Middle age plus 9/4

I enjoy listening to the car radio. The music relaxes me and I often begin to think back to other times and other places. One of the most common themes of my reminiscences is the travel I did as a child with our family. We did not have a radio to play soothing music, or for us kids to argue over which station we wanted to hear. In fact my mother thought she was lucky if we all agreed to sing the same song as we traveled. My earliest trips were taken with up to ten people in the car. We had three or four in the front seat. Two of the middle children sat on metal folding stools between the two seats, and four sat in the back seat. I often was on someone's lap, or stretched out across the laps of the others while taking a nap. A vivid memory of those naps in the car includes feeling the stocking supporter on my mother's corset as I laid my head in her lap. I would try to change my position to avoid this little hard circle, but it would always seem to get under my right ear. I knew better than to complain. My mother always sat on the right side of the back seat, and rode with her right hand clutching the stirrup-like handhold that hung from above the right rear window. Often her left hand was holding onto her hat because all four windows of the car would be rolled down as low as they would go, to keep us cool. The nearest thing to a snack that we would take with us in the car was a package of chewing gum. Often when I began asking for a drink of water, my mother or an older sister would provide me with a stick of Juicy Fruit gum. We played many car games that involved counting cows and horses, spelling words, finding the alphabet on signs before the others did, guessing "Who Am I?" or making up songs or stories. Our annual trips from Nevada to Washington DC and back took three and a half days when we first started this yearly commute. This called for a lot of ingenuity on my mother's part to keep us from fussing. Actually the only fussing I remember was between my sister, Ellen, and brother, Vernon, who were the two 'lucky' ones to be assigned the metal stools between the seats. As they sat back to back one or the other would often feel that the other was protruding beyond the specified space. If my father was driving he would squelch such fussing with one rapid sweep of his arm across the back seat. It didn't matter if the offending one or the innocent one got the first brunt of his action. It stopped the fussing. Often he wasn't with us, but would be on a business trip and meet us at the farm later in the month. This left the responsibility of the trip to our mother and the older siblings. But it did cut down the population in the car by one person. However one year when one of the older sisters wasn't taking the trip with us because of a summer job, we must have felt we had too much space because we invited a neighbor girl to come with us to spend some time as our guest at the farm. She took Vernon's spot on the stools and he was able to sit in the car's seat for a change. If I wore a hat as my mother did, it would be off to my remarkable mother who faced this challenge twice a year and still left me with fond memories to recall as I now often drive alone in an air conditioned car listening to quiet music with a handy cell phone nearby.