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My favorite place in the world was the backseat of my Dad's car--behind the backseat actually, a little nook above the warm engine. Those little VWs purr and growl like animals. I'd sleep atop the tartan blanket he kept there, it may have been a horse blanket I don't know. For some reason when I think of my Dad I think of plaid. I'd lie back there, look at the moon and stars, the shadows of the trees. Wake briefly across his shoulder, then settled in my huge adult-sized bed that my mom was so shrewd in buying for me just after I left the crib. "He'll have it his whole life. Solid oak!"
I can't imagine myself so small, smaller and younger than my son now, that I'd fit there in that little car's space to sleep. It was a different time, of course. The air was different, the stars. People were taller, more glamorous and handsome. And soon it will be a different time than now.
After kindergarten, at pickup, I was to ride with him to Mt. Airy, to my grandmother's, on an errand. Three hours round trip. My friend David was bragging about his new blue space gun, the kind that shot the plastic-colored disks--they'd fly twenty feet, spinning and curving. I can see them now, seemingly slow and effortless, yet spinning through the air, rounding the corner of the long hallway at David's, one after another. They were beautiful. We never grew tired of them as evening came. David's mom shut us in the back of the house as it got dark; I could hear low voices; the telephone rang several times, and there were headlights in the driveway.
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