Lifetime of long car rides leaves stories and identity in its wake.
On any random weekend during the growing season and harvest, my Grandfather Malone, with my grandmother beside him, took Sunday afternoon drives to check out the neighbors’ crops.
People used to say he didn’t like to drive, but I don’t know that I believe that. Born before automobiles were common on America’s roadways and long before interstate highways carved up the countryside, I imagine he was suspicious of the new technology, uncomfortable with the speed and the change and the speed of the change. But he drove on Sunday afternoons. Up and down, back and forth on the long straight county roads as freshly-turned earth turned into soft green grubs, then board-straight rows of milo and sorghum and corn, knee high, then as high as an elephant’s eye, then tasseled and dented and ready to be picked.
My grandfather died when I was just a little girl, not yet in kindergarten, so I don’t have a very clear memory of who he was. Mostly my connection to him is just stories told by my mom or her siblings or the lucky cousins who lived near him, creating bonds that I never formed, but I do remember my mom getting the phone call from someone in Nebraska, telling her that her father had died. I remember her standing in the kitchen by the wall phone, the receiver gripped in her hand, crying, and me crying but only because she was crying. I didn’t understand then how her world just became untethered.
I understand now.
When my mom first mentioned those Sunday drives in some stray tale about my grandparents, I dismissed them as dull, quaint, relics of some long-gone, less progressive age.
But now I drive.
* * *
My dad was always a man of the road.
The son of a doctor who bought a new car every other year (whether he needed one or not), some of his fondest childhood memories were of riding in those big cars with his dad, on the backroads between their home in Michigan City, Ind., and their farm in southern Indiana, listening to Cubs baseball on the radio. Later, when my dad was old enough to have a license, he would accompany his dad on house calls, reading in the car while his dad delivered babies or set broken bones or stitched up farm wounds; and then he would drive home, his dad weary and spent from the work but he himself exhilarated behind the wheel.
On those trips, sometimes in the humid Indiana daylight and sometimes blanketed by the falling night, my dad heard the stories of his dad: Of growing up in rural Indiana. Of his life as a young physician in Mexico (did he really get chased out of the country by Pancho Villa?) and of moving to Kansas, where he planned to establish a medical practice. Of being called home when his own father, a Civil War veteran, became sick and needed extensive care, which my grandfather provided at the expense of his own future until his father died. Of becoming a doctor at the Gary steel mills and meeting a nurse 12 years his junior, who he would marry and with whom he would begin a family at nearly 50 years old. Of refusing to stay at hotels or eat at restaurants if the Black farmhand he sometimes traveled with was not also welcomed. Of showing grace and respect to the prisoners he treated when he was a surgeon and physician at the Indiana State Penitentiary; of refusing to attend executions even though that was a requirement of his employment; of being allowed to leave the prison during a riot because the convicts wanted to show him reciprocal grace by ensuring his safety.
My grandfather died when my dad was a junior in college. He had a heart attack, his second, and was gone immediately. My dad was on campus, about two hours away from home, when he got the call. He told me years later — the day after my mother died, in fact — that he remembered being amazed that the day following his father’s death was just a normal day. “How does the world just keep on going?” he wondered then. He wondered again 11 years ago when my mother died. I wonder now.
Although the expectation was that my dad would become a doctor like his father, he majored in animal husbandry; and following graduation, a brief job at a research farm and a two-year stint in the U.S. Army, he moved to Lincoln to work for the Red Poll Cattle Company, a breed association for a dual-purpose breed, writing and editing the association’s magazine, traveling across the Midwest and South to speak to producers, going to conferences and conventions and county fairs to promote the breed.
He put lots of miles on his car when he had that job.
“I intended to write much sooner,” he said in a letter to my mother just weeks after he met her, “but I’ve been jumping from place to place like a hare in front of the hounds and have scarcely had time to sleep. I left Lincoln shortly after calling you and had every intention of driving to Mason City; however, by the time I had reached Dennison, Iowa I was so sleepy that I thought it wise to stop for forty winks. I started out early Tuesday morning and was in Austin Minnesota by noon. I saw two breeders in that area, took some pictures and then left for St. Paul, where I spent the night. Wed. morning was spent on the campus of Minn. Univ. talking with Dr. A.L. Harvey and inspecting the U’s herd. In the afternoon I headed for Hampton, Iowa. Inspected another herd of cattle and drove on to Waterloo, Iowa where I stayed overnight.”
He met my mother on a blind date, set up by a mutual friend. He was more than an hour late to that first date because he had car trouble on the drive home from an out-of-town meeting. Despite that, my mom used to say she knew on that very first date that she would marry him.
