LIFE FROM THE BACKSEAT OF GRANDMA’S CAR

by

STEPHANIE DRAY

I learned most of life's important lessons from the back seat of my grandmother's 1968 lime green Ford Fairlane. My grandmother was a first generation Italian-American and child of the depression who believed no task was so banal that the family could not enjoy it, together. Thus, even in weather prompting public service warnings about the dangers of leaving your pet in a sweltering car, my grandmother would stuff all four of her granddaughters into the back seat and take us around town on her errands.

According to its advertising copy, the Ford Fairlane was designed to provide the family with enough room to store the groceries and the kids while still maintaining fuel economy and savings. Grandma bought hers used and was determined to make it live up to its promise. The fact that it didn’t come with air-conditioning didn’t seem to bother her in the least.

It bothered us a lot. Trapped on vinyl seats that glued to the back of our thighs and added to our feeling of suffocation, we would thirstily beg for drinks. Grandma would always promise that we'd get a soda at the next stop. There, the four of us learned that very important Italian-American lesson—deprivation, or at least dehydration, builds character.

When I say the four of us, I mean myself, my sister, and my two cousins. We bickered and squabbled like hellcats. Even as children, we had very different well developed personalities, and they all clashed. We'd yell, scream, hair-pull, and generally torture one another with whatever was available, including bingo markers—which leave bright red indelible dots on your opponent’s face that are hard to explain at school.

But this kind of fighting was no deterrent to my grandmother. Seemingly immune to our back seat battles, she would tell us, "Blood is thicker than water!" Whether we could tolerate one another or not was irrelevant. The important thing was that we were together. We learned that family is a constant.

What was not a constant was the occupant of my grandmother's passenger seat. Some days, my great grandmother Angelina would join us. Born in 1903, she herded goats in Italy as a child, came to America with her widowed mother at age eleven, and married at age thirteen. She never learned to read or write, and only spoke English when it suited her—and even then, only in the most incoherent way.

We called her "Big Ma,” her unique interpretation of “Great Grandmother.” To us, it conjured up images of the mob to our delight and entertainment. She was “The Enforcer.” This was no tiny, frail, great grandmother. She was a large, strong, vigorous woman—the true matriarch of the family. If she was in the car, discipline reigned and we were in for a hell of a day.

Not only did she have the heaviest purse this side of the Atlantic Ocean, but she'd also use it to flatten us if we acted up. Trips with Big Ma always involved some lengthy wait at the bank or some other boring officious place. The only consolation to these trips was that Big Ma had a big heart, and the spirit of a kid. She’d press five-dollar bills into our hands and send us on adventures to steal salt and pepper shakers off of the tables at restaurants. We learned from her that no opportunity was ever too small to take advantage of.

Other times, the passenger seat would be filled by one of my grandmother's cousins or aunts. She seemed to have hundreds of them. Our guest for the day might be Aunt Ida, Aunt Elta, Aunt Audrey, or even Aunt Lucia. We always hoped for Aunt Lucia because she taught us how to make paper dolls. Whoever it was, we'd end up going to garage sales looking for deals. The four of us felt the waits with the aunts were interminable. We would trail behind my grandmother while she bargained over used junk, and came to feel that everything in life must somehow be negotiable.

When we got bored or whined, we were exiled back to the car. Once in the car, if we could rouse ourselves from the mind-numbing humidity of the back seat, the four of us would take whatever we could find and turn it into a toy. An old vinyl 45, positioned perfectly under the beating sun on the back dash of the car made a perfect bubbling tar pit for our toy animals to get trapped in. Plus, the look on grandma’s face when she saw that black plastic melted on her car was really priceless.

When we tired of tinkering with the ashtrays and our pretend toys, I would start weaving stories for my cousins. I’m fairly certain I owe my writing career to my grandmother; it was creativity born of necessity. We learned the importance of entertaining ourselves, and to respect that it was no one else’s job to bring us happiness or purpose.

To this day, I’m not sure whether our working mothers were grateful for my grandmother taking us off their hands during those long summer days, or if they were appalled at what she was doing to our little impressionable minds. By the time the sun started to set, our parents would have gathered at grandma’s house to pick us up. But before going home to be whisked off by our parents, there was always one last stop. We always had to stop at the store for a few groceries.

There were two really good things about this last stop of the day. First, the store was almost always air-conditioned. Second, if we pleaded enough, grandma would inevitably buy us something we wanted. But “a few groceries” never really meant a few. If potatoes were on sale, she’d buy ten pounds. More accurately, she’d have to buy ten pounds for herself, ten pounds for my mother and ten pounds for Aunt Diane. By the time we left the store, the buggy was always filled to the brim. We came to understand the importance of providing generously for those you have at your table.

It’s not a wonder that none of the four of us were very good with math. If my grandmother said to give her “one minute” to talk to a friend she bumped into at the grocery store, we knew that could mean anywhere from five minutes to an hour. If she said she’d be somewhere at five, you could expect her to arrive at six. If you asked for “a little more” of something at the dinner table, you got a full plate. We learned Italian Math: Rigid numbers and timetables have no place in a richly lived life.

Eventually, grandma sold that Ford Fairlane. By that time, she’d driven it into the ground and we were all too big to fit into the back seat together anyhow. We were growing up and living our own lives. We inevitably grew apart, as our education and careers sent us off to different cities and different states. Our childhood lessons seemed distant, and as if perhaps we’d outgrown them. We hadn’t.

Big Ma died in October of 1998. The four of us returned home from various places for the funeral. After the wake we somehow ended up in a car together again. It had been years since we’d been together like that. At first it was awkward as we fumbled for our new adult roles. Our mission was to go to the store to pick up “a few groceries” for the family.

There was no reason for all four of us to go, but for some reason, it just felt right for us to do so. And once in the store, we couldn’t stop the memories and the bonds from cementing us into combined purpose. Our efforts manifested the abundance in our hearts—we didn’t leave until the buggy was heaping full. We knew no other way.