For roughly 11 of the last 32 hours, I have been folded into the back seat of a two-door Mini Cooper. I can get into the car without too much trouble, but to get out requires my gingerly backing out, posterior first, and hoping for the best. It is ungainly as it sounds. I had never thought that the ability to get in and out of a Mini Cooper would feel like a reward for taking care of myself for the last three decades, but it does. It is a test of stamina, strength, and flexibility on four very cute, very small wheels.
We are in the Mini for two reasons. One: It is the last car standing. The three of us — Chris, our daughter, and I — had plans to visit Athens for the eclipse. But the time came, and the family sedan was in the shop, and our mechanic could not get to it. It was either the Miata, with one of us tied like luggage to the trunk, or the Mini Cooper. The Mini it was. Two, and perhaps more broadly: Blanche, the family’s elderly station wagon, is on her last wheel, and our daughter had been stranded one too many times by the wagon’s overheating engine. She needed a new car, and she wanted a Mini Cooper.
By the way, if you ever want to hear good things about yourself as a parent, I highly recommend purchasing a car for your 18 year-old child. In the last weeks, I have enjoyed an unprecedented boost in my approval rating, although (sadly) the forecast seems to be trending downwardly as I type.
The boost could not have come at a better time. I saw my hairdresser on Friday, and it is fair to say that he was not exactly ecstatic about my decision to go grey. It is also fair to say that this announcement amounted to the hair equivalent of the it’s not you, it’s me talk, the one that ends with but we can still be friends! At the appointment, I faced all sorts of dire predictions about my hair, the most troubling being that I would have to adopt a completely different style of dress, one that was not nearly as adventurous and fun. This statement hit me squarely where I live. As I mentally contemplated the next 40 or so years with a generous bosom, wearing matronly black dresses with lace collars, tightly tying sensible oxfords, and tucking wilted Kleenexes into my sleeves, I struggled to equate salt-and-pepper hair with looking like a babushka.
I think the process is much easier and much less fraught if you are a man.
I walked out with a short haircut that makes me look like Laura Bush, an unlikely pitstop on my way to looking like Barbara Bush. I liked it. But I liked it even more when I got home, grabbed a jar of Chris’ pomade, and slicked it all back and up into a pompadour. Nobody’s babushka wears a pompadour, I thought triumphantly, and even though I was standing in flowered pajamas, I carefully applied a healthy dose of red lipstick and sneered at the mirror. Chris found me there – my right hand raised in sort of a scratching kitty gesture – and started singing “Addicted to Love.” That happy comparison was enough for me, for I am easy like that, and I found myself falling in love all over again at the rate of 32 feet per second per second.
Hair aside, it had been a rough few weeks, which made the Mini Cooper boost most appreciated. Our son had been due home from Maine last Friday night, and rather than arriving in Savannah at 11:15 p.m. as scheduled, he arrived instead in Atlanta at 3 a.m. on Saturday morning. There are few worse feelings than being stranded in an airport late night, and I now know one of them: Having your homeward-bound 19 year-old son stranded in an airport late at night. He would text with updates and cancellations, and even my phone’s chirping alerts sounded frantic. I pulled out a painting that I started and abandoned three months ago, and I worked on it until his grandfather safely collected him from the airport. (I still dislike the painting immensely, so it’s not like the endeavor made me hate something I used to love.) After three months away, he made it home 17 hours late. Within 22 hours, after two family meals, three loads of laundry, and multiple trips to the trunk of his car, he was off again to college.
My daughter is in college, too, attending high school classes in the morning and college classes in the afternoon. I told her that dual enrollment was like a year of playing JUCO ball before she hit D-1. By the blank look she gave me in return, I felt like I’d failed as a parent: My own flesh and blood failed to understand such a simple sports metaphor. But she is where her brother was two years ago, in his own senior year of high school, and over the last 24 months, I’d managed to forget what a difficult time it was. She wants out. Yesterday. The day before yesterday. Her feelings about living at home can be distilled into these brilliant lyrics from Motley Crue: Girl, don’t go away mad. Girl, just go away.
It is hard.
At some point this week, I fell apart and cried to Chris that our son was gone, our daughter was on her way out, and the dog would certainly not be around much longer. Chris hugged me and said, You’ve still got me, and then, after a moment, I’m so sorry. And we both laughed.
All of this explains why I am in the back seat of a Mini Cooper, for in addition to watching the eclipse, Chris and I took her to Athens yesterday for a college tour today.
It is time.
After the information session ended, we gathered her brother, and the four of us walked to Sanford Stadium. The geography department had organized an eclipse-watching event there, and despite excellent publication of the event and even a hype video, it was as if the school expected no one to come. They opened two gates initially; people crushed in; and within minutes, all 13,000 eclipse-watching glasses were gone. Getting into the stadium on football game days is an affair conducted with near-military precision. Getting into the stadium to watch the eclipse was a bit of a cluster. Someone finally figured out that 30,000 people or so were trying to enter, so the gates opened and traffic eased and the four of us found ourselves sitting in an area of the lower deck shaded by the upper deck.
Even in the shade, it was like sitting in a giant steel wok. But the hosting geography professor – clad entirely in black in 94 degree Georgia weather – put on an incredible show. We learned facts about solar eclipses. (A vicious war being waged in the 6th Century BCE ended due to a solar eclipse.) Since we were sitting in a stadium of an SEC university, the professor peppered those facts with facts about Georgia athletics. (The last solar eclipse was in 1979, the same year that the University hired a full-time coach for women’s basketball.) We watched the shadow of the eclipse travel across the United States, and we watched the moon entirely blot out the sun by video feed from Knoxville, Tennessee. The crowd cheered when we found that the event had made the New York Times above the fold. The temperature dropped. The shade deepened. And the big moment arrived.
It was a surprise. Athens was not in the totality zone, but it promised a 99.1% eclipse. Although it was noticeably darker, a fair amount of light could be generated by such a small amount of sun.
The event ran from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m., but when the eclipse passed at 2:38, the entire stadium began to empty. Wait, said the geography professor, wait, there’s more. He touted more facts, more eclipse-related music, a football autographed by Kirby Smart. As we walked out, I heard him saying again, Come back.
Our son had had a class with this professor, and he told me that the man was a very good teacher. He was. I learned a lot this afternoon. You plan, and sometimes things don’t go quite as expected. You wait for a big moment, it passes, and you want it to continue. But there is a natural end, and even though you beg and plead, life moves on. Even if the sun is almost totally obscured, it is still there, shining more light than ever seemed possible in the circumstances.
We could not be swayed to wait or come back, and the four of us walked out in a throng of people. We made our way back to the Mini, and packed in tightly, we drove our son back to his dorm. He needed a nap, a shower, and some time to study. Unable to get out quickly, I waved good-bye from the back seat. His sister took the wheel. As she worked the manual transmission, our progress was halting at first, but as she grew more comfortable, the car took off, smoothly hurtling down the road back to Savannah. I stayed in the cocoon of the back seat, watching the back of her head and listening to the hum of the engine.
ALC