My dad said it took him longer, but according to letters he sent her from the road (one every day when he was on those business trips) he fell pretty hard pretty fast:
“Dearest Gwen: Only a day has gone by and already I am looking forward to my return to Lincoln and you. I never thought I could miss anyone so much in such a short time.”
It took less than a year but a lot of letters from the road for them to make it down the aisle.
“As I was driving along today, I got to thinking how lucky I am. I’ve had nothing but good breaks all my life, but the luckiest thing that ever happened to me was having you fall in love with me. I am sure that God in his infinite wisdom planned you just for me. There is nothing about you that I don’t love. Your smile, your face and eyes, your you. ... I am continually amazed at the way you put up with my foolishness, moodiness, even my selfishness and never complain. For me, it is wonderful. You and only you can really make my life a complete thing, something of meaning and purpose. So long as I live my purpose in life shall be to live and work for your happiness.”
A couple of months into their marriage, my mother quit her job as a bookkeeper at a furniture store so she could go on those trips to Iowa and Texas with him. She went with him on nearly every road trip he took for the next 56 years. I think they built their lives together, side by side, on the bench seat of a Buick.
I guess we’ve always been driving people.
* * *
During the early weeks of the pandemic, following the hunkering-down, movie-marathon-on-Netflix days, my dad and I started taking drives in the country. My dad, 90 years old then, had all but stopped driving at that point, so I got behind the wheel and he rode shotgun. We usually strapped our little pug dog in the backseat and stopped at a drive-thru coffee shop for something sweet and, if the dog was lucky, a biscuit.
Mostly, my dad would order a small black coffee and an oatmeal cookie, but sometimes he’d choose a hot chocolate (thick and creamy, made with real milk), sometimes icy granitas with lots of whipped cream and fancy names like “Aztec” and “Sopapilla” and “Snowcapped Toddy.” Sometimes, if we went in the morning, we got donuts.
Larimer County, where I’ve lived most of my life and where my parents first touched down when they came to Colorado 65 years ago, is a big county at the northern most edge of the state, about midway between Nebraska and Utah. It is about 2,634 square miles: urban, rural, mountains thick with dark forests and the pungency of pine, wide open ranch land above timberline, mesas, foothills, gentle generous farmland. Obviously, most of those acres I have never seen, even though we took those drives almost every day for two-plus years.
Following the coffee stop, we would take the main drag through town, past the university that he worked for for 32 years (although not on campus for many of those years), past the sandwich shop that used to be a shoe shop where we got our new school shoes when we were kids, past the Aggie Theater where my mom saw her first movie, (“Curly Top” with Shirley Temple), past the center-of-the-street parking.
Past the Northern Hotel on the very far corner of Forts Collins’ Old Town. “That’s where I spent my first night in Fort Collins,” my dad said, again and again, almost every time. Once he explained that when he came to Fort Collins in 1957 from Lincoln, to interview for a job with CSU Extension Service, my grandfather, my dad’s father-in-law, came along for the company.
A little farther down the road, we cruised past El Camino, a squatty little motel on a big corner on what used to be the outskirts of town; once upon a time it was yellow but now it’s kind of Dorito-colored. It used to be tagged with a turquoise Lady of Guadeloupe, but she was painted over some years ago. “That’s where your mama and your sister and I stayed when we first came up for Extension conference,” he told me, although sometimes in the last months he thought the baby was me. It’s the only time he ever called my mother “mama.” “That’s where she made that blue velvet coat. It had little white buttons with pink roses painted on them.”
We still have that coat — in a box somewhere under the house.
“Let’s go past the lake,” he often said, so we veered to the right. My dad grew up on Lake Michigan and spent many boyhood days on its beaches. Sometimes I wonder if that’s the lake he was thinking about, because this lake, Terry Lake, is small, insubstantial, almost forgettable in comparison. But it’s beautiful, especially when the foothills are covered in snow and they reflect in the still waters. Sometimes the water is blue, like a baby blanket, or green like a piece of Depression-era glass, sometimes gray and choppy and foreboding. Once, when we made the curve around the lake, five pelicans flew over our car.
A few miles past the lake, there’s a semi-trailer parked in a field, no tractor. Big black letters give motorists a timely warning. “Resist the fascists,” my dad read aloud, every time, and then he said, “Yeah, that’s right” or “That’s good advice” or just “Yep,” certain, like he knew what he was talking about. He was a young teen during WWII, 15 years old on V-J Day, and a soldier during the Korean War.
So I guess he really did.
