Here in my car
I feel safest of all
I can lock all my doors
It's the only way to live
In cars
Here in my car
I can only receive
I can listen to you
It keeps me stable for days
In cars
Here in my car
Where the image breaks down
Will you visit me please?
If I open my door
In cars (Gary Numan)
The lyrics to the classic 1980's song Cars by Gary Numan could have been written for my father. My father loved cars. And I do believe that like the first words of the song, my father felt safest of all in cars. My father had MANY cars over the years. And I do mean MANY. We never knew what to expect when we looked out to the driveway in front of our house when we were growing up. On any given day there could be a new car sitting unannounced in the driveway.
I have no idea how much money my father paid in car loans over the years. He rarely took the time to pay off a car loan before trading the car in for a newer model. The local car dealership knew him by name. The salesmen would practically trip over each other trying to get out to the lot when they would see him drive up. They knew the minute he drove up a commission was in their immediate future. He loved the challenge of the trade and working out the deal never realizing that he was being used unfairly by the dealership.
One of the saddest things my sister and I ever had to do was to take the car keys away from our aging father. In his later years he developed alzheimer's disease and it was unsafe for him to continue driving. We both knew we would never be able to get him to give up his car, so we had to work with his doctor's to take away his keys. We took him to the Veteran's Hospital where he was being treated and had the doctor ask for his keys. At first he was in tears, then he became very angry. He told the doctor and the nurses to just go ahead and kill him. They had taken his life from him. We brought him back home from the doctors visit and his car was sitting in the driveway. He got out of the car we were driving and walked over to his car and touched it lovingly. We watched as he walked around and around the car touching it in disbelief. I know it was all but impossible for us to both hold back our tears that afternoon.
Last October Mark and I took a trip to Los Angeles to visit a high school of Mark's named Ralph. Ralph's husband John collects die cast car models and has walls of them on display in his house. The minute I saw them I thought of Dad and all of the cars he owned. Many of them were represented on the wall at Ralph and John's. I could almost see my father there in the house, walking along the wall looking at the cars and touching each one remembering all of the ones he had owned.
My father passed away many years ago now. But he is still around in many ways. Looking at the cars on the wall that day I could almost hear him saying those last lines in the lyric of the song:
Here in my car
Where the image breaks down
Will you visit me please?
If I open my door
In cars
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