🧵 Thursday Thread: Winter in the White Car

Have you ever driven blind, but ended up somewhere meaningful?

During the year of my very bad divorce, my three kids were 10, 8, and 5. Billie was just starting kindergarten. They had otherwise never been in any kind of daycare or preschool. I was a brand-new first-grade teacher. I had never been a teacher before (I also had no degree in teaching—private school loopholes.) Nor had I ever worked full-time out of the house as a mother.

The man I was divorcing was suing me for custody of the three kids I had stayed home with for 10 years (he lost, but it cost me 24 months of my life, two custody evaluations, forty thousand dollars in legal bills for me, and other losses too painful to quantify), while also very publicly campaigning to have me terminated at the school were I had just started teaching, and where our children attended.

Meanwhile, I was responsible for the mortgage and all the other household bills, the kids, the dog, shoveling, and whatever other household things I was supposed to be doing, most of which I ignored (sorry, neighbors, I know that was a snowy year).

God, that was a terrifying time.

Anyway, I was left with this unreliable old Volvo that my ex-husband and I had bought from a newspaper ad not long before we split. It was a terrible winter car with a lot of quirks ranging from annoying to dangerous. One of those quirks was that the defrost was broken, or something with the heat was broken, and it resulted in the windshield icing over from the inside of the car, making it impossible to see out.

What I would do, since I had to get back and forth from school/work, is stay on city streets, go slow, scrape the windshield in front of me with a credit card as best I could, and give my older daughter another credit card to scrape her side.

Telling this story now, I wonder why I didn’t try to get the defroster/heat fixed. I don’t know the answer. I guess one reason is that every minute I wasn’t at the school, I was taking care of my kids, and if I wasn’t taking care of my kids, on the two nights very other week that they were with their dad—this was their “schedule” those first two years—I was incapacitated on my couch. Even for the presidential election, I could not force myself off that couch. Also, I had never sought a car repair in my life. I didn’t know where to start, and couldn’t muster the energy to figure it out.

So, I drove blind.

Eventually, sometime during at the onset of the second winter of this, I did something else I’d never done alone before: I went to a car dealership and bought a very cheap new car on a what I now know was a criminally predatory bad loan, and my kids and I road to school in style with the windows down and the heater blasting. We started joking then about writing a story called "Winter in the White Car,” where a little family would have various adventures, ultimately transformative ones, as a result of their janky, iced-over Volvo.

We never did write that story, but the phrase “winter in the white car” became something of a familial idiom, one we used then (and occasionally still do now) to refer to anything particularly scary, publicly humiliating (driving with your windows down in winter, scraping away at the inside of your windshield), and a little bit dangerous, a chronic sort of trial that is awful a the time, but funny(ish) later, and the indisputable source of new strength.

So this morning, when we woke up to piles of Minnesota snow (see current view from our porch), Billie sent me a version of a poem they’ve been playing with forever, one that’s part of a poetry manuscript they’ve been at for a few years.

driving

blind

that winter we pile—all of us—into the Volvo

[appraised value: $3,000, awarded to her]

Monday morning it proves it runs steady in the

driveway as we search for shoes, hats, violins

it’s running but blunt cold when we double

buckle puzzle with scooted knees and hips

it’s cold because it’s winter

and the heat is broken

i scrape frost collecting a pile

of tender ice beneath my nail

my mother drives slowly; her eyes set

and mug full, spills punctuating every turn

hot coffee froths on the frozen floor mat

and the smell of old earth fills our car

across town students are already shedding jackets

and boots and pooling into my mother’s classroom

broken heat means no defrost

windows opaque with ice and

nothing to do but roll them down

jut heads out and shout CAR

I am pretty sure Billie never rode in the front seat? Or maybe they did, this was 1995, but still, I’m pretty sure Sophie would have pitched a fit about it, so I really don’t know. Billie’s right about the yelling Car! part—that was part of the operation, since I couldn’t see out the side windows.

Anyway, I don’t know why I’m telling you this, other than to say, it does remind of the E.L. Doctorow bit about writing books being like driving in the fog at night, how you can only see to the end of your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

And that gets me thinking about how all creative writing is like that, we’re always just feeling our way through it, searching for something meaningful and true. And that, of course, brings me back to this constant fixation I have about writing being synonymous for living.

Because what is it to make a life, after all, other than to chase some hazy vision, by trying to shape the raw material you’re given into something more, try to sculpt it with own two hands into a reflection of an idea you only partially understand, like a language you used to speak or are only just starting to learn, then watch as the wave or the wind or the rain or the snow swallows or blows or melts or buries your creation.

And then you try again, but harder, or softer, or with a little more heart, except by this time, the hazy vision has changed again.

In a way, then, winter in the white car is always coming and going, right?

What’s your most recent or most memorable or most poignant or funniest or weirdest (or, or, or) “winter in the white car,” whether as art or life or both, and where did it lead you?

Love,

Jeannine

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