Sometimes on the straightaways, he told me stories about growing up in Indiana in a big house on a wide street with two older sisters and a grandma who knew how to make pies and a mother who was slow to romance but was madly in love with her doctor husband. (Once, many years ago, my dad asked his mother how she “landed” his father, and she said, “I don’t know; I really worked at it. As soon as I saw him, I knew that was my man. I really did. You don’t think things happen like that, but that did.”) He told me about telling his mom about going out for a short bike ride but pedaling to Valparaiso, about 25 miles away, instead, buying a Coke at a diner, and then riding home. He told me about how he and his sisters took piano lessons from Florence Smith, a “maiden lady” who was friends with his mother and how they all decided, pretty quickly, that he would be better off playing the baritone in the marching band. He told me about his friend, Don Tracy, whose father was in the Coast Guard and was gone almost all the time, especially during the long war years. “Don could tell you the make and model of every car on the road,” my dad told me, many many times, clearly still impressed with the feat.
We wheeled to the left and suddenly there’s an old Massey-Harris tractor rusting in the yard of a white farmhouse. (They quit making Massey-Harris tractors in 1957, so this one, built sometime before then, really is old.) We’re in the country now, farm country, ranch land, and we rolled past fields dotted with cattle. “There’s some black ones,” my dad said, “Angus, dang us.” He said it every time. And every time I laughed because it sounded so absurd, so silly coming from a man who made his life working with cattle.
Angus, dang us, are the predominant breed in Larimer County, but as we drive, we also go past some random Herefords, then a little herd of Belted Galloway, sometimes Longhorn, although they are shy and mostly stay out of sight. We drive past a bull farm where white Charolais stand segregated in a field from black Angus. We can’t see any barriers keeping the breeds separated and wonder if cattle have the intellectual capacity to be so discerning or if, you know, bulls of a feather and all that.
There’s a roundabout at this intersection of county roads, for some crazy reason that we weren’t aware of and can only guess about. To the east of the roadway, there’s a white fence. It’s long, low, precise. It, and a big iron gate, enclose a tidy property and well-tended buildings. It might be a horse farm; but, as hard as you might try, you can’t really tell because a thick windbreak of evergreens just inside the fence protects the place from prying eyes.
Every time we drove past it, my dad said: “Look at that damn fence.” Sometimes he also said: “I’m glad I didn’t have to build that fence.” Other times he said: “That’s a nice fence. I’m sure glad I don’t have to paint it.” It’s an attitude built on experience. He spent too many summers working on farms, too many years erecting and repairing backyard fences, too many lifetimes lending a hand. So he said those things about other fences too — privacy fences and barbed wire — but it was that tidy white rail fence that primarily got his disdain.
If we’re lucky we see pronghorn in the rugged open space across the road. They’re skittish; they prick up their ears and freeze when they hear our car, take off running if we pull to the side of the road. Occasionally we see mule deer peeking their heads out of a field of corn or grazing in someone’s yard. Sometimes we score a trifecta by spotting buffalo lumbering in the distance. Once, my dad saw a peacock strutting down the pavement.
Sometimes, if we had time, we drive by a dairy that’s crowded with sweet placid Holsteins. My dad, when he was in his 60s and had “retired” from CSU, worked for Dairy Herd Improvement. Once a month he would visit several dairies, like six or seven of them, maybe 10 at the peak, mostly in Weld County, which is the next county to the east. He would take milk samples from each cow, then send the samples to a lab where the milk was tested for buttermilk, protein, urea nitrogen, things like that. He went to each dairy twice, once in the darkness of the early morning, then again in the afternoon, sometimes as far as 40 or 50 miles one way. He liked that job, the cows, the dairymen, the time on the road, NPR on the radio, but some persistent bronchitis, exacerbated by too much time in wet winter barns, convinced him to quit before he really wanted to. So when we had extra time, we added another 10 miles to our drive to see the cows, to smell the silage, to remember an animal and a job and a journey that he loved.
Besides, another couple of miles down the dirt road, there’s a herd of yaks.
Sometimes we talked about current events as we drove, sometimes politics or people long gone or phone calls from family members. Sometimes we were quiet, listening only to the hum of the tires or the rhythms of the center-pivot sprinklers in the fields beyond our car. Often he sang. Funny old tunes on a continual loop:
“I was born 10,000 years ago, and there’s nothing in the world that I don’t know.” It’s a rhyme from way back in the day, when my siblings and I thought everything my dad did was clever and every joke was funny. “I saw Peter, Paul and Moses playing ‘Ring around the Roses,’ and I’ll lick the man who says it isn’t so.”
