Backing Up Your Bumper Sticker

            I’ve long had an aversion to any and all bumper stickers, and for several reasons.

            For one thing, they’re ugly and mess up your car.  For another, I really don’t feel the need to proclaim anything about myself to strangers on the highway.  Considering my fondness for acceleration—not to mention the borderline-juvenile glee with which I’ve been known to dispatch slower cars ahead of me—I figure I don’t need anything making me more memorable.

            Recently, however, I’ve had to reexamine this disdain for stickers.  Why?  Because my church has been handing them out.  It’s a discreet little window sticker—innocuous white letters stating “Central Christian Church” on a clear background.  I see them all over the place, and every time I do I think, “Hey, friend!  I go there, too!”  In the middle of a busy commute or a hectic workday, it’s nice to look over and see a fellow church member in the next lane.

But here’s the rub: I’m chicken to put the sticker in my window on account of how I drive.

I mean, it’d be bad enough having people think nasty things about my employer, my alma mater or my political party as they’re watching the back end of my car zoom away, but my church?  Don’t get me wrong—I don’t think I’m a jerk on the road.  I try to be considerate to everyone.  But I know darned well that there are times when my, um . . . exuberance . . . might leave a bad impression.  Just sayin’.  And at such times, it would just seem weird to communicate, in essence, “Hey!  If you enjoyed having your doors blown off just now, come to church Sunday and meet more people like me!”

This all resurfaced just yesterday when a coworker—a good Catholic and a first-rate husband and father—shared a story about his aggravating drive to work.  It seems he’d been in the left lane of the freeway in his BMW 3-series when a man slightly ahead and to his right changed lanes and got right in front of him . . . and slowed down.  Adding injury to irritation, this inconsiderate rolling roadblock then turned on his windshield washers, which missed his windshield entirely and arced right over his roof, dousing my coworker’s clean car.

When the opportunity presented itself, my friend passed his assailant and returned fire.  (Question: Are anyone’s windshield washers aimed right?)  This game of lane-change leapfrog continued when the slow guy—who now was laughing and visibly enjoying himself—suddenly found his accelerator, passed my friend and hosed him down a second time.

No word on whether either car sported a bumper sticker, but wouldn’t the whole thing have been funnier if there’d been a “WWJD” or “My child was student of the week” sticker involved?

            Lots has been written about how much braver some folks are in their cars than in their own skin.  Funny what two tons of metal, plastic and glass will do for the psyche, isn’t it?  Funny, too, how there’s often an inverse relationship between the braggadocio of the vehicle and the character of the person behind the wheel.  Reminds me of that saying about suddenly acquired wealth: “If you’re a jerk when you’re poor, you’ll be a bigger jerk with money.”   Bottom line, we’ll do things bumper to bumper that we’d never dream of doing face to face.  It’s a shame, really, and it’s something my conscience reminds me of every time I express my irritation on the expressway.

            After he’d told his tale, my co-worker and I had a laugh plotting various ways he could get revenge on his freeway attacker if he ever encountered him again.  Eventually, though, I just shook my head and advised him to let it go and be the bigger man.  To his credit, he did and he was.

Hm.  Wonder if my church has any more of those stickers?

Do What You Love

                I freely confess that I’m kind of a whack-job when it comes to washing my car.  There is The Way, and then there are all the other ways.

                Which are wrong.

                I honestly believe that the two scariest things in life are A) having a car full of kids park next to you, and B) allowing someone else to wash your car.

                You heard me right: Nobody but nobody washes my car but me.  I have never, ever been to a car wash.  Ever.  Those high school kids at the corner gas station washing cars to raise money for band?  Ha!  As if.  Go flail your arms at some other sucker.

                I thought my philosophy on this subject was clear to everyone, especially my family.  Which is why I was thunderstruck when my 13-year-old, Jake, asked if he could wash my car yesterday.

                How do you answer the unanswerable?  I was in the front yard working on the lawn when Jake asked.  As the question lingered in the air and I stood there, speechless, I thought, Shoot, why not ask if you can give me a haircut with a hacksaw?

                Now, to fully appreciate the irony of Jake’s question, I have to back up a step.  While this was going on, see, my nine-year-old, Nicholas, was across the street applying white paint to the trunks of my neighbor Wes’s citrus trees.  It was a job Wes had asked Jake to do, but not even the promise of twenty dollars could coax Jake into doing it.  He had done this job once before, and it had two fatal counts against it:  First, it took place in the morning—a time of day to which Jake reacts as though he were a vampire; and second, it was work.  I had assumed my whole morning was going to consist of puttering around in the yard while keeping an eye on Nick.  And now, this?

                “Jake, no,” I said, simply.

                “Why not?” he asked.

                “Because I have a certain way I do it,” I answered, in a tone I hoped would convey, That is just about the stupidest thing you ever asked me.

