car talk
for a girl whose grandfather was a Ford dealer for more than 50 years, i should think more about cars. but i don't. a car to me has always been transportation, surely, but a means to and end? a status symbol? a love? not so much. and i have not ever really thought much about the car in story — like some people might write about the trans am they saved up for and drove as a teenager or the '65 mustang they painstakingly restored.
a car gets me down the road and home again and i always feel pretty blessed about that. but i don't often think otherwise about the meaning of the box with pistons and throttle, brakes (unless they don't work) or gas (unless i am out of it), and though i should think of the people who created this great machine that changed the world as we know it, i don't.
or at least i didn't.
until i go a new(er) car. two weeks ago.
i have had my fair share of cars, though there is not one picture of any of them. the first, a pale blue maverick i shared with my sister. no ac, no power anything: brakes, steering or windows. a static-y AM radio. my grandfather didn't trust any newfangled gadgets like FM or AC, and though more than once my mother chose those options on family cars, her new drive often showed up in his shop without them.
the Maverick took me many places, but i remember most driving down the back roads, windows down, headed to the beach for the very first time by myself. i think i was 16.
then there was the mustang — a blue 1975 4-speed my father let me pick out, not at all the collector's item as the '65 — that car moved with me to Carolina, to my first job in journalism. when my landlord found out i had a cat in my apartment, i threw her into a suitcase and into the back seat of the mustang and drove her home to my mother.
together the mustang and I moved all the way down to Georgia and into the-rest-of-my-life. we traded it for a harsh two-toned brown escort with an orange stripe down its side, a little car more suitable to carry the baby home from the hospital than the 4-speed upstart. that brown car was the only car i ever really hated.
then came mom cars. the wagons — a burgundy dodge and a white chevrolet, the dodge van with the fake wood on the side. the expedition that made me nauseous when i drove it out of the dealer lot it cost so much. then the jeep that took my children to college, the one i drove all around eastern North Carolina schlepping my first book.
and then the last car — a used lexus suv. daddy thought we were living beyond our raising buying a luxury car — even though by the time it joined the family it was already four years old.
but it's this car that for some reason got me to thinking about the story of it. and the stories of all the other cars in my life.
people write whole
. (my friend Jane has written a slew of short stories and every one of them features a car.) one of the only twilight zones of my memory was about a car that talked back to its driver (imagine that!). what about 'my mother the car', apparently labeled the
second-worst sitcom of all time
and who can forget Car 54 Where Are You?
i don't write about cars or name them or think about them or tell stories about them, really. but then we found a new car, and before we were headed to the dealer to pick it up, i found myself thinking about all the places the old one had taken me.
100,000 miles. that's how many we trekked together. and as i thought about those miles i actually took a picture of the odometer, and thought, Lord, you are going crazier in tiny increments every day. a few minutes later, we ticked across the 114,000 mark, and it felt like a milestone.
when my husband said he had someone coming to look at the car, i went crazier still. found myself pulling out a note card and writing — as if i were the car itself — to the faceless new owners to tell them what the car had meant to me. seriously.
I may look a little worn around the edges, the car wrote. I am 11 after all, (is that 33 in car years?) but i have been good to my family...
the buyer didn't show, and i tucked the car's carefully scripted letter in a safe place to wait for one who did.
100,000 miles.
to the gazebo where the Pea got engaged and to her wedding, with her gown draped across our laps. to the vet with the dog, when we had to put her down, then home with her ashes. to my son's college graduation. to his first house, the back filled with new house things from Target. to my niece's house to meet her new baby.
to my father's hospital bed too many times, the car doors and windows framing winter as it changed to spring, the steering wheel absorbing my many tears along the way.
that car took me away from my childhood home for the last time and to my mother's new house. to our favorite beach and our friends' favorite mountain respite. to the airport with the dog and to church and to the grocery store and back again on hundreds of regular days. we didn't cover a lot of the map, my old car and me, but we traveled far.
when we sold her last week, (did i really call her HER?) i forgot to put the note in the glove compartment, which is probably a good thing. no reason for the new owners to worry that they bought crazy along with a pretty good old car.
now i'm finally back in blue again. though it's three years old, my new drive still smells like the back of my Bigdaddy's neck ('new car' was his cologne of choice), and has two — TWO — manuals, a 300-pager for the sound system alone.
and this: it doesn't even have a key! what in the world would my grandfather say to that?
and so we're back on the road. i can't say where my new blue car will take me, but i know somewhere along the way, that's where the story will be.
