The first
car in my memory was a 1950 Chevrolet. It was black. In front of the regular
windows on the driver’s side and passenger’s side were triangular windows (wing vents) that
could be turned in such a way as to force a blast of wind against the face.
That breeze felt so good on a hot day! The windshield was in two halves joined
by a thin metal connector moulding. As a child, I always experienced motion
sickness, which was far worse if I were in the back seat. Even when I was lucky
enough to sit in front, my eyes would focus first on the metal moulding then on
the distant view then on the connector again, until I was well on my way toward
nausea!
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| My Mother, My Brother, and the 1950 Chevrolet |
My parents
drove differently. My father was far-sighted and enjoyed perusing fellow
farmers’ fields to his left. Meanwhile, he slowly veered the car to the right
until the right wheels were off the road and onto the berm. Miraculously, he
never lost control of the vehicle but gradually brought it back onto the
pavement, only to repeat the experiment immediately. My mother, meanwhile,
played with the throttle. Her small foot, usually wearing a flip-flop in
summer, wore out the gas pedal by depressing it and lifting up right away,
depressing it and lifting up right away. The car lurched forward and hesitated,
lurched forward and hesitated accordingly. To ride with my father at the
steering wheel was less nauseating but more frightening.
One day in
the good old summertime, I was riding with my mother at the wheel. Down went
the gas pedal, up it went, down it went again, back up it came, and so on. I
was a youngster still short enough to stand on the front seat. I was near the passenger
door and was trying to keep my balance while the car briefly gained speed and
momentarily slowed, gained and slowed, gained and slowed. I remember being
slightly dizzy. I could smell my mother’s new permanent. (She had to have curls
in her straight hair!) We were lurching and hesitating along a gravel road
lined by tall corn on our right. We came to an intersection with another gravel
road. My mother obeyed the stop sign, but the corn was planted so close to the
road that she could not see around it. She entered the intersection only to
discover that a road grader had almost entered the intersection from the right.
The big machine had been hidden behind the corn. My mother slammed on the
brakes, and the road grader just missed the front bumper!
The sudden
braking made me lose my balance. My mouth struck the hard metal dashboard. I
lost both of my upper baby teeth in the front. My mother yelled, “Why don’t you
ever stand close enough to where I can grab you?”
A long time
after the incident, when my two permanent teeth came in, they were separated by
a gap, or diastema. Whether I liked it or not, the diastema became a trademark.
I still have it, although the gap has lessened over the years. Terry–Thomas was
a popular British comic film actor in American movies of the 1960s. I always
enjoyed his performances because, like me, he had a pronounced diastema.
I am old
enough to be mindful that young people today have such perfect teeth! When I
was growing up, children lacked such gloriously white, exactly spaced teeth,
the result of costly orthodontics. (Incidentally, antibiotics given for ear
infections, from which I frequently suffered, turned children’s teeth yellow.) Visiting
an orthodontist was just becoming an option for rural kids back then. My parents
took me to one in Lafayette, Indiana, but, when they learned how expensive it
would be to close the diastema in my front teeth, they asked me if I really
wanted to have my incisors properly aligned. I hated dentists. With vast
relief, I said that I would just as soon avoid going to the orthodontist. Also
relieved, my parents did not have to pay the thousand dollars to close the gap
in my teeth.
Whenever I
brush my teeth, I recall the dashboard of that 1950 Chevrolet.
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