the old car

this evening Ive been examining half scraps of my childhood. they
are pieces of distant life that have no significant form or meaning. they
are just things that happened, like lint.

i remember the old rusty car we kids used to play in at school. it
was a light blue hatchback- a little old lady of a car. even though she was
overgrown with weeds and had no doors or wheels, she was the first
thing we first graders adopted as our own in the uncertainties of the
new playground. i can only imagine all the adventures she
witnessed in her lifetime... as for me- i rode to mexico and back with
her, chased bandits across the badlands. i quenched bush fires and rode off cliffs into
oceans and up into the limitless sky of my imagination. she was the
stalwart of the schoolyard; the one thing that unified us all in this
brave new world.

i cant remember how the rumours started- was it a janitor who saw a
puff adder underneath her chasse? or was it a spitting cobra that
blinded a security guard one hot dusty night as he lay on the back seat smoking a
lucky strike? Whatever it was, it was bigger than us all
. for several empty months we avoided the car, preferring
instead to go on horseback or simply by foot through our imaginary
worlds.

summer hols came and went in that listless endless child-time way.
on the first day back at school the first thing we noticed on the
playground was that old lady. how she had completely changed... the
leather seats that smelled of a thousand school lunches had been
ripped up and replaced by simple wooden benches. the speedometer that
registered only a fraction of the journeys she had taken with us had
been removed; the windshield knocked out; the glove compartment
sealed up and she wore a brand new coat of pink paint.

it was a strange thing... the school had revamped our car to make her
play-safe. but by doing so, they had also wiped away all the secrets
and adventures she had held for all those years... all the reflections in
her rear-view mirror...the memories in her leather, under her seats and in
her glove compartment. the odour of faraway places had gone. she
was now just a shell of an old car that once upon a time someone had
owned.