Sometimes he sang sad songs — “Oh, its crying time again, you’re gonna leave me, I can see that faraway look in your eyes” — and he’d get choked up, or weep, until we steered him to happier tunes.
Sometimes he sang popular songs from when he was a young man: “Detour, there’s a muddy road ahead; Detour, pay no mind to what it said; Detour, oh these bitter things I find; Should have read that detour sign.” Usually he liked to free form that one: “Stop sign, there’s a stop sign up ahead …” Or: “Roadwork, there’s some roadwork up ahead …” But mostly he sang: “Red light, there’s a red light up ahead; red light, pay no mind to what it says; red light, should have paid attention to that red light sign.” I’d tell him that wasn’t good advice, but he’d just start up again at the next intersection.
One song became almost a mantra for him:
“It’s a lovely day today,” he sang, or sometimes recited like a poem, “so whatever you’ve got to do, you’ve got a lovely day to do it in, that's true.”
He got in the car. We drove about two blocks to the edge of our neighborhood, and while we sat at the stoplight, waiting to turn onto the busy street that would lead us away, he would begin singing: “And I hope whatever you’ve got to do is something that can be done by two ’cause I’d really like to stay.”
No matter the time of day. “It’s a lovely day today. And whatever you’ve got to do I'd be so happy to be doing it with you …”
No matter the season. “But if you’ve got something that must be done and it can only be done by one …”
No matter whether it was sunny and blinding bright, or gray and gloomy, or windshield-wiper wet. “There is nothing more to say, except it’s a lovely day for saying…”
And for the most part, no matter what was happening at home or on the news or in the world. “It’s a lovely day.”
He believed it. I think he actually believed it.
Even if the facts didn’t support the tune, he repeated the lyrics until I began to believe them too.
“It’s a lovely day today …”
* * *
My dad died this summer.
Now I drive alone.
Past the university and the theater and the old hotels. Past the lake that isn’t Lake Michigan and the “Fight the Fascists” trailer and the farm machinery slumbering in late-summer fields. Past the angus, dang us, and the self-segregating Charolais and the Belted Galloway. Past the buffalo, because I know where the herds are now, and if I’m lucky past the pronghorns and the white-tailed deer and the yaks. Past the sweet-natured Holstein. Past the long white fence.
“Just look at that damn fence.” I hear it in my head. But it’s quiet in the car now so I whisper it. Sometimes I say it out loud. I want to scream it, but I don’t. I repeat it — “Look at that goddamn fence” — just to fill the emptiness, just to put sound where his words should be, just to make sense of this long road.
I feel untethered. From the world outside this car. From the past inside it. From who I am. Who I was. Who I always knew myself to be.
It’s fall now and all the world outside my car is golden. The sun is bright still and hot but somehow less mocking than it was in the summer. The trees are beginning to put on their autumn finery, and the yarrow in the ditches is burnished and fading. The sunflowers turn their faces to the sunshine. The sprinklers are quiet: the combines are in the fields now.
At some other time, I would revel in this season, the cooler temperatures, the smell of apples in the grocery store, the reds and golds and purples in the trees, the warmth of a cup of coffee seeping into my hands. At some other time, I would be excited by fall football games, looking forward to holiday gatherings, eager for future plans and surprises.
But now I sit in the silence and wonder, like my dad did once upon a time: “How does the world just keep on going?”
As it did for him, the answer eludes me.
But I’m still searching.
I’ve convinced myself I’ll find it in the bottom of a cup of coffee. In the words of a funny old song. In the hum of tires on a lonely country road. In the empty seat beside me.
And so I drive.
The Pie
Magic Victory Pie
AKA Blubarberry Pie
When I was in high school, I wrote a paper and did a presentation on the novel “A Lantern in her Hand” by Bess Streeter Aldrich. The book told the story of Abbie Deal, a young wife who moves with her husband to the Nebraska prairie determined to make a life for her growing family. The story revolved around pioneer values like hard work and family and faith. It was one of my mom’s favorite books, so I’m sure she recommended it. I don’t know what we were studying. It was a social studies class. I think I was a junior. I too loved that book, but in retrospect, “A Lantern in her Hand” seems a little low-brow for an academic exercise.
I don’t remember the paper or what I said during the presentation, but I do remember when I sat back down, my teacher — a tall thin woman who had short blonde hair, or was it gray?, and who carried a purse with many pockets — said she was struck, when she read that book years prior, with how the main character died. “Do you remember?” She asked me to explain the scene to the class, who, I’m sure, had had enough of Abbie Deal by that time.
