Chevy coupe

“Jesus Christ!”  I blurted out---emphasis on the first syllable, “Je-sus.”  I had tumbled off the bench seat of our old Chevy coupe when my mother slammed the brakes. My head grazed the dashboard as I toppled to the floorboard below. The brown and red threads of the tan plaid upholstery prickled my bare legs as I clambered back on the seat. 

It was 1951 and I was six years old.

The car---I’ve confirmed from photos online---was a 1940 Chevy 2-door business coupe, and about this color. The model was a Master 85, and in the brochure artwork it looks professional but sporty.  

The coupe had its own story and I learned it decades later.

That day we were headed into the city---to San Francisco, 40 minutes by car from our small town north of the Golden Gate Bridge.  I watched my mother grip the gearshift with its milky bakelite-tipped handle as she pressed in the clutch in one smooth, deft motion. She was a good driver.  

In the 1950s medical and dental appointments in San Francisco were expeditions that entailed coat, hat and gloves.  Deckled-edged Kodaks show me in a gray and white checked coat with a matching tam that my mother had sewed. I wore white gloves in little kid sizes that now seem unimaginable---clothes for city sidewalks, not the gravel roads in the county where we lived.

Our destination was 450 Sutter Street, a professional building a few blocks uphill from Union Square and one of the tallest buildings in the city at the time.  A 26-storey art deco tower, its front doors were recessed beneath a gold fan-shaped portico.  I thought my family dentist lived in a temple on the 16^th floor.  When we waited for the elevator in the black marble hallway, I craned my neck to look up at the bronze and silver ceiling. Its dimly lit zig zag shapes made me dizzy. Only recently did I learn they were Mayan revival motif designs. 

For several years my mother regaled friends and relatives with the story about my startling expletive.  As the only child of parents who had---and now it puzzles me---mostly childless friends, I often listened to adult conversation.  Grown-ups told stories about other people, but they also seemed willing, even eager, to tell stories on themselves. Adults seemed to have an invisible protective skin, and they could become a character and be made fun of, be the butt of a good joke. It was something we kids never did.

Grown-ups telling stories---when not at my expense---brought relief from well-behaved boredom. I watched as the launch of some tale snagged the scattered conversations in the room, reeling in the attention of highball-clutching adults. I listened to half-understood words and events that seemed to stretch out as if along a tightrope of telling. The tension clutched my stomach.  Back and forth my eyes darted, from teller to listeners, anxious for some weave or wobble in the story, a gasp of surprise, a sigh of let-down, or a hoot of laughter at the end.

The work of what I later learned to call literary devices seeped unnamed into my brain.   

Sixty years after I banged into the Chevy dashboard, my mother came to live with me in  Michigan.  Unable to manage in an apartment on her own, at age 81 she pulled up stakes on the west coast and moved east to share a house with me and my son. 

And of all places, in Flint.

Family recollections surfaced during the six years we lived together in Flint, and one was the back story to the 1940 Chevy coupe.  We both remembered its faded beige finish and the red pin stripe still visible along its sides the year I grazed its dashboard. According to my mother, she and her older brother had bought the car new in their hometown, Portland, Oregon.  In the course of the purchase, the dealer off-handedly mentioned that delivery charges could be saved if the car were picked up at the factory in Michigan.

Brother and kid sister set out east by train. Grand Northern’s Empire Builder ran daily from Portland to Chicago’s Union Station where they could pick up Grand Trunk Western mainline and get off at Flint.  My mother recalled being told to wait on a Saginaw Street corner for a man who would take them out to the factory---which must have been Chevy-in-the Hole. 

To save money on the return road trip to Oregon brother and sister shared a motel room and my mother remembered sleeping on a trundle bed.  At remote stops along U.S. 30 and the way home, my uncle---a jazz lover---searched out obscure recordings.  Heavy 78s in brown paper sleeves, some of them ended up in our house, gifts from my uncle to teach my mother about jazz.

Four years later, in 1944, my mother got engaged and planned to move to San Francisco where she would be married. Her brother let her take the car---he was headed to Washington, D.C., to work in the Office of Strategic Services or OSS that had been established by Roosevelt in 1942. Off to a glamorous career in the capital, my uncle readily signed over the title and threw in some jazz records. The Chevy coupe became my parents’ first car. 

By 1955, my grandparents lived with us and a more practical family vehicle was needed. One summer evening my dad pulled into the driveway in a 1950 4-door Ford custom six “executive sedan.”  A deep forest green, in the center of its grill a “bullet” jutted out that only underscored the car’s roomy boredom. 

My dad bought it used. We never again had a brand-new car like that sporty Chevy coupe.

I’m still in Flint.  My mother died here in 2008. I drive Saginaw Street and imagine her waiting on one of its gusty corners in 1940, twenty-three years old and never dreaming that she would return to this city where her first car was made. 

Growing up, I’d had to suppress a flinch whenever my mother plunged into the anecdote about my “Jesus” outburst. Now the story seems less attached to me than to places and people that I have loved. The protagonists depart, social conventions change, and places are transformed beyond recognizing. The story remains and now I can do the telling---I did learn to be one of those grown-ups who can tell stories on themselves.

Fluttered away like a pack of cards

When I was about 8 years old I was very sick with a fever that must have been unusually high.  What caused it or what my mother and grandmother surmised it might be, I don’t remember now.  But I was in bed in a dark room, restless and confused. 

The family prescription was that I needed to sleep, sleep being the general cure-all in household pediatric advice, circa 1953.  But domestic illness lore also warned that fever would spike at night. 

Worry must have been considerable.  We lived in an undeveloped area in Marin County, miles away from the nearest town, Mill Valley.  In the early 1950s neighbors were sparse, doctors unavailable.  Few people had telephones in those party line days.

