The Honda

My foot cramps again, but I hold to the clutch, right hand grinding gears until I happen upon one.  Habitual eyes wander out the window, simply wanting to know if anything is coming up behind me and to the left, but the side mirror is gone.  Removed long ago by a slab of cement on the road home from New York.  I jerk my head quickly over my left shoulder, feeling the fear of driving again, remembering as I did at sixteen the complication of ignorantly controlling machinery.  I complain, loudly bitterly.  And hear my daughter’s chiding reminder, “Hate is a strong word, right?”

 

The interior is dark, though the street lamps in So. Philly allow for a perpetual night vision, so that if I leave the city I feel desolate, alone, vulnerable.  I hear the crack of a can of de-icer as it rolls along the floor, up the lip of the car towards the door and back under the seat, banging into the worn “The Club.”  I have been given no directions for this tool, a device intended to lock the steering wheel in place so that even as bandits might break a window and take all that is valuable from the car, the car itself will remain.

 

But this placebo club was simply set on the wheel, unlocked. And that is how I leave it when I retreat. With a feigned twist at the club’s lock, intimating that I am for real, don’t mess with me you who lurk near this abandoned house on a side street west of Broad.  

 

My gloved hands fumble with the keychain car alarm.  And I hope the double beep and the clicking of the locks truly signifies that I am guarding all that travels with my husband as he moves between our world and his.  That I have created a safe harbor for his traveling companions, his paper cups stained with caffeine and sugar, his empty plastic bags marked with ingredients lists and promises of savory beef jerky, his pile of sunglasses and the TomTom hiding in the glovebox that speaks to him softly in the night encouraging him home again.  

 

Hate is a strong word for the tin vessel that carries him to me.  And I pray a prayer of protection for it.  I walk in the door, grateful that my use of the car means he is home tonight.  Right there, sitting with his other favorite gadget. And the strong word creeps around in my head again, until he sets the laptop down and walks toward me.

2007 Word of the Year

So, locavore.  The hip new word of the year from Oxford University Press.  It stands there next to upcycle, hoping to encourage our general consumption of that which is sitting right next to us.  It says grow your own tomatoes, use the wire hangers you long to throw away as stands to rope your vines around.     

These are good things, aka Martha.  And remind me that blogs, particularly mine, require local lore.  I hope only to regale you with stories, of people shuffling through my park, of children sick in the night, of Philadelphia scrappy and tough.    

If all goes well, I’ll have provided myself enough insight to begin that carefully put-aside novel, enough story to know that story itself colors our world.  It is from story that new words become.  Locavore is defined more as an initiative, a story-in-process than a constant noun.  And here on the hip of South Philly, I and my tough Italian Market hub are just that, a story-in-progress  (which I will sometimes refer to as grace, and other times as detritus.)   

Hang on for the fairy tale ending.