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I downshifted, and the car hugged the cloverleaf coming off the highway. The motor hummed; the seat embraced me. Both hands, both feet, my entire body: all engaged. No fiddling with cellphone or radio. Just me and the car and the road.
I was transported to the fall day in Vermont when my husband taught me to clutch and shift in a different convertible on another serpentine road. I was studying for medical school exams. We had no money, but we splurged on a bed-and-breakfast. That was how he was: Hardship didn't stop him from plunging into things he loved.
In the early days, an unreliable car was our only means of transportation. We eventually added a safer car, but how our daughter beamed when her dad drove her to school in the Spider! How the second-grade boys mobbed the convertible in the pickup lane! No airbags, no roll bar, metal bumpers, an open top — a bad idea to send a child off like that.
I was the kind of mom who put helmets on our kids when they learned to ice-skate. But my daughter wrote a poem about the light filtering through the trees as she and her dad flew through those moments in time. My daughter and son have grown into people who immerse themselves in the world via all their senses.
The Alfa is impractical, costly and inconvenient. My hair becomes a bird's nest when I drive with the top down. When it rains, the fabric roof pings cold drops onto my head. It has left me stranded more than once.
And I love it.
I was raised to set aside my aspirations to be a writer because the winding path of a creative career seemed lined with risk and destitution, and my immigrant family had had enough of that. Better to cut loose the i mpractical and hold tight to tangible certainties, my parents advised.
My husband, raised in similar circumstances, with similar expectations, somehow flouted conventional notions of what was worth holding onto or jettisoning. He became a scientist instead of a doctor and found not only creative fulfillment but financial success in that less predictable career path. His grad school student loans partly subsidized flying lessons, and he later flew me to Ocracoke, N.C., in a twin-engine Cherokee Warrior, landing on the grass strip beside the shimmering beach, extinguishing the fear of flying I'd developed aboard much safer commercial jets.
He took safety seriously. We delayed flying back if the weather turned. He didn't take foolish risks. But he inspired reasonable risks.
He encouraged me to keep writing and working part time as a physician, even if it meant it would take us longer to repay student debt. He advised students to ask meaningful questions, not just those considered most likely to get funded. He left letters for our kids urging them to refrain from bitterness or fear because of his fate. Remain open to the vast beauty around you, he told them. Engage. And when your mom meets someone new, as I hope she will, try to be open to him.
I did meet someone new a few years ago and had to let go in a host of unexpected ways. My partner has four children, two younger than mine, and two former wives. His children have lost not a parent but something potentially more destabilizing: their faith in the possibility of deep love.
The oldest is cynical about the odds of any relationship lasting. His 9-year-old half brother keeps his parents' wedding photo on his desk and refers to his mother's live-in partner as his aunt, even though the relationship has been explained to him. Some children carry into adulthood the fervent wish that their divorced parents will somehow reunite, poisoning their ability to find joy in the actual relationships that surround them.
My partner recognizes the difficulties. Early in our relationship, he questioned why I would take on the baggage of his past life, baggage he has often wished he could jettison. Not the children, of course, but the painful dynamics of the adults around them.
My husband used to say, "If it was easy, it would be done."
Driving my Alfa Romeo reminds me that difficulty, per se, has never stopped me from pursuing something I think has true worth. Driving, I'm reminded that I, too, can shift gears, face risk, handle inconvenience — and survive tragedy. I re-experience the joy in all my senses: touch, smell, taste, hearing and not exclusively vision, as dictated by our increasingly virtual world.
I am forced to disengage: I can't return calls, eat lunch and drive to the office all at once. Without anti-lock brakes, I scan the road ahead more mindfully. The car may look zippy, but any soccer mom in a sealed, air-conditioned six-cylinder Land Rover can easily overtake me.
It's not the speed but the journey, I tell myself. I continue to write, even if my day job means it takes me half a decade to finish a book. And my partner and I press onward, doing our work individually and together to address the losses we've had, to build something together that is strong enough to withstand both nostalgia and anger.
As I consult various people on whether to sell the car, it becomes a litmus test. My in-laws say simplify: "You have so much to manage!" My kids are sad but accepting: They're moving aro und the country now with college, internships and jobs, and although they love the car, they are a little afraid to sit in the driver's seat. To be reminded of too much, and perhaps, to be compared.
My partner, eyes misting, says: "You love that car. And your husband was an extraordinary man."
He says, "I feel so lucky that we're together, and so sad that you two couldn't be."
He says: "Keep fixing it. I'll drive it with you anytime."
Maybe the trick is knowing when to let go, and when to hang on.
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