My Kentucky-born grandmother mobilized.  Her remedy was a large spoon in which she crushed a single aspirin which she then dissolved with a droplet of warm water.  Into this she sprinkled some sugar and added a generous dollop of whiskey.  I know that spoon’s size and pattern---the same family silverware rests in my kitchen drawer now.

My mother propped me up and cajoled me into swallowing this potion, encouraged with a more sugar water as a chaser. 

The fever broke of course, but what I remembered as vividly as my grandmother’s nostrum was a mysterious experience I had at the time.  At some point in the darkness a large, an overstuffed armchair loomed and grew, magnifying as it moved toward me.  Other objects, chiefly furniture, ballooned and closed in on me.  Advancing, then retreating.  Expanding, then shrinking, the shapes tinged with a reddish halo.  I could close my eyes and block out the images, but when I opened them, they returned.

I think I told my mother about this---maybe that’s what galvanized my grandmother to resort to the sugar and whiskey. 

My hallucinatory experience (and I had it at least one time later) is a phenomenon called “Alice in Wonderland syndrome” (AWS) or “Alice in Wonderland-like syndrome” (AWLS).  I had nearly forgotten my childhood sensations of it until I saw an article in The New York Times (“I Had Alice in Wonderland Syndrome,” June 23, 2014).  Author Helene Stapinski reports the experience of her daughter who suffered from a bad headache at bedtime and then saw distorted perceptions like what I remembered.  A first-hand account by Robin Tricoles in the Atlantic (“Objects in the Brain May Be Bigger than They Appear,” March 9, 2015) confirms continued research and notes the distinction now made between AWS and AWLS.    

Characteristic perceptions during “Alice in Wonderland-like syndrome” include micropsia (objects appear small) or the opposite---what I experienced---macropsia (objects appear large).  In “Alice in Wonderland Syndrome” body parts grow or shrink.  The phenomenon appears chiefly in childhood, often at sleep onset, and in most cases the experience is outgrown.  Triggers seem to be infection, migraine (reputedly Lewis Carroll suffered from them), or perhaps a type of aura that precedes a migraine.  Stress or drugs---particularly cough medicines---may stimulate the syndrome, but in many cases no cause is found.

Cursory web surfing didn’t bring up much more, so---tickled as I was to recapture the memory of a strange event from over sixty years ago---I turned to the classic that gave its name to this odd childhood phenomenon.   Had I ever really read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or just seen a movie or TV adaptation?  Time to pay Wonderland a visit.

Reading Alice delighted me---it’s a gleeful take down of education, Victorian manners and smugness, and the indoctrination of children.  Nonsensical animal banter softens the parody of learning by rote and ridicule, and authority asserted by bombast and bluster.  Perplexed at the play of language and logic, disconcerted by alternately growing and shrinking, still Alice presses on.  Even the grotesque Duchess or Queen of Hearts does not diminish the enticing beauty of Wonderland; curiosity propels Alice forward. 

The Wonderland adventures climax in the final two chapters where satire turns sharp. Carroll skewers the English court system.  Accusations rest on evidence no one understands and the Queen’s dictum, “Sentence first---verdict afterward,” satisfies foolish jurors.

The plucky heroine is at an impasse.  Only a return to her real size rescues Alice.  She outgrows the Wonderland world.   In the original Tenniel drawings Alice raises her arms in mock horror, exclaiming as she escapes that it was all “nothing but a pack of cards.”

It’s pretty easy to see that Alice’s adventures mimic growing up and exploring identity.  Fantasy and whimsy capture the child’s perception of the adult world in all its bewildering arbitrariness.  But Alice is inquisitive and intrepid.   Changing size may be unsettling, but our girl is on to the main issue of life.  As she declares to the White Rabbit, “Who in the world am I?  THAT is the great puzzle.” 

My only gripe concerns Carroll’s condescending narrator; why did a Cambridge mathematician choose a voice so unworthy of this fantasy?  When Alice first encounters the White Rabbit, narrator cavils that Alice “should have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural.”  At the end he grows priggishly sentimental, blathering that one day as an adult Alice’s sister will recall funny stories and a sunny afternoon on the riverbank. 

Give me a break.

Childhood---even a loving and secure one like mine---is a weird combination of things that don’t make sense to a kid but seem quite natural.  Like my fevered experience of macropsia.  Growing up means negotiating the contradictory admonitions and exhortations of adults,  being frightened and at the same time dependent on big people in a world of rules and riddles.

My 1950s childhood seemed natural to me too.  And I navigated it pretty well.  I was a compliant kid, more eager to please than (I’m embarrassed to admit) to question---out loud at least.  Rebellion came later in the 1960s---when the wonderland garden of adulthood that beckoned to me was the counter culture. Not psychedelic hippiedom, but political protest and a rejection of middle class expectations that spumed out of dissent.  My parents were appalled.  In the end the social side of my rebellion mattered less than they feared.  By the 1990s, many proprieties of my forebears, conventions I grew up with, collapsed and fluttered away like Alice’s pack of cards.  Flimsy and foolish.

I’m in my seventh decade of life with a lot of time to mull over my past, a biohazard of longevity.  A strange childhood event and a literary allegory of adulthood has set me to musing.  That pack of adulthood cards---or at least the part of the deck called middle age---has fluttered away.  In its stead, the “great puzzle” of who I am seems to have returned.  I feel as if I am growing again, coming to myself as an older adult. 

It’s all a bit disconcerting, as might have been said in Alice’s day.  Did I expect at this at this point to have more certainty, more peace of mind?  I never thought about it.  My memory of that childhood fever recalls my redoubtable maternal forebears who cared for me, and whose genes I share.  And like Alice, I am curious; there are still mysteries of my inner life to explore and a self and a story to explain.   

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