In the early fifties my father bought a new car every year. He was doing well in business, building a new house for us, and playing golf, not all that successfully, at the local country club. The cars were usually Cadillacs. This was the time when a “Caddy” really was a luxury car, with shiny chrome bumpers, paint that looked a mile deep, and a fragrant genuine leather interior. I was about six years old, and the back seat was my domain. Father driving, Mother enjoying the ride, and me, just me, in the back seat.
We were living in New Jersey, in a big old house, waiting for that new house to be finished, and we took lots of car trips. With gas selling for about twenty-five cents per gallon, this was cost-effective entertainment. We went to the Jersey Shore where my mother grew up. We went to visit my grandmother in New York City. We went to see friends in Clifton, Farmington, and any number of other small industrial towns trying to pass themselves off as suburbs. We would start out early, make a day of it, and often we would return quite late, the lights of the factories and the oil refineries and the chemical plants giving the landscape, through the smoke and the mist, an undeserved ethereal look.
I don’t think that I ever stayed awake for an entire ride home. Maybe it was my age, or the lateness of the hour, or maybe it was the gentle, bosomy luxury of the back seat. No matter what I did to try and stay awake, the softness of the upholstery and the rhythm of the tires beating cadence over the seams in the roadbed would always cause me to drift off into wonderful dreams…dreams of puppies and of holidays and of good things to eat.
There was a small bridge not far from my house, or rather my parents’ house, although I always thought of it as mine. The bridge was nothing more than a tiny hyphen on the long road home. It crossed what must once have been a narrow creek, but was now nothing more than a muddy, weedy ditch, punctuated by derelict tires and rusted-out appliances. It was an old bridge. The sides were the corroded spiderweb steel of a railway trestle, only in miniature. The floor of the bridge was made of old, thick, weathered, gray wooden planks, and some of them were loose.
I had the same graphic fears as every child. I could describe the monsters in my closet in excruciating detail. I knew with crystal clarity why I must never let a hand or a foot dangle off the bed. And in my child’s mind, I could see the car, with me in the back seat, plummeting through the loose boards into the ditch. But that fear was quickly banished by another, stronger feeling. Those loose boards made a distinctive sound as the car rolled over them, a sound so subtle as to defy accurate description. My pediatrician once tried to calm me down (prior to a shot, I think) by encouraging me to listen to my own heart through his stethoscope. That’s as close as I can come to a description of the sound of those loose boards. I have few early memories as rich and fully realized as my memories of being awakened by those boards, their heartsound telling my now-half-awake self that it was late, and I was tired, and we were nearly home.
And soon, my father’s business burned down, and we moved to Florida, and I went to school, and my father died, and I suddenly became old, and although now I’m too tall to stretch out in the back seat, and although now I do the driving, and although now I always stay awake until the end of the trip, I would give most anything to hear the heartsound of that bridge just once again, reminding me that it is late, and I am tired, and I am nearly home.