An old woman by the time the story ended, Abbie Deal came in from the field, put some meat on the stove to cook, lay down on the bed to rest for a moment, and died while her dinner burned.
“I always remember how ordinary it was,” my teacher said.
We should all be that lucky.
I guess it was ordinary for my mother too. She and I went out for coffee that morning, sitting for awhile in the shop and chatting with other patrons. We stopped at Walgreen’s on the way home for some aspirin because she said she had a headache. She very seldom had headaches, but this one had lingered for a few days by that point. It was spring; she thought it was allergies. We had something ordinary and boring for lunch: ramen noodles, crackers and cheese, probably an apple. It was the end of the month. She never liked “store-bought” soups, so she didn’t eat much. After picking up the dishes, she went out to the living room to watch “The Waltons” on some high-numbered cable channel. She sat down on the couch, took off her shoes and had a stroke.
I’ve always thought it was sad that my mom’s last meal was something she didn’t even like, so when my dad got sick I was determined that we would do better by him.
The week before Christmas, last year, he was hospitalized with a liver infection. He had two surgical procedures in three days and then, on Christmas Day, he was discharged to a rehab center. In the next six months, he was hospitalized three more times — for a compression fracture of the spine, a urinary tract infection and sepsis, and finally something they were never able to identify, although I did hear a nurse use the term “failure to thrive.” He went to two more rehab centers. He got COVID in the last one. During his final hospitalization, someone decided he was having trouble swallowing and put him on a soft food and thickened liquid diet. It was awful and he didn’t eat much of it.
After four days of that, we brought him home and made him real food. He ate real meals, full meals for a few days (and a hamburger and fries from McDonald's, a treat), and then he decided he was too tired or not hungry or no longer interested in keeping that up. For the next few days, my brother fed him bits of fruit — apples, which he loved, and nectarines, because Colorado’s peach crop had not yet come in. One day, a friend brought over some rhubarb, much coveted this year because the crop was missing in both grocery stores and gardens, and I asked my dad if he would like me to make a pie.
He said, yes, so I combined the rhubarb with some strawberries and blueberries and put a pretty crust on it. We served it with vanilla ice cream and he ate it. And for the next two days, miraculously, he ate pie, little bites, each bite a victory.
Then he stopped eating altogether and he left us about two days later.
I don’t really believe that there’s magic in a piece of pie, although there is comfort in that thought. I don’t know if that fruit and sugar and the pretty crust kept my dad with us any longer. Or made him feel better while he was hanging on. Or made his journey any easier.
But I do know that, even if it didn’t touch him, I felt something akin to magic in the chopping, in the mixing, in the baking, in the sharing and the love. And at least for a moment — one brief holy moment — it made me feel better.
THE RECIPE
1½ cups sugar
6 tablespoons flour 5-6 cups of rhubarb, strawberries and blueberries
Cinnamon-sugar mixture for sprinkling 1 recipe for a double-crust pie crust (below)
Preheat oven to 450 degrees.
Cut rhubarb into 1-inch pieces. (One pound of rhubarb is approximately 2 cups.)
Slice strawberries.
Combine rhubarb and strawberries. Add blueberries.
In a small bowl, mix together sugar and flour. Mix lightly through the fruit.
Place bottom crust in a 9-inch pie plate. Fill with fruit mixture. Cover with top crust and crimp edges. Prick top crust several times with a knife or the tines of a fork to vent. Or using cookie cutters, cut our flower shapes and arrange on top of the fruit to form a top crust, making sure to leave some space between flowers for venting.
Sprinkle with cinnamon-sugar mixture. Bake in hot oven for 40 to 50 minutes or until crust is golden brown and the fruit juices begin to bubble through the open spaces in the crust.
Cool before serving, although this pie is good served slightly warm.
BUTTERY ALL-PURPOSE CRUST
2½ cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
¾ cup (1 ½ sticks) cold unsalted butter, cut
into 1-inch pieces
¼ cup (4 tablespoons) cold vegetable shortening
¼ cup (4 tablespoons) cold vodka
6 tablespoons cold water, plus extra as needed
Mix together the flour, salt and sugar until thoroughly combined. Add the butter and shortening and cut together with a pastry cutter until the mixture forms small pea-sized crumbs.
Pour the vodka over the mixture, a tablespoon at a time, using a rubber spatula. Add the water and press the dough together to form two large balls. If the dough seems dry or does not hold together, add extra water a tablespoon at a time until all the ingredients come together. (Be careful not to work the dough too much to prevent the crust from being tough.)
Press each ball into a 1-inch disk, wrap each in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least an hour — or up to two days — before rolling out.
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