Between the Lines -- Byron de Arakal

I’ve been off the tracks since Saturday. Run aground and out of sorts.

Drifting on the backwater. It’s what happens to me when a flurry of

random thinking and fretting and realizing invades me like a swarm of

flies on a gooey Louisiana afternoon.

I’m mired in this head stupor, should you care, because of the car. It

wasn’t here Friday, and so all was placid and fine. But now it lurks --

sardonic and beckoning -- outside my house. It’s here to take my boy away

from me. And this is what it’s like to have your heart drawn and

quartered.

As you read, my oldest child holds in his hand (the one that once

clutched the knob of his pacifier as he slept all swaddled and warm) the

title and keys to his first automobile. He is euphoric and a foot taller

and his wings are stretched wide. I’m dazed and confused and utterly

apoplectic by the sudden turn of events. I want to hunt beneath the bed

for 1986 (the year he was born) brush it up a bit and pickle it for

eternity. He can’t wait for July, the month he turns 16.

Now, the car came to him quite suddenly, and by extraordinary and

generous means. Close friends -- whose children my boy had looked after

at times -- purchased a new car. They’d plotted at first to relinquish

their aging sedan to charity in exchange for whatever meager tax benefit

the government uses to reward such philanthropy. But just prior to

pulling the trigger on that plan, the prettier half of that marriage

phoned my wife (the prettier half of our union) to inquire if she knew

anyone who needed a car.

Ever the clear thinker and strategist, my wife reminded her that we’d

soon have a driver in the house. “We’d love for him to have it,” came the

voice on the other end of the line. And so the deal (to his elation and

my quiet horror) was done.

On Saturday, we visited them and examined the vehicle. It was clear

soon enough to my son, indeed all of us, that it suffers from the usual

maladies that plague a 12-year-old car. Some scratches and odd rattles

and the creeping drip-drip from an old seal on the transmission pan. Some

stuff inconsequential cosmetics, others easily and cheaply repaired. But

he didn’t care. To him it was a Porsche just out of the box. A girl in a

bikini. Plus the price -- a mere dollar -- fit his budget.

Once we got the car home, I scoured the thing as if it were the girl

my boy was to marry. Would it be good enough? Would it be reliable? Would

it strand him or break his heart? But really the answers (both rationale

and emotional, and therefore at odds) didn’t matter because it was what

he wanted -- and needed -- to seize his independence.

And so I found myself wrestling with the reality of my first born

standing on the cusp of manhood ready to take flight. A man-child with a

clear plan and a relentless focus on what he wants his life to be, and

already some distance down the road to that destination.

Every minute of these last few days have pulled at my eyebrows to

remind me of it. He spends the bulk of his free time with his band holed

up in our garage, huddled over their mixing board and laying down tracks

and working hard to make it. And I look at him and see the drummer and

the sound engineer and the producer who will “change the music business,”

as he is wont to say, in near full flight.

Which never bothered me so much because he was home. The car will

change all that. It will carry him out into the world where the creeps

and goons dangerously race about. Where the martini-saturated careen.

Where the mascara queens apply and drive. But it will carry him, too, to

the life he has mapped for himself. To school. To his gigs. To the

studio. On the dates he’ll have with the girl he’ll marry and the young

ladies he won’t.

That car will take my boy away, and it needs to be that way. That’s

because it’s his time to sit in the driver’s seat. To decide direction

and where to turn. To experience the potholes and the fender benders and

the exquisite freedom of the wide-open road.

I only wish I could come along.

Byron de Arakal is a freelance writer and communications consultant.

He resides in Costa Mesa. His column appears Wednesdays. Readers can

reach him with news tips and comments via e-mail at o7

[email protected] . Visit his Web site at o7 www.byronwriter.comf7

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