Baby you can drive my car

The Hondo smells like donuts

When my mom tells the story of my birth there are several details that never change. There was bad and icy winter weather. There was a taxi cab ride in that weather. And finally, I was in a rush to be born. Perhaps it was because I was the last and youngest of 4 children to be born. Or perhaps, it is an indication of the type of person I would be. I leave that up to you to decide.

The picture here is one of your imaginative creations put together in "the old house" at Warwick. It's a car that you built using old boxes and some arts and craft supplies. You used paper plates for wheels so they were already round. But you wanted to cut them into shape any way. In the back seat, I can make out the heads of at least two of your baby dolls.

Because of where we lived, as you may recall, you basically traveled everywhere by car from a very early age. For myself, we never really made use of baby seats (or seat belts for that matter) growing up. It's just the way things were back then. I remember wearing seat belts became mandatory for front seat passengers around the time that I got my driving license.

Can you still remember the Warwick house and the long walk to the parking lot. We had two parking spaces that were not near each other. One was near Mr. Scott's "grabber orange" Mustang and Brad and Karen's Scion cube. We parked Goldar there usually. The eggplant purple "Hondo" was parked further down the sidewalk next to Mr. Scott's white pick up truck.

Do you remember your daily trips to MCHL? We would go out of our parking lot neighborhood to the traffic light on Sterling Blvd. Cross over the bike path and turn right at the light where the Domino's pizza and gas station were. We would pass where Rebounderz was and the warehouse buildings where you used to ride your bike with training wheels. We would drive down Davis where all the trees changed colors in the fall...but now many of the trees were cut down to make room for an ICE detention center.

We would pass Joe's Cafe. We would also pass the Sterling Cemetery where your brother, Joshua, is buried. And your school would be at the next light, near the 7-11 and King's Buffet, the Filipino store (which isn't there any more) and so much more.

Your school was at the intersection of Cascades Parkway and Church. We used to take Church over Route 7 to go to Wegmans. Now we take Cascades Parkway to get back to where we live on Algonkian, or to go to Home Depot or Majest from Sterling Park.

Any way, this picture was part of a portfolio your mom put together to get you into FUTURA at Algonkian Elementary. She wrote about how you were a kinetic learner who worked best by being hands-on. She talked about how you are also a social learner who works well in groups and also is attentive to receiving directions and getting positive feedback from your teachers. I think that's why Tae kwon do appeals to you so much in a way that piano lessons did not. 

Play piano and get ice

First Uniform

Enjoying music as a player is a hard thing to do. It's partly group, but a lot of individual practice. For some, it is like athletics. And in the end, one loves and takes to things for whatever reason. I often tell people the violin was my first love. It was definitely the first instrument I had formal music lessons. I know that I took to the mechanics of it and could easily play things by ear. I know that I enjoyed being in orchestra later in life and definitely enjoyed playing chamber music in Spring Lake or at music camp. (I'm even on 2 records).

But I am nowhere near as proficient as I was back then. Lack of practice and passage of time. Instead, I've become much more of a piano player (and some guitar). But none of that really happened until the last handful of years. I am sure I'll talk about music more in other posts. For now, I just wanted you to know, in the same way that you will one day drive my car, I hope you know that whatever I can offer you musically (or that you can make use of when I'm not), it's yours.

As a writer, I often listen to conversations in a room and think about how I could script them better. As a musician, I think it's where my creative energies go when I don't want to have to talk, but I still want to register that "I am here" and "I'm doing something that matters in the moment." It's my way of doing my part. And, as I am sure you recall me telling you, it meant that as long as I was playing, I was off the hook until it was time to eat.

"And baby, I love you..."