Car of Wonder

When I was a young man, my friends Lance and Jeff could identify the make, model and year of a speeding car backlit by the sun from a quarter mile away.  At night.  I, on the other hand, couldn't even tell you the make unless I was close enough to read the nameplate.  Even then, I had to squint.  For awhile there, they tried to teach me to recognize the differences between a '65 Mustang and a '64 Mustang.  I knew this was important, that this knowledge would somehow make me a real man, so I really gave it my best effort.  The problem wasn't that I was incapable of learning the subtle nuances of headlight width and keyhole diameter or whatever.  The problem was I didn't care.

I didn’t care to the point that, when my wife Jenny was pregnant with our first daughter, we drove a sixteen-year-old Toyota Corona station wagon.  The dealer probably listed the color as something poetic, like “goldenrod”, when a more accurate description would have been “phlegm.”  The car would stall at stop signs and overheat in hot weather and would take twenty seconds to reach its top speed of 55 miles per hour.  The interior smelled like someone had burned an old sneaker in the back seat. 

And this was our good car.  Our other car, a sedan, was an eighteen-year-old Toyota Corona.

My dad was the original owner of both cars.  He had given the station wagon to us in exchange for a car which also happened to be a sixteen-year-old Toyota Corona.  The eighteen-year-old sedan had been a college graduation gift.  My dad had seen a chart in his favorite magazine (Consumer Reports) where he learned that Toyota Coronas had the best repair record.  Seeing the column of red dots when other cars were getting white dots, or half-black dots, or (God forbid) black dots, must have warmed his engineer heart, because he ended up buying four Toyota Coronas. 

And they were indeed reliable.  For all the years we had the cars, all we had to replace or repair was the oil, the tires, the wiper blades, the spark plugs, the brake pads, the brake rotors, the fuel filter, the air filter, the hoses, the ceiling head liner, the clutch upper slave cylinder, the clutch lower slave cylinder, the clutch, the alternator, a sun visor, the water pump, the ignition coil, the starter, the distributor, the carburetor, the radiator cap, the radiator, the exhaust manifold gasket, the head gasket, the head, the driver’s seat and the odometer cable.  If I had replaced the seatbelts, I would have been required by law to buy a nameplate that read “Monument Car Parts” because there would have been nothing left on the car that had been manufactured by Toyota.

The cars had amusing quirks that made every trip, no matter how short, an adventure.  For example, after a prolonged session of night driving, we could pop the hood and see the exhaust manifold glowing a molten-metal red in the darkness. I shudder to think about what a car that earned black dots in Consumer Reports would have been like.

That year, I was involved in a summer mission week in Sacramento sponsored by several churches in my area.  I was placed on a team with Karen and Steve, a young couple from England.  I say “young” because they were my age. The first time I really got to spend time with them was the hour-and-a-half drive from my home town of Antioch to the state capital.  In order to impress my foreign guests, I took the good car.

About a half hour into our trip, I noticed that the temperature gauge was rising close to crisis level, so I turned on the heater.  I explained to Karen and Steve that every car’s heater operates like a smaller version of a car’s radiator, and that turning on the heater actually causes the engine to run cooler.

I should explain at this point that the temperature outside the car was 105 degrees.  In England, a cold rain falls twice a year--once for five months and the other time for six.  If the temperature reaches 80 degrees, the newspaper headlines scream “COR, WHAT A SCORCHER!”

Still, Karen and Steve seemed not to mind.  As we winded down delta roads and the sweat dripped off our faces, we chattered away happily.  They were absolutely thrilled to be in America and were eager to point out the subtle differences between our two great countries.  “In England, this car wouldn’t be allowed on the road,” was an observation Steve made more than once.

Despite this, Jenny and I became best of friends with Karen and Steve.  They returned from England several times to stay with us, giving us many more opportunities to have adventures in our little station wagon.  Once, on another 100+ degree day, it overheated and left us stranded on the side of I-680.  This happened only fifteen years ago, so you can understand if it is still too painful to recall in detail here.  Let it suffice to say that the story ends with Steve, Karen, a fragrant guy named Dave, and me, crammed into the cab of Dave’s tow-truck.  I was pressed up against Dave with his stick shift between my knees.  Every time he changed gears I sat up a little straighter.  By the time we reached our destination, Steve was shaking, Karen was in tears, and my voice was an octave higher.

That was the trip that inspired Karen and Steve to compose a song about our vehicle, to the tune of We Three Kings:  The chorus starts:

Car of wonder!

Car of fright!

Car with engine burning bright!

We no longer own either car, and believe it or not, Karen and Steve are still our friends.  They have visited us here and we have gone to England to see them more times than I can count.  They used to kid us a lot about our old cars, until the day when, during a drive through the English countryside, we were stranded by the roadside because the windshield wipers stopped working-- something that would never happen in California.

