The Car Your Father Drove

Using a prompt from 642 Things To Write About from the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto.

Tan Volvo Station Wagon

If ever there was a car built for Middle American dads, it’s this beige beauty. What it lacked in flashiness, it made up for in embarrassment to one’s children. Thankfully, I was lucky enough to be chauffeured around in it an an age where I was more worried about getting into the perfect attendance pizza party, but the potential was there.

Like the Wagoneer, this car also came with leather seats. Perhaps my father saw them as a status symbol. In modern cars, small children must sit in the back, but because passenger airbags didn’t yet exist, in the Volvo, it was an all out fight to see who got to sit in the passenger seat, because my dad had sprung for two sheepskin covers. Animal skin, to protect us from the other animal skin. Otherwise, one was relegated to hovering and trying to extend one’s shorts to endure the searing temperatures of the back seats. You might think Colorado summers are mild, or even a little bit chilly, but the real truth is that it’s often over 90 degrees and feels even hotter due to the state’s elevation and proximity to the sun (it's science). Imagine a cauldron of flames, then wrap it in leather and sit down on it with your sensitive, virginal skin. All for a simple trip to the grocery store where you won’t be allowed to put any Drumstick ice cream in the cart because you lipped off about being told to stop bouncing the basketball against the garage.

The one thing I did like about the Volvo was its cassette player. My dad and I would blast Don McLean, and to this day, I still remember every word of American Pie.

Wood-Paneled Jeep Wagoneer

I don’t remember the exact year my dad bought this car, let’s call it 1994, but the important thing to note is that this model was only in production from 1963 to 1991. I’m still not sure why my dad, who loves the new and shiny, spent weekends combing through the classifieds to find an impractical used car, but then there’s a lot I’ll die not knowing. We even drove an hour to test drive it, and as a man set on conservative investments, maybe he felt the commute time was already a bit of a buy-in.

I sat in the back seat during the test drive wondering what all the extra room was going to be for. Were we adding another child to the family (and if so, were the crash ratings on this thing that good)? Was my dad finally going to buy me the dog I’d spent the entirety of my short life begging for? The Wagoneer was so long, if the windows were down, there was no way in hell you were going to be able to yell up from the back seat to the front. But then to an exhausted father, maybe that’s a selling feature in itself. It also had leather seats, which Jeep probably hoped would translate to affordable luxury to a middle-class family. Unfortunately, what it translated to a child’s skin during a Colorado summer was absolute abuse. The fine leather seats would soon be covered by old towels found in a box in the garage.

And can we just talk about the name? Wagoneer. I mean, where are we going in this thing? An adventure out west? According to the popular and historically accurate game Oregon Trail, wagons are susceptible to broken tongues and axles, putting all the passengers at risk for dysentery, cholera, and snake bites. Was my dad willingly putting a few thousand dollars down for that type of risk?

Maybe my dad imagined weekend camping trips, fishing rods dangling out of the enormous back window and me in the back happily shouting, “Are there yet?!” We’d pull up to our site, fling the wood-paneled doors open and leap out of our Jeep Grand Wagoneer smiling like the perfectly-cast, model family we imagined ourselves to be.

What actually happened is that the Wagoneer turned out to be a gas guzzler, and we were back to the classifieds in a few months.