racing
I laugh when I say it, but it’s the truth: driving from home to school and back in the mornings feels like playing a round of that old racing video game at our favorite childhood pizza place, the one with the actual race car seat and steering wheel, the one I had to climb down into in the dark. A rainbow of neon dashed the black, crumb-dotted carpet. I buckled in with a real seatbelt, and from the speakers beside my ears played the sounds of revving engines. For a little while, the game took me somewhere else, to a place where I was the only thing real, away from the smell of melted cheese and my ordinary drawstring shorts and tennis shoes. I was only ever 75 cents away from having my own announcer and cheering fans, and although I’ve never been much of a gamer, not then and certainly not now, I enjoyed that game, with all it’s weaving through traffic and away from potential accidents. I remember that the roadway scrolled out from the center of the screen and trees popped up on the sides. For a few moments, I pretended I not only knew how to drive but how to race; I entertained the idea that I could make a better time through the course than Robbie S., whose name forever occupied all three top places on the digital scoreboard. I think maybe even then little-girl me whispered comments to other faceless drivers.
But this of course is not a game; and, I often remind myself, it isn’t a competition, because the sad truth is that I can sometimes be so self-absorbed that I still believe my experience is the only one that’s real.
To get to school, the kids and I travel down several commute-clotted roadways. After the somewhat frantic push to get on our way, when Adam coolly tosses his backpack in the trunk and Riley comes outside several minutes later reciting aloud the things she’s triple-checked, and I watch the clock, sometimes praying, sometimes whispering come on, Riley under my breath, we end up, after leaving the neighborhood behind and chattering through the start of the day, on an eight lane road that is punctuated by stoplights. Countless people have died jaywalking across this road, and yet periodically others step out, sometimes dragging children by the hands, sometimes lifting a hand without looking toward the oncoming traffic. Once I stomped down on the breaks and felt my seatbelt tug, my stomach wildly flipping, because a teenaged girl, her head thrown back and laughing, pulled a teenaged boy across right in front of me. So I grip the wheel now, hyperalert, and try to leave some space between my car and the one in front of me. I practice slowing, as a spiritual practice, while I drive. But there might as well be revving sounds playing in my ears and hurry hurry hurry written tremendous and bold on all the roadside signs. Cars rush in to fill any empty spaces, and a pickup truck sits so close on my bumper it would crush the backend of my car if I needed to stop suddenly.
Riley keeps restarting the song playing on the stereo, a song called Dive—Caught in the rush, lost in the flow, in over my head I want to go–because, she says, she loves this song, and our carpool friend, who missed school one day last week for a trip, keeps doing an Abbott and Costello routine with Adam:
“Adam, did you miss me?”
“Miss me.”
“No, not miss you, miss me!”
“Miss me.”
“No, did you miss me? On Friday?”
“Miss me.”
“No…”
I white knuckle the steering wheel. Eventually, when most of the lanes on this road disappear, we exit onto another road, a four-lane with significant hills and twisting curves and lanes so narrow that trucks barreling toward me from the other direction often have one wheel in my lane. It’s not uncommon to suddenly come upon a car stopped and waiting to turn or a stretch with one lane blocked for tree trimming or because a landscaper has just decided to park in the middle of the road. From the valley I can’t see what’s happening on the hill, and isn’t that just how it is? We don’t see clearly from either extreme. And stops come so suddenly whenever I get caught up in the rush. Today in the valley, traffic stalls completely.
“Oh come on, people, get out of the way,” our friend says from the backseat, and I smile, because I have just whispered, now what’s all this and glanced at the clock and our mapped out route that shows on the screen in the car. I tend to think of other travelers in terms of the vehicles they drive–that car, that truck–but at least she recognizes them, if impatiently, as people. Hurry makes me impersonal and half-blind; I misplace my compassion in the press of go go go. On the screen now I spot an icon that indicates a crash, and just that quickly, human hardship becomes a symbol, a cartoon.
“There must be an accident up on the hill,” I tell the kids, gesturing toward the screen. We stare at the brake lights of the Buick in front of us, the two clogged lines of vehicles snaking up ahead. Our cars, our houses can become functional places of isolation; we learned this in quarantine. In this digital, racing world, we can forget the warm, solid feel of living people, of skin and bone and blood and family. I can barely see the blue glow of emergency lights through the trees on the horizon.
“I just hope all those people up there are okay,” Riley says finally, gazing ahead, and I realize now, well beyond what we can see in front of us. Autism leads her to misunderstand so many aspects of life, but some truths she sees far better than I do.
“I do too,” I say, smiling, releasing my grip on the steering wheel, letting my hands fall open in my lap. She has a way of getting to the heart of things efficiently. All around us now, people wait, and up on the hill, people hurt; we are all people God loves, just people trying to make our way.
