Blogatron

Moon and Cars

This weekend I spent some time riding in cars. Last night I rode in a car up Interstate 90, or something, I rarely pay attention to things like road numbers unless I am doing the driving, but anyway, I rode in a car on one of the highways that gets you from the Albany area to the Boston area.

I react to being a passenger in two ways: I either become very sleepy, or I become very melancholy. Last night it was late and I was weary and the traffic was heavy and aggressive and made me too nervous to sleep, so it was the latter for me.

We chased a huge harvest moon over the horizon for an hour or so until it got higher in the sky and lost its orange glow, and while it was hovering over the ranks of taillights going too fast, too close together in front of us as far as we could see, I thought about how I used to see the moon when I was little. I didn't get what the adults were going on about with the Man in the Moon. I never saw him. I saw a beautiful lady, sitting in profile, wearing a wasp-waisted dress and a big carriage-wheel hat, holding a parasol. I liked that lady. She was my secret, when I looked at her or when I smiled and nodded and never said a word to the foolish people talking about the Man.

Now, one million company logos and cartoons and offhanded cliches later, I don't see the lady anymore. I've come around; I see those big smeary eyes and the round "O" of a mouth that make the Man in the Moon look, not cheerful, but just as alarmed as the zooming idiot tailgaters make me. The lady is gone; I can't trace her image in the shapes, can't force my memory of her onto the shadows that I see now.

I thought about this and then I thought about how I used to ride in cars when I was little. I'm sure that my tendency to get sleepy in cars comes from when I was a baby, when my mom used to drive me around and around the neighborhood to get me to go to sleep. According to family legend I'd sleep blissfully through the car ride, through my mother's careful maneuvering out of the car and tiptoeing with me through the house, and then wake up screaming as soon as I felt myself laid down in my crib. The sense of security I must have felt stayed with me as a child; I've always loved to ride in cars. Being a passenger is an excellent position for daydreaming, letting the sense of motion soothe you while your mind wanders, secure in the feeling that even if you don't pay attention, you're getting somewhere.

Through all those long-ago car rides it never occurred to me while I watched the world go by, driving my mom crazy by gazing out the window but never reading a single road sign, that something bad could happen.

Last night while I sat in the back seat thinking about what would happen if we had to brake suddenly and the pickup truck riding our bumper was slow on the reflexes, while I cursed the jockeys darting in and out of our safe following distance, it occurred to me that I haven't done so well with the growing up, at least in this regard. It might be a sign of immaturity when you can't or won't consider the possibility of an accident. But what's the point of trying to stave off disaster by worrying about it? Last night, my fretful glances out the back window and strained jokes about somebody'd better be in labor did no more to keep us safe than my childhood obliviousness did. The only change I've made is to give myself a sore neck, and that doesn't seem like progress at all.

Now if I could see the lady and the Man, or if I could know about twenty-car pileups but at the same time live the fact that, when I'm the passenger, worrying about those things hurts me and helps no one, that would be something. That's something you could call growing up, I think. Or moving forward.

Posted by hilatron at August 30, 2004 02:52 PM