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
we'll always have paris (hold on, it's a long one)
my high school french teacher was an eager young woman who ran around the room pointing at things, shouting 'kes kur say?'
we played along, shouting back at her in our best eastern north carolina accents that i'm sure a frenchman would have found appalling.
when she moved on and the new teacher came — a family friend i'd known all my life — he spoke 'real french,' the guttural kind, introduced us to Paris Match and actually expected us to read it, and taught us how to sing carols in french. my last year, i opted out, having enough credits to get me to college, not wanting to disappoint him with my poor pronunciation. (i think i disappointed him more for not taking his class, and that year i would not land a role in the senior play, which he directed. i was not even picked to be a stage hand.)
in college, i took french again, could do a pretty decent translation, though in my third year, when i showed up to class and couldn't understand a word of what was spoken, i opted for calculus. (the outcome is an entirely different story that involved begging during the final exam...) back in those days, france was this place so far away from my life that i never imagined going there. who would want to visit a place where you couldn't speak the language?
wouldn't you know though, that 25 years ago, my husband found himself working for a French company. and he would visit a dozen times —even spent our 15th wedding anniversary in Paris without me— but never once asked me to tag along. he spoke a little spanish but no french, and you would think he would have liked a helpmate who still knew how to conjugate a couple of verbs. but no. weary, he'd drag himself in from the flight back saying: you'd hate Paris. the people smell. it's just 'so French.'
but by then i had stretched myself beyond the boundaries of my high school life enough to know i would like to at least make that determination myself.
i eventually did visit Paris, traveling with him on a couple of trips, staying in a small hotel just off the
with a dynamic view of the arch d'triomphe. i found out that i did love paris, smelly citizens et al, and those two trips are among my favorite memories. i promised myself that i'd return to the city of lights one day, trying to figure just how to afford it.
one day came a few weeks ago, when i left my husband to tend to the dog and boarded plane for a a week in my favorite city, this time with the girls.
we rented an apartment in the 9th arrondissement — Anne Boone, my best friend since 8th grade and two of her friends, who became mine in short order. and for a week, we lived like i imagine a lot of parisians do — beds low to the floor, small furniture, baguettes, cheese and jam for breakfast, and walking. lots of walking.
we timed our trip around a special event — the premier of an Agnes De Mille ballet produced by the
, the oldest ballet company in the world. Anne Boone's friend Andy is the executive director of
, and the POB would be staging de Mille's
, a ballet about Lizzy Borden, of all people. we were set to attend on opening night at the
, the home of the POB. (Agnes' brilliance of course gave us Oklahoma!, Paint Your Wagon, Carousel and many others in iconic American theatre.)
a week before the trip, i picked up a novel i'd read about: three sisters who danced with the POB in the late 19th century. i knew nothing about the book, but thought it would serve as a worthy companion on the flight. once settled, i pulled it out of my carry-on, and at the same time Anne Boone revealed her book —
— the exact one i had chosen. as great friends, this happens to us from time to time.
the book would prove the perfect backdrop for our experience, as it is the fictionalized story of three real sisters who danced in the late 19th century with the POB. they lived in the very area where we stayed, and so as we walked the streets of paris, i began to recognize places mentioned and could picture them there.
my favorite museum in the world (so far) is the
. home of the great impressionists, you will find degas, monet, manet, renoir, cezanne and more. degas is famous for among many things, his depiction of the reality of parisian ballerinas at work. he used to hang out at the Opera Garnier and sketch the girls dancing there, trying to capture their pain and fatigue. the model for the
La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze An
is Marie, one of the sisters in the novel.
oh, how i love a good book, and this is great one, one that took me inside the POB, behind the scenes in a way i could not have imagined had i not read it. when Andy took us to the dress rehearsal for the de Mille ballet, we entered from the back door of the opera house and i could see where Marie might have entered herself. i saw the fatigue on the ballerina's faces — just as Degas did — though their beauty on stage hides it well.
chagall ceiling
on opening night, i wrapped myself in a fringed silk shawl that had been my great-grandmother's and sat below a painting of Chagall. as the ballet played itself out before me, i imagined the thousands of people who had sat in my seat (or at least the area of my seat) in its 150-year history. the stories that had been told there. the magic that people had experienced there. (i didn't even mention that this is the setting of the Phantom of the Opera, and the box he is said to inhabit is high above the stage, to the left.)
the day before the ballet, we spent an afternoon with a guide at the Musee d'orsay, and for the second time in my life i looked at the face of la petite danseuse. on this visit, she was real to me, and i found myself wanting to sit with her for awhile, and take her in, but the crowds would not allow it.
+++
in our week in paris, we found ourselves trying to speak more french. to be understood, and the challenge was refreshing. we found ourselves reading signs in the metro, saying je voudrais as we asked for our meals, saying much more than merci when someone gave us what we asked.
i think back almost 40 years ago to that first 'kes kur say?' (
qu'est-ce que c'est?)
what is it? what was it about this place i never imagined visiting but now can't imagine not? hope to go again before too long, just to experience it again.
qu'est-ce que c'est?
the best answer is this:
allez la-bas et vous comprendrez
ps: i took a few pics (400 or so) and here are a few.
stumbling in on a ballet practice
city of lights
artists Place du Tertre
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.