You've Got to Be Taught

You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught.

                                                --Lt. Joe Cable, South Pacific

I learned to be a racist when I was eight years old.

When I was a kid, the Oakland A’s were everything.  I could not remember a time when they weren’t winning the World Series.  I could rattle off the names of every player in every position…Sal Bando, Campy Campaneris, Vida Blue, Catfish Hunter, Rollie Fingers, Billy North, Dick Green, Gene Tenace.   I don’t think I understood the concept of replay back then, so in my mind Reggie Jackson was always hitting home runs, and Joe Rudi was always robbing them from other players with spectacular leaping catches at the wall.  Always. 

My best friend Vincie and I would play baseball together with a beat-up wooden bat and a tennis ball.  We would be the A’s, competing against an invisible Other Team.  The Other Team didn’t have a name, because in our minds, no other team really mattered.  The A’s would always crush the Other Team with massive moon-shots to left field and brilliant defense.  I can say with all modesty that Vincie and I played dozens, perhaps hundreds of games, and finished our careers undefeated.

The way we saw it, the only other thing happening in the baseball world at that time had to do with some guy named Hank Aaron.  Even though Hank Aaron was not an Athletic (it wasn’t until I was much older that I figured out that the “A” in A’s actually stood for something) Vincie and I were aware of him, because at the start of the season of ’74, Hank Aaron was one home run shy of the all-time record.  The excitement in the country had reached flood stage, overflowed its banks, and inundated every corner of the country before finally trickling through the gutters of Chickie Street where I grew up. 

I remember talking about Hank Aaron with Vincie.  I expected him to mirror the enthusiasm I had observed in my older brothers and their friends, but he didn’t.

“My dad doesn’t want it to happen,” he said.  “He doesn’t want a (black man) to break a white man’s record.”

I don’t know how, but I knew the word he used for “black man” was a very bad word.  Yet here was my best friend throwing it out casually, like a warm-up toss before a baseball game.  It never occurred to me that the record Hank Aaron was about to break had been set by another man.  Babe Ruth was a pudgy guy with a face that looked like a depressed Gerber baby, but the most important fact about him in Vincie’s mind, other than that he could hit home runs, was that he was white.  A lesson had been planted in my young heart, a lesson that said a black man was not worthy of a white man’s record.  That many of our Oakland A’s heroes--heroes we not only admired but often pretended to be--were black, was an irony that was lost on both of us. 

Of course, Hank Aaron paid no attention to Vincie’s dad.  He first tied the record, then, on April 8, 1974, broke it.  I remember watching it happen at my brothers’ friend’s house.  As the ball sailed over the wall and one fan tried to snare the priceless sphere with a fishing net, the room erupted in cheers.  I alone remained silent, conflicted. 

Fortunately for me, and unlike Vincie and Lieutenant Cable, I grew up in a home where seeds like that failed to thrive.  The word Vincie had used was a word I would never hear in my house.  I never heard my father say a disparaging comment about someone simply because of the color of their skin, and I never heard him tell a racist joke. 

But it wasn’t just the things my father didn’t do.  My sister, eight months older than me, was adopted.  My mother and father say they saw her picture--an infant with sad, almond-shaped eyes, her chubby face framed by a black pixie cut--and immediately fell in love.  They knew in an instant that this little girl from a Hong Kong orphanage was their daughter.  When I was a young teen, they told me that extended family protested, asking “isn’t there a white baby you can adopt?” My mom and dad ignored them.

Another lesson came when I was in high school and sang bass in the choir’s barber shop quartet.  I was surprised to learn that my reserved, mechanical engineer dad sang baritone in one when he was a young man.  He said he had even considered joining a national society of barbershop singers, but rejected the idea after he learned they would not allow black people into their organization.  He didn’t say it boastfully.  He didn’t point out that he made this little stand several years before the Civil Rights movement started to gain national attention.  He just said it, because it was true.  These are lessons that were also planted deep in my heart; finding purchase, taking root, and crowding out the one placed there by my best friend in 1974.

While I am grateful to have had parents who would teach me these lessons, I am also uncomfortable with how easily my eight-year-old heart was molded by a friend’s offhand remark.  While racism appalls me now, I must also recognize that I once started on that path, even if I never got too far past the trailhead.  I realize that even now, seeds of arrogance and ignorance and fear are constantly being sown, and I have a responsibility to be vigilant, to weed out evil and lies, and nurture charity and truth.

Bigotry has “got to be carefully taught” as Joe Cable self-loathingly sings.  The good news is that tolerance, respect and compassion can also be taught.  We, as adults, need to pass those lessons down to the next generation.  We need more people like my dad.

I, for one, choose to be one of them.