turtle shells and suffocation

We were walking home from the plastic green playground at our neighorhood school last night. It was a cloudy cool perfect night to be pushing our now-too-heavy-to-push stroller through the streets of suburbia…

And I noticed that someone was sitting in her parked car in her driveway.

I cycled through the possibilities: she’s a stalker. She’s crying because she doesn’t want to go in. She’s crying because she’ll never go back in again. She’s numb and exhausted and can’t believe that her life has been reduced to sitting here. In this car. In this driveway.

And I realized that this image -- A person sitting in a parked car -- has a powerful iconicity.

Dr. Don Enholm used to tell us in Graduate Seminars On Classical Rhetorical Theory about his weekends. His wife perused antique malls all over the state of Ohio while he sat alone in the car reading the latest treatise on the Nuremburg Trials. Sometimes when I found myself sitting in a parking lot, waiting, I wondered what it would be like for your life to eventually simmer down to a quiet read in an obscure back parking lot.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman just sat through most of love liza in his car while I watched it last week.

Wasn’t it Julieanne Moore's character who was sitting in her car singing in Magnolia?

I tell my kids that the “evil robots, programmed to destroy us” from Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (one of their all-time favorites songs / albums) are probably cars. Cars are robots I tell them. And I hate car culture especially as I snake North on Cleveland Avenue for three miles of strip malls, car mechanics and fast food on the way home every day from work.

But I also get what it is to just feel okay about sitting. Staying. For a while at least…in your car.

When we take long trips with the fam in (the cleverly named) “Minnie” the minivan, we call it our “Shell.” And I like that metaphor for how cars offer us a bit of shelter. We need it sometimes, don’t we? Our human skin is so soft? A bit of armour in a weary driveway or parking lot or metered spot is like a quiet breath of (slightly polluted) air.

Once -- before kids got kidnapped in Malls and before stalkers hid under the cars of wary shoppers in urban mythic parking lots -- my mom would leave eleven-year-old me and my two brothers in the car, sitting in the parking lots of malls.

On one of these days, I finally had had enough of waiting. My two year old brother was crying and whining so I buckled him into the stroller and the three of us made our way carefully into Sears. We were all crying or red eyed by the time we were inside and we announced to a store clerk that we had lost our mother.

But I think we had just lost our sense of being. People can only sit in parked cars for so long. No matter how much we need them to survive

May all of your parked cars be purged of suffocation and fill you back up with –

Peace~