The lanes of cars are uniformly, methodically moving upstream alongside the Hudson River. It’s still light and the air is fall-brisk, the clouds tinged with the showy colors of the setting sun. It’s Friday evening. A weekend on the horizon. I’m headed out of New York City, aiming north toward Connecticut and then Massachusetts, finally Boston. In the seat behind me is my son, age two and a half, in a car seat, with a board book about dinosaurs and a couple of hard-plastic figures, the rage of the under-six crowd at that time—the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. My son’s favorites are clutched in both his hands, Donatello, the tech nerd with a purple mask and a staff, and Michelangelo, the party dude with orange mask and nunchucks (kids aged two knew about nunchucks?!). A sippy cup with orange juice rests next to his left thigh on the car seat. He’s content. I glance at him often in the rearview mirror. “We’ll be at Danbury for dinner in one hour,” I say enthusiastically, hoping that the Friday night commuters won’t prove me wrong. I turn on the evening news. Always NPR. I roll down my window, rest my arm on the door and say, “I love you!” “Love you”, he replies. He starts dreaming, I bet, of French fries, and Big Macs at Danbury and then frozen yogurt at the rest stop just as we enter the Mass Pike. We’ll reach Boston by nine and I’ll carry him from the car, where he’s fallen asleep in his car seat, to his bed with bottom drawers, three floors walk-up in a triple-decker on the “Line,” Beacon Street dividing Cambridge and Somerville.
I’d done the five-hour drive that morning, so I could pick him up from his playgroup and then drive the five to six hours back that same day. I’ll repeat that on Sunday, Every other weekend. For nine years. We came to know our favorite exits and the food we’d get and the many routes in and out of the enormous city on the East Coast and the significance of Framingham on the Mass Pike when I was gunning to get home to Boston.
The bobble-head boy, as he dozed on the Mass Pike, in the car seat at the back of my car, is a father today, of a just-beginning-boy-toddler, almost a year old. He sends photos and videos every day of my grandson, posting to a shared album on Google. In one my son is sitting on the grass in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and making faces over his shoulder at his own son, who is dissolving in giggles, his eyes sparkling with unrefined joy. It’s my favorite photo for now. We are all home.
Ei I remember those days!