My parents still take Sunday drives, a pastime reminiscent of an era when automobiles were still a novelty. I think of driving aimlessly (”meandering,” I believe it’s called) in the light of current gas prices, and as such have written off Sunday drives as my parents’ little personal extravagance that they kindly share with me. Similar to how they regularly buy the deluxe mixed nuts—the ones with pecans—and let me eat as much of it as I want.
Our meandering involves the regular inspection of Pass Christian and Bay St. Louis, two little beach towns that took the brunt of Katrina and responded with a blossoming of coffee shops and art galleries. Mom doesn’t see so well anymore, but that doesn’t stop her from driving. She rolls along at about 35mph while Dad serves as her copilot. He’s responsible for cleaning her sunglasses with his shirt and changing the radio station. My job is to sit in the backseat and take nervous stock of the long chain of cars that inevitably forms behind us.
As we creep slowly through the backcountry, Mom points out dusty roads that are named after distant relatives. Edwin Ladner Rd. JP Ladner Rd. Butch Ladner Rd. Mom is also a Ladner—one out of millions. There are so many Ladners that a great aunt forbade me from marrying someone from the Gulf Coast. They may be a Smith or a Jones, but if they’ve been at the bottom of Mississippi for more than a few generations, a Ladner is likely somewhere in the mix.
I have been Sunday driven so often now that, on one recent occasion when I was on the coast with a friend, I took on that same tour guide persona. Even as we were barrelling to a very precise destination, no meandering involved, I found myself saying things like:
“Now, if you’ll look to your right, you’ll see the old bank where my grandfather used to work. Before he was a barber.”
“That little building over there used to be the county jail.”
“Here we have what used to be the Singer Sewing Factory. My great aunt worked here nearly her whole adult life. Fell in love with a car salesman who turned out to be her second cousin.”
On our most recent Sunday drive, we stopped at a local coffee shop where it’s customary for me and my parents to share a scone. This is a coffee shop right in the heart of my Mom’s stories. From one window you can see that bank where my grandfather worked (before he was a barber.) From another window you can look out onto the ocean. I sat down at such a window and began calculating the shortest amount of time that politeness would require me to sit there. I was ready to go home. The fast-paced city was calling me. You could tell by the way my knee beat up and down, as if in answer to a call.
Dad, however, in between the casual sips of coffee, had taken up his Sweet’N Low wrappers and was meticulously rolling them up, tight and tiny. He rolled them up and then placed them into an empty creamer carton. It reminded me of when he worked in the oil business and would spread his maps of the ocean across the dining room table and color code them with different highlighters. With that same focus, patience, he’d manage to fit all those maps back into a single cardboard tube.
Meanwhile, Mom had been looking through the adjacent little bookstore in search of a history on Christian Ladner, the namesake for Pass Christian. She came back empty-handed (although there was nothing in the book she didn’t already know) and sat down with her back to the shop’s bay window that looked out over the Gulf of Mexico. Using the ocean like a family dirt road, she told me about an 18th-century cousin (the progenitor of all my marriage restrictions) and his washing ashore on that same beach.
I half listened. Partly because I had heard this story many times growing up. But it was also getting late, and I had a three-hour drive back home to the “big city,” a place of little-to-no meandering. I had done well enough letting my parents drive me down the most inefficient routes—we could’ve taken the interstate and gotten to the coffee shop twenty minutes earlier—and I took it on the chin when all the exasperated cars blew past us. But here we were with nothing left to do. Our cups were empty. I had dabbed up the last crumb of the scone with something like a nervous starvation. But also I had now done everything I had set out to do: see the coastal sights, drink coffee, spend quality time with my parents, make lasting memories, etc., But still my parents—and really, this exasperates me about almost everyone I eat with—wanted to continue to sit. Wanted to lime as my Trinidadian roommate calls it, which means to visit, potentially for hours, and take pleasure in another person’s existence.
Dad still had a few empty packets to roll up. (The man puts a lot of Sweet’N Low in his coffee.) Mom, whose warm, arthritic hand was now in mine, was still in the upper canopy of our family tree, at Cousin Jean Baptiste Ladner, a name she repeated a few times, attempting to achieve the most authentic French pronunciation.
I’m aware of the hamster wheel that is the pace of my life. Back in the “big city,” it seems a little more normal. Everyone is cranking out their to-do lists and taking corners on two wheels. We’ve convinced ourselves that we leave restaurants as soon as we’re done eating as a courtesy to other diners waiting on a table. But my parents’ Sunday drives make me a little more aware of my haste. If I give myself a chance to pay attention. In this case it was Dad’s little pink bouquet of wrappers that snapped me out of it. The tedium of those tightly-rolled little sticks. Another time it was the slow, intentional way in which my mother fought against the mild paralysis in her right hand to write her morning devotion in her journal. Long, hard-won loops. Once my parents idled for ten minutes in a stranger’s driveway to discuss whether or not the climbing bramble along the chain link fence was rockrose. In those moments of realization, when I see the juxtaposition, I can, with significant effort, settle down a bit. Though I really have no choice. It’s what I’ve come to believe is the ulterior motive of my parents’ Sunday drives: to lure me with coffee away from the freedom of my own vehicle and then make me abide in one place for more then ten minutes.
On the way home, my parents decided to take the interstate. I suppose they sensed my need to get home before dark. But even then, their chosen route to I-20 was not the most direct one. Mom wanted to see Long Beach, another little town knocked down only to rise again, though to more modest proportions. It has never surpassed its original identity as an industrial town, but it was where we went for most of our homeschool gatherings long ago, not to mention the location of an old bed and breakfast that Mom liked to roll by, at a snail’s pace, so she could admire the ancient azaleas. I was convinced I’d be spending another night on the Gulf Coast when at last we rolled onto a stretch of fresh, sleek asphalt with the interstate in the offing. Mom accordingly picked up speed to a jaunty 30mph.
I guess driving slow enough will turn anyone into a tour guide, even the most taciturn person. I wouldn’t be surprised if my dad has as many stories in him about coastal geography as my mother. We just needed to hit a locale that he knew and she didn’t. As we rolled by a run-down tire shop, far too new and ugly to evoke any of Mom’s stories, Dad broke from his regular co-pilot duties and tapped at the passenger window with his knuckle.
“That’s where I get my tires,” my usually silent father said. “The owner has a pet capuchin monkey.”
Sara teaches high school English in Jackson, MS, and enjoys writing on the obscure and absurd aspects of the Deep South. You can read more of her essays on her Substack, Clumsyloom.
 | A guest post by
|
The existance of this story is a dream come true.
This is beautiful. And now I need to sit with it a bit.