Van-verted

It seems like an eternity ago, but I did at one time consider myself a car guy; loved the wheeled beasts in facts. I’m sure in my high school locker, beside pictures of Eddie Van Halen, Steve Stevens and other ‘80’s big-haired guitar gods, nestled nicely between destroyed and collaged Honda motorcycle brochures, there were pictures of American muscle cars, Porsche 911’s and Lotus Esprit Turbos. The weird thing is I don’t even remember when it all just stopped mattering to me. But it did. If I had an aversion to the idea of the mini-van it was based more on the stereotypical owner, than any man-ly creed evidenced in a bellowed, “I would die before owning that underpowered, ill-handling snot-rag box on wheels.” Any residual car-guy-ed-ness and the corresponding van-dular distaste were washed aside by the arrival of child number three.

Bringing Lily home from hospital it became painfully clear that no extraordinary ability with packing and spatial relationships was going to allow me to overcome this interesting challenge. It was the tightest of tight fits with all children under 7 and still in booster, child and infant seats. Not only annoying, a kind of almost fun challenge, it turned out to cause physical injury. The grandparents were incapable of the contortions required and both Jennifer and I suffered injuries in the first few weeks with three car seats. We had settled into life in microscopic hell when I got a call from Mom and Dad. Would we take a used van given a very complicated chain of events orchestrated by Dad and a friend that involved somewhere between 6 and 6 separate steps? A quick tour around the interwebby and many phone calls later and I was off on a bus to become the unwilling beneficiary of a new to me Plymouth Voyager.

Jennifer immediately fell in love with our free van. My love was stunted by the cancer barely visible to the casual observer but there forming under the sliding door and around the wheel wells, the engine miss bespeaking a cylinder going down, and a maddening and terrifying clunk in the front end. It was obvious that our family was ready for the space. Like a couple returning from a high school reunion, we exhaled and settled, breathing a sigh of expansive relief. (You see the couple was wearing clothes that were too tight, pining for a life past, for youth lost; and returning home they popped open buttons, unzipped strained zippers and relaxed, realizing that the comfort of their present adult life was good enough and that there could be no going back).

We just fit in that decrepit van. And this family has always been a sucker for the quirky, for the under dog, for the less then perfect or beautiful. The van fit us as well. We’ve had just such a great year in that van. Innumerable trips to the beach, traveling to visit family, the poor old thing managed pretty well, at it’s pinnacle serving as the support vehicle for team Nicholson during Jennifer’s magical first marathon in October. We took a wreck and lovingly wrecked it; the floor usually obscured, a-wash in toys, sloughed off hoodies and toddler thrown food.

Alas, the van appears to be dying. Little things like that cylinder finally dying and leaking coming from every gasket are complicated by seemingly less important but in fact critical things like being trapped by a frustratingly finicky sliding door. Sometimes it freezes open and others it locks you in. Quirky has passed and damned annoying is front and center. It becomes harder as a father, husband and provider to, in good conscience, strap everyone in to a vehicle so very close to combusting it’s final hydrocarbons. It is time to consider replacing the free van with something far less free but far more reliable and appealing. The day will come in the not so distant future when we will be forced to hoodwink a financial institution and purchase a new van. And we’ll be all hyped on the smell, the cool features and the absence of worry, excepting the ubiquitous fear of financial ruin. That new van induced joy will be diminished by a subtler but real and powerful sense of loss for that crappy Plymouth. Isn’t it wonderful how even the most humble of objects can be a part of such rich lives and infuse our memories with such colour and character? Maybe I’ll make a planter out of it in the backyard.