Undone by the Tow Truck

When I was six-years-old, my hair was still strawberry blonde, and long enough to get caught in my belt loops. It swayed when I walked, and tangled in everything, especially itself. My mother trimmed my blunt bangs every other week, but, other than that, I never really saw a hair stylist. My hair cycled through these three stages: long, short, and bangs. Sometimes it was more like a Venn diagram, alternating between bangs and no bangs. I consider the bangs my low points in life. Not necessarily because anything momentous happened, but because they made my already-round-face look even more like an infant. I got bangs when I was too young to walk until I was six, then again at ten, thirteen, sixteen, and almost when I turned twenty-one.

I had this idea in my head that, by the time I was an adult, my baby cheeks would thin into cheekbones, I’d be a smokin’ hot ten, and I’d be an author. I stared into the mirror for lengths of time trying to picture myself older. As if I was trying to figure out the silhouette of the next Pokémon evolution: I couldn’t quite see it. I couldn’t quite see it until the day my father donated our minivan.

As one of four children of my parents, the navy blue minivan took its toll of beatings over the years. Roughly over a decade, we drove her from Maryland to Florida, Pennsylvania to Kentucky, Philly to Pittsburgh, York to Indiana, Pennsylvania to South Carolina almost every year. Needless to say, she earned her miles. This minivan took me to college, took my younger sister to college, moved my older brother to Kentucky; its first trip was to Walt Disney World, Florida.

Before the navy blue beast, we had an older version of the same Ram car, a gold minivan. My parents would play a Beatles CD, and we’d all sing along to “Yellow Submarine,” like we were singing about our car. My father’s parents, who lived down the street from us, bought the blue minivan to tote their seven grandkids around. Specifically, they bought it for the DVD player. That’s exactly why my parents wanted to buy it off my grandparents before our fourteen-hour drive south. I was eight at the time, my older brother was thirteen, my sister was six, and my younger brother was no more than four; my parents needed to keep us occupied and quiet for fourteen hours.

So that was the minivan’s first trip with us; its last trip was twelve years later. At the time, the minivan hadn’t been moved in months. She sat in the loose gravel of our expanded driveway, under a pine tree, and collected dollops of sap while she waited for someone to take her out. Before our yearly vacation, my father took her to get inspected and tuned up. Our mechanic/family friend told us that, even though the check engine light was on, she was fine to take to South Carolina, so long as we remembered to change the oil before we left. The sensor was shot and faulty, and it said there was less oil than there actually was. My father did not change the oil when we got to South Carolina. By the time we got back to our home in southern Pennsylvania, the engine died: like dead-dead, not fixable, ka-poot, done-zo, dead.

The navy blue minivan, with all its dents and scratches, sat in its spot under the pine tree for four months, until it became obvious to my parents that they didn’t have a need for a minivan anymore. My siblings and I had our licenses, we each had a car, and soon we’d transform into our own families, and our own minivans.

The day the tow truck came to take away my childhood minivan, that was the day I stopped seeing the baby face in the mirror. I recently cut my hair shorter than I anticipated, and when I looked at myself quickly, I didn’t see the teenager I was last year. I saw a woman, not my mom, or an aunt, or any of my other female family figures; I saw myself as a woman. Even though I’m not who I thought I would be, at least not who my ten-year-old self thought I would be. I still think she’d be proud, though.

I became an adult the day I realized family vacations would never be the same, that traveling together would never be the same. What was once a single van, now a caravan of cars. No more voting on movies, storing extra batteries for the headsets (so my parents could listen to Dave Matthews in peace), or picking on each other. We’ve entered the gray space between generations, when we’re too young to introduce the next, but too old to cherish the magic of youth.

I didn’t even see the man tow the minivan away. He came, jumped it, chained it to the truck, and made off like a thief in the night, except it was ten o’clock in the morning. One minute it was hiding away memories under the pine tree, the next it was gone. The next oldest car, my 1997 Acura, took its place, like a line-up, like a waiting list.