"Granma, your car is no longer 'the fun car,'" nine-year-old Marshall matter-of-factly announces as I am driving him and his two brothers to the school bus stop.
I am not surprised by his declaration. I am surprised, however, by how long it has taken my grandson with no guile to fess up to me.
There was a time when my car was indeed “the fun car.” Those halcyon days of early car ownership, two and a half years ago, when my grandchildren came to my house to play not with me nor the toys in my basement, but with my new Tesla Model Y, my new toy in the driveway. They swayed and bopped to the light show–music playing from the external speakers while lights, windows, mirrors, and even the trunk danced to the rhythm. They raced beach buggies, fought warriors, and moved pawns and rooks through an entire arcade of games on the touchscreen. And they squealed at the six different fart sounds available in the Emissions Testing Mode. My house has never been so spotless following my grandchildren’s visits than during those weeks.
It was Adella who christened my car “the fun car.” (Lower case, perhaps suggesting it was not a Proper Noun sort of name.) I noticed the name when it popped up on my touchscreen after one of the cherubs’ visits. Undoubtedly when she was customizing those fart sounds, she found the prompt to name the car and did so without much thought, unlike Pop Pop, who had deliberated for weeks about an appropriate name for his Model 3 before finally settling on “Charley” in homage to John Steinbeck’s standard poodle in the travelogue Travels with Charley. “The fun car” was not a moniker I would have picked. Yet its whimsy delighted me.
“I know. I know,” I say. “My car is no longer ‘the fun car.’” I finally admitted it out loud. Pop Pop’s car was now the car of favor.
The popularity of my car tanked the moment Pop Pop traded his Model 3 in for a Model S. It was not Scott’s intention to usurp my car’s role. But Tesla’s technology has become Pop Pop’s Achilles’ heel. He, who until Tesla came into his life, had never bought a new car and had driven all his previous cars until their last gasps, had felt compelled to upgrade his Tesla Model 3 in order to move from hardware 3 to hardware 4. Of course, all this was lost on the boys. All they care about is that there is a screen in the middle of the back seat that works while the car is driving. Pop Pop’s car is now the fun car, even if Pop Pop has transferred the name Charley, along with the Full Self-Driving software, to the new Model S.
No sense dwelling on my demise in status, I think. I change the subject. “You know why Pop Pop named his car “Charley,” don’t you?” I ask.
Of course, they don’t. But the rhetorical question primes my story.
“A long time ago, there was a man named Steinbeck who wrote a book about driving across the country with his dog named Charley. Pop Pop named his car Charley because he sees his car as a travel companion just like that dog. Steinbeck took Charley to all sorts of places all across the United States. . . .”
“But . . .,” Marshall interrupts aghast. “Is Pop Pop going to drive all across the country? That will take two years.”
And so my literary lesson is cut short. And before I can describe one of my favortie scenes when to Steinbeck’s dismay Charley ignores a giant redwood tree, not duly appreciating the opportunity afforded the beloved poodle. A story these two boys, who love nothing more than spraying a tree in the wild, would have loved.
“Oh, no,” I laugh. “Pop Pop likes driving Charley, a lot. But he doesn’t like him that much.”
And then I ask, “So, Marshall,” I say, “What would you name my car?”
He thinks a minute. Then he says, “The Fast Mobile.”
Apt, I think. My car can, in fact, go from 0-60 in 4.8 seconds. An excellent feature for the several merges required to get from my house to their bus stop. But it is not the acceleration rate of my car, but rather how I drive my car that Marshall is considering.
He knows Granma has a lead foot, even if my acceleration rate is set to “Chill” mode. As the older child, he usually wins the tussle for the vaunted middle seat. This small center seat has no window and is made even smaller by the encroachment of Alex’s car seat, but oh what a view. Perched in the middle, he can monitor our drive. He vigilantly watches the large touchscreen in the center of my dashboard. He tracks our position in the lane, the speed limit, and my current speed on the left half of the screen. On the right half, he sees the map of our route, follows our position on it, and tracks the estimated time of our arrival. He very much knows how fast Granma drives our fifteen-minute route: he is monitoring whether or not we will have time to stop at Dunkin Donuts. It is curious that his pleas for me to obey the speed limit in September now have given way to “Can’t you go any faster, Granma?”
“Or maybe,” Marshall continues, ”we could call it The Honey Mobile.”
"The Honey Mobile?” I ask.
“Yes,” he explains. ”Because honey is so slippery.”
Hmm, I think. Has this child ever spooned or dripped honey on a biscuit or peanut butter sandwich? I think of honey as sticky, not slippery. Is there some cartoon or video game that has led him to that conclusion? Some challenge of Mr. Beast? I am about to attempt another lesson, but decide to let that one slide.
Then six-year-old Max, he, who has lost car seat scuffle simply because he is younger, joins in, hoping to at least win the naming contest.
“THE CUBE MOBILE," Max shouts. (Max lives life at 80 decibels.) "I WOULD LIKE TO NAME YOUR CAR THE CUBE MOBILE.” A name that reflects his current interest in math rather than a descriptor for Model Y, more curvy than angular.
“Yeah, right,” Marshall says, calling him out with just a hint of sacrasm appropriate for a nine-year-old not yet jaded by adolescence. “Max, this car is not a cube.”
“Oh, yeah, right,” Max quickly accedes.
“RECTANGLE MOBILE,” he then shouts, his enthusiasm evident.
But before Max can unleash a panoply of all the geometric shapes he knows, and before Marshall can correct Max with reasoning and logic, we are at the bus stop. Thankfully. And before Marshall can shoot down Max's second choice as well, Marshall and Max are gathering backpacks and jackets and scurrying off to their friends at the bus stop.
I sigh. As I often do when my little cherubic hellions have been discharged from my care to make their way into the world at large. And then I smile. For my car to be considered as some sort of mobile is to place it in the same category as the batmobile, which is to suggest that I, too, am a superhero. Perhaps false illusions of grandeur. But not bad for a granny.
The bus comes. They scamper on. The bus goes. Now it is just me and three-year-old Alex in the car. We settle in for the twenty-minute wait for his bus.
And as Alex presses all the buttons on my touchscreen (and without my knowledge actually activates the fart mode on the external speaker on my car), I consider the issue of my car’s outdated, obsolete name that Marshall has so kindly brought to my attention. Alex calls my car “Gamma’s car.” He does not say much. So his words count. But I kinda like "the fun car." I did not choose the name. It was thrust upon me. (Thanks, Adella.) And I freely admit my car no longer lives up to its name. Pop Pop’s car is, indeed, “the fun car.”
By the time Alex's bus arrives, I realize all my internal debate is moot: I am far too comfortable in my learned helplessnes is most things technological. Changing the name would not only require me to make the effort to do so, but also require me to learn how to do so.
Then, I spy the glovebox. The glovebox that requires a page in the Tesla Owner’s Manual to learn how to operate it. Every car has a glovebox. How many decades has it been since anyone actually stored their driving gloves in a glovebox? It stores car registrations, insurance cards, maybe even a pen or two, but no gloves. Nonetheless, it is still called a glovebox.
“The fun car” it is and shall ever be.
