10.25.23

I like to drive my mom’s car, a white VW convertible Beetle, around in the back roads surrounding my hometown after I run one (1) errand, so at least I feel like I did something. Today, I went to Target to purchase a black purse for a wedding I’m going to on Saturday with a head-to-toe-black dress code (fashionista knows where to shop). I also buy a small can of Pringles from the checkout line. I shove them in the cupholder of my mom’s car then subsequently shove three to six chips at a time into my mouth while I handle the steering wheel with one hand, very exposed in the convertible at a stoplight. This is the biggest drawback of this car. What if someone just leaps into my backseat?! Anything could happen!

On Thursday when I came north, I wasn’t expecting to attend a funeral in my time upstate. I arrived at the Albany-Rensselaer station around 1pm on Thursday, got into my dad’s car, and he informed me that my grandfather, my mom’s father, had passed away twenty minutes ago. I had just missed him. I bit my lip til it bled and we rode home in silence. The tone of my trip shifted. I had just purchased an outfit for this black-dress-code wedding, and I now had a funeral to attend.

On Friday afternoon, I set out to drive back down to my apartment in the city to pick up this godforsaken outfit, and immediately drive back to my parents’ place. It was more-or-less six straight hours in the car, my mom’s car. It was rainy and slippery on the Taconic, but the leaves were pretty — we are in peak-foliage in this region of New York State. And I would rather just do the drive, listening to Taylor Swift’s Evermore and Charlotte Cornfield’s Highs in the Minuses, than go to the mall, once bustling with Delia’s and Orange Julius and flirtatious teens, now seemingly filled only with stores invented for sitcoms to avoid copyright infringement and a struggling Macy’s, making a likely-futile attempt at finding another new, all-black outfit. Papa would have wanted me to be frugal — such was his way. I don’t wear a lot of black. A second black outfit would have been a stupid investment.

So today, I drove for pleasure — I listened to a playlist I made a few years ago, songs I used to listen to during peak-COVID times, winding around back county roads to the tune of the Bee Gees and Linda Ronstadt and friends of mine and Paul Williams and others. I remember moments of respite from staying at my parents house in 2020, thinking of a boy I almost-dated but didn’t due to the pandemic, of friends who I wasn’t sure still thought of me, of my family I hadn’t seen, driving around by myself on sunny Summer afternoons. Isolating, liberating. Lonely but not, like now.

I drive through a familiar route of farm-flanked roads from Nassau into Chatham, the low afternoon sun peeking through the clouds and shining through the Autumn trees. The oranges and yellows and reds toss stained glass images across my windshield and I think fondly of my Papa, whose funeral we attended yesterday, who we will never not miss, who worked in stained glass often when he was younger and made several pieces that live in my parents’ house. He would have loved a day like this — unseasonably warm for late October, though he would always be gone off to Florida with my Nana by this time of year.

I drive past swaths of land scattered with cows and horses and alpacas. I sing loudly, with abandon, well-knowing that passersby would be able to hear me better than they could hear the music I sing along to. The sun lowers closer to the horizon and it gets colder. I turn the heated seat on and sigh heavily, repeatedly. It’s been a very long week. A very long few months. Hospital visits and text updates and breath-catching phone calls. I turn down a road that ends up leading to where I thought it would and applaud myself for my semi-decent sense of direction. The surface tension of my waterline is tested as I skip over CCR’s version of “Proud Mary.” I would generally prefer the Tina Turner version, but the Creedence version is Papa’s favorite song, and I’m not sure I’m ready.

I return home in the few minutes before the sun sets, to the house that Papa built with my parents some thirty-plus years ago. I laugh with my mom and dad in the kitchen and talk about everyone we saw yesterday at the service (including a woman named Janice who said that Papa was her first steady boyfriend — which is pretty rich, since he and my Nana got together at age thirteen, so, her age-12-steady-boyfriend. “Janice has a lot of nerve showing up here…” my cousin Anna whispered into my ear, which made me laugh so hard I almost peed myself in the receiving line). How nice that they came, wild what they said. He would have loved this, he would have hated that. We laugh hard, we cover the ache of our loss with shit-talking about people we hate. We have dinner. We watch Theater Camp on my recommendation, since I saw it in the theater a few months back. And my mom, at the end of an emphatic, glowing review of the movie, says to me, “I can see why you liked it.”