                But Jake persisted.  “Well, then can I clean the inside with that spray?” he asked.  And even as he posed the question, a sliver of regret stabbed me.  Jake was showing an interest in cars, and I was squashing it.  Still, couldn’t he learn to clean a car on . . . oh, I don’t know . . . a donor car?  My wife’s car?  Something experimental?

                I squelched my natural inclination to say “no” to everything and reminded myself that I’m not nearly as attached to my car’s interior as to its paint.  Spritzing the dash and seats with interior detailer and drying it off with a microfiber towel seemed harmless enough, so I gave Jake my blessing, breathed a silent prayer and returned to my lawn, counting on the drone of the lawnmower motor to drown out my anxiety.

                I emptied the grass bag several times, and each time I passed the open garage door I glanced inside.  Seeing one or the other car doors open every time I walked by, I was amazed at how long Jake stuck to the job.  It may have been the longest he's ever stuck to anything, come to think of it.

                Finally, I heard him calling out to me.  “Dad, come see.”

                I took a breath and went to look.

                There was Jake, in the back seat, having wiped down every leather, plastic or vinyl surface in the car.   The dash was clean, the instrument panel was clean, the seats were clean . . . all of it.  “Oh, and look,” Jake said.  “I even got all the dirt off the pedals.”  I looked: Brake, clutch and accelerator were aluminum-colored jewels.  There was no dirt or dust anywhere.

                And nothing was broken.

                When I got in my car this morning to drive to church and my butt squeaked in my squeaky-clean seat and my feet kept slipping off of my oh-so-clean pedals, I realized something: Jake doesn’t have a problem with work.  He’d spent an hour cleaning the interior of my car, and he’d made no money doing it.  He just needed the same thing we all need: Motivation.

                "Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life," goes the saying.  Well, it’s fine with me if cars are what Jake loves.  They’re a good place to start.

By Extension

            There are lots of memorable scenes in the 1986 James Cameron movie Aliens, but the one I most enjoy is where Sigourney Weaver dons that mechanized “human forklift” suit and fights the alien.  Suddenly, our vulnerable, 130-pound, flesh-and-blood heroine transforms into a menacing ton or so of steel, hydraulics and pincers that allows her exterior, at long last, to match the kick-butt attitude she’s had all along.

            What’s engaging about that scene, I think, is that it so wonderfully gratifies the inner superhero in all of us—the part that watches a gliding hawk as it banks and swoops and thinks I want to do that, or that sees a cheetah on a nature show, legs all a-blur as it rockets over the savannah, and yearns to experience that kind of personal speed.  When Weaver’s in that suit, you’re like, OH yeah—THAT’S what I’m talkin’ about!

Does that happen a lot to you?  It surely does to me.  On some level, in fact, it’s almost like I believe that I really ought to be able to do these kinds of things; that, in fact, there’s something gone awry somewhere, because the longing is so potent that it’s as though I once upon a time had these abilities, only they’ve somehow been misplaced. 

And I want them back.

It’s a sensation I suspect Mr. Cameron understands, as he followed up that Aliens scene years later with an entire movie—Avatar—devoted to the fantasy of inhabiting a bigger, stronger, faster body that can do things your own body just can’t—that’s you, only more.

When people ask why I like cars so much, I sometimes try to explain this whole car-as-an-extension-of-self thing—typically with limited success.  And I get that.  It’s easier to stuff me into the tried-and-true “speed freak” or “poseur” pigeonholes than to really think about it.  And unfortunately for people like me, there’s a stigmatizing element out there—an element with more money than either sense or taste—that buys the kinds of cars I love in a vain quest to appropriate for themselves qualities they will never, ever personally possess.  Those folks make it tough for true believers.

To a believer, a car’s beauty is something you enjoy during a Saturday morning wash and wax, not when you hop out curbside at a swank, crowded restaurant and toss the keys to a valet.  To a believer, a well-executed heel-and-toe downshift as you turn left from one empty, pre-sunrise boulevard onto another is better than a hundred showy burnouts.  It’s about the communion you feel with the machine; how the two of you, together, do and feel and accomplish more than either of you could alone.   As you wait for the car, the car waits for you.

As my 13-year-old packs on pounds and inches and muscle seemingly overnight, gaining heretofore unimagined sway over the physical world, I can tell he’s already looking at my car and wondering, what would it be like to have . . . even more?  When I was washing my car the other day, in fact, Jake stood to the side begging repeatedly, “Dad, let me pull the car into the garage.  Just into the garaaaaage.  C’mon, pleeeeaze?”  Naturally, I refused.  The last such venture—in my wife’s car, an automatic—resulted in one rocking jolt forward and another rocking jolt backward.  I took the keys and ended that excursion before my wife’s SUV became our new coffee table.

My son’s day will come.  But as we all learned from Spiderman, with great power comes great responsibility.  The way I figure it, Jake’s busy enough right now figuring out what to do with hands, feet and shoulders that he’s still growing into.  The forklift suit can wait.  But once he gets it, it’ll be a high-performance driving school for both of us.  I’d like him to become a believer.