now here we were, barreling down the highway, and she was thoroughly enjoying herself as a passenger.

I watched her poking at the phone again, laughed, and let her be. What the hell. She could play with the phone all day if she wanted to.