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The Sunday Drive gets expensive
(by Ed Flynn - April 16, 2008)
I hope that the price for a gallon of gasoline doesn’t reach the point where my wife and I can’t afford to fill the tank for our regular “Sunday Drive.”
The Sunday Drive, you see, has been a tradition in our family from as far back as I can remember and now that we’ve reached the age where we seldom venture out at night it’s just about our only form of entertainment; driving to some favorite restaurant for lunch and taking the long way home on back roads that pass farms and lakes that, while now familiar, change with the seasons like time lapse photographs.
One plus to the soaring gas prices, if it’s possible to find any plus in a situation that is increasing the cost of just about everything we use, is that I’ve decided to drive a bit slower. Since the Sunday Drive is really a leisurely trip to nowhere, simply an hour or two spent “out-of-the house” doing nothing, why not slow down like a typical “Sunday Driver” who doesn’t care if other cars pass him by. That way you can spend the same amount of time out but cover fewer miles and use less gas. And you don’t have to worry about cops with radar lurking behind billboards and bushes.
The tradition began a long time ago for me, back in the 1920s when I was a small boy and my dad came home one evening driving a brand new Chevrolet. It was the envy of the neighborhood in a time when cars were still a novelty and few families owned one. I never knew for sure where dad got the money for that car but there were always whispers – not meant to be intercepted by young ears – that dad had a tendency to bet on the horses and that occasionally he even picked the right one.
That car became the family’s pride and joy and every Sunday mom and dad would herd my sister Virginia and me into the back seat and we’d take off for destinations unknown on roads that frequently tapered down to one lane and sometimes ended in unpaved, rutted dirt trails that came to a dead end and my mom and dad would argue over whose fault it was that we were lost while my sister and I bickered in the back seat.
And not too many years later, when World War II was behind us and my wife and I had begun our own life together, we continued the tradition. At first it was just the two of us, venturing along Route 9W to
Bear Mountain or Route 46 all the way to the Delaware Water Gap. And later we went with our own daughters, Peggy and Pattie, squirming in the back seat and bickering just the way my sister and I had.
But those Sunday drives made for time well spent, family time in which we played games like counting cows or seeing how many out of state license plates we could collect; the stuff of which memories are made.
Like the time Peggy insisted on taking her cat along and the cat got sick and threw-up all over the back seat. In a moment of exasperation I grabbed it by the scuff of its neck and tossed it into a nearby field. Then I had to spend the next hour coaxing it out from a briar patch of wild blackberry bushes while Peggy stood there crying and accusing me of killing her cat.
And there was the time we drove all the way to the Jersey shore one Sunday and on the way home my wife and I kept commenting to each other about how badly polluted the
New Jersey air had become only to discover when we got home that we had been bringing the odor with us. It turned out that in the car’s trunk, along with the wet towels and other beach paraphernalia, there was a pail of dead clams that the girls had collected.
Then there was the time we drove back into our driveway after what had been a typical aimlessly wandering kind of Sunday drive to nowhere and back and Pattie sighed with relief as she got out of the car and said, “All we did was go in a big circle.”
I thought of Pattie’s comment last Sunday as we returned home after another of our aimless drives. Maybe Pattie was right. Maybe that’s what all those Sunday Drives have finally come to… going in a circle. We’re back where we started. Once again there’s just the two of us.
But, I thought as my wife and I got out of the car, for two old people who now have trouble straightening up after a long drive, maybe going in a circle really isn’t so bad.
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