When I was 6 years old we had a green, 4 door, Oldsmobile Omega. Our family was growing however, and with the addition of Grant, the 5 of us were outgrowing the sedan. Mom and Dad decided to get rid of it and buy a van. I was heartbroken. I cried. I begged Mom and Dad to let me keep it. They said they would take a picture of me with it, so I could remember it. It’s a picture of me, just me, standing next to the car. I cried myself to sleep that night.
We just got rid of our 2002 Ford Escape. It kept having issues, and it wasn’t worth repairing. It made me sad. That was the first car Lianne and I ever bought. She was pregnant with Ava and we wanted something a little roomier. We went on a lot of trips in that car, usually overnight. The kids would fall asleep in crazy positions, but that thing would always get us to where we were going. There were a lot of memories tied to the Escape.
I also just sold our 2008 Grand Caravan. We bought it because of that picture of the kids sleeping. As they grew, the Escape simply wasn’t big enough. We put 240,000 on the van, traveling as far as Orlando, Detroit, and Montreal. It was sad to let it go. So many memories.
We recently found a bunch of children’s cassette tapes. It was a subscription service we had back when Jaron was a kid. Each tape had songs about a specific theme, and they came with a book. We listened to those every time we hopped in the car. I was throwing them out when Lianne stopped me. “You can’t throw those out! They’re precious!”
I wanted to get rid of them. I pointed out that they are useless to us now. They are cassette tapes! Simplify! Lianne insisted that we keep them. We went back and forth, and surprisingly, I think I heard Lianne utter the word “grandkids” at some point. Finally, we listened to some of the songs. “There’s a dinosaur knocking at my door. Knocking 1, 2, 3.” I admit, it took us back to the time when Jaron was 4 years old and Ava was just an infant. I could feel the same feelings I had back then as a young father. I felt some uncertainty about raising a daughter, but also plenty of excitement about the future. The musical quality was subpar. The lyrics were cheesy. The memories were real.
We are constantly going to the thrift store with bags of clothes, books, toys, kitchen items, and electronics. We visited Amish country many years ago and ever since then we’ve tried to declutter and simplify. Some things we thought were important, so we kept them in the attic. Then the house fire tore through our attic and destroyed the yearbooks and most of the notes Lianne and I wrote to each other in high school. All of my college punk band’s paraphernalia went up in smoke. It was sad to find charred baseball cards in the rubble of the garage after the fire. A few things did survive though, and most of them are tied to specific life events. On the TV show “Hoarders” they explain how every item has a story. I can relate.
Getting rid of the Escape and the van was tough. It isn’t the cars themselves that have any value. It is the memories associated with the cars that are important to me. I could sit in the front seat of the Escape and remember carpooling with my coworkers at 4:30am on the way to my shift job at the Naval Base. I could open the back of the van and remember sitting there with the family at a drive-in theater in upstate New York watching “Cars 2.” Or sitting on the roof in an abandoned field with the kids, watching meteors. Our family was young. Those times were incredibly sweet. The van is a money pit. The memories are priceless.
Jaron is getting married in less than two months. Ava is getting ready to turn 18. Lianne and I just celebrated 26 years of marriage. We’re at halftime, looking back over the first half with a lot of nostalgia and very little regret. I’ve realized that we don’t need old, broken down vehicles to remind us of where we’ve been. We can see our past by looking at our present. Our lives are built on those treasured memories.
Besides, I’m more excited about where we’re going than where we’ve been. The first half was fun, but the second half is going to be even better.
We kept those cassette tapes though.