The heat makes me restless. Let’s go for a ride, I tell my son.
I use my father’s words. “Let’s go for a ride,” he’d say, and we’d scramble for our shoes. We only went for rides late in the day. Any earlier and it’d be too hot in the station wagon, and I don’t remember my dad ever viewing air conditioning as an option. That’s why God made windows.
“Let’s go for a ride” had any number of meanings to a bored kid in a small town. It meant driving up to the mesa, past the dump and beyond the paved road into the flatlands that hid arroyos and jackrabbits and roadrunners. It meant rolling past farms where the air smelled like dust and hay. It meant sticking your arm out the window and letting the wind buffet your hand, fingers riding a current while you half-listened to your parents talk. The ride allowed you to imagine what they must have been like when they were young — though they were still young then; you just didn’t know it.
He must have won her heart with his humor, you’d think, and right then she’d laugh, turning toward the open window, letting the wind blow her hair back.
“Let’s go for a ride” meant driving over the railroad tracks and across the river and realizing that even the familiar can be strange. Most of all, it meant pulling up to one of my parents’ friends’ houses unannounced. The adults would visit. The kids would play late into the evening.
And since this was the practice in my New Mexican town, it meant that if we weren’t going for a ride that weekend, someone else was. At any moment, they might knock on the door and come spilling into the house and, just like that, a slow summer day was full of possibility.
Do people make unannounced visits like that anymore? I mean, outside towns with newspapers that tell you Beth and Charlie’s grandchildren are out for the summer. My aunt and uncle in New Mexico are still hard at it. They take weekend drives and stop along the way to see folks. My auntie called me once to say she and my uncle were coming to Denver to visit. “We’re just leaving Pueblo,” she said. An hour and a half’s notice. It had to be unprecedented.
I imagine some people would think the practice of such visits rude, an imposition that forces the body into action and the mind to race: Is the bathroom clean? Do we have anything other than milk and water to drink? I’m right in the middle of a “CSI” marathon.
We are busy. We have schedules now, and people with schedules are people with routines, and people with routines become people who don’t really like to see them disturbed. Unless, of course, we have planned for disturbances, and we call those “play dates.” We telephone instead of visit, text instead of call. We invite isolation and then lament it.
I rarely visit anyone unannounced these days. Not even my sister. A pity, that. The unannounced visits of friends and family offered a chance to be surprised again. Not simply by their presence at the door but by gaiety and spontaneity, of which there are far too little. A planned visit requires preparation on the part of the host and guest. Getting prepared is akin to girding oneself, protected behind the social face.
It always seemed to me that one reason my parents’ friendships were so strong and lasting was that they had long since abandoned that face. They answered the door as they were, as they are.
Where are we going? my son asks. I don’t know, I tell him, but already I am meandering toward the home of an elderly couple I know and love. Both are in their 80s.
“Walking on thin ice,” the old man likes to say, before he’s off to fix a tenant’s faucet.
Sixty-seven years they’ve been married. They bicker, then get on with the day just like my grandma and grandpa did. You start with love and then add give-and-take, and that’s how you get here, the man says.
I nearly talk myself out of stopping when I see the lights on in the living room and the old man outside watering. I pull over. She comes to the door in her house dress and holds my face in her hands — where have you been? — and then leads me to the couch.
I’m not doing too well, she says. “It’s my heart. I could go any day now, but before I do, I want to get this couch reupholstered.”
What for? her husband says. She shoots him a look and says, “I don’t want to leave you with this dirty couch.” I don’t care, he says. “I do,” she says. “I want you to have a nice couch and drapes, too. Look at those drapes. They’re gray.” I think they look fine, her husband says.
They go back and forth and ask my opinion, and I offer it and think, this is the gift of the unplanned visit. One moment, otherwise unwitnessed, in which a woman tries to tell the man with whom she has spent her life that she still loves him.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
