An Old Car

She was my father’s last car. He gave her to me when I moved to Dallas. The decade that I was in New York City, I had no car, and was of course delighted with the freedom of life without one. But it is impossible to live alone, without a car, in Texas, and now I had one, a very well-made, 14-year-old car with 155,000 miles.

They say she has the best engine that car company ever made. She has done me well. Her turn radius is tight; when necessary, she quickly accelerates; and when I go for days without driving her, she still starts up and runs without complaint. And for me, the icing on the cake: she boasts a cassette tape player.

Because of this, even though we are an unlikely couple, still you could say that we were made for each other. I have about a thousand cassette tapes, most of them homemade decades ago, and a majority of those recordings from the radio. Indeed, most of my tapes are older than my car. Since moving to Texas, I have listened to hundreds of them while driving along the landscapes of the Southwest, reliving various stages of my life inside her cabin.

She hasn’t cost me a lot. Now at 265,000 miles, there have been a couple of maintenance repairs with four-digit labor costs, but not much else. Partly this is because, like my father, I don’t demand perfection. The front passenger door, for instance, can be unlocked only by hand from the inside, on account of some sort of connecting gizmo being broken. The grill is missing a piece from a turkey that I hit—the bird came madly out of nowhere. Dents from hail are complemented by a scratch made by a young boy, shoving open his car door while his mother was attending to his younger brother. (I saw it happen. She was embarrassed, offered to give me insurance information. I said, are you kidding? Look at this hail damage.)

In short, the body has scars from many years that tell their tale. Lately, the motor that moves the rearview mirrors has started skipping; it cheeps away like a woodpecker for about ten seconds every time I start the car. The inner section of one of the hubcaps is missing. A vandal? Or did it just fall off? I am starting to wonder if we are getting close to the end.

Although she has features that newer cars lack—a CD player, the aforementioned cassette player, a smart little drawer to hold coins for tollbooths—she lacks a rearview camera and all the sensors that warn of getting out of lane. She also requires a special diet: only premium gas will do for her. I know that, at her age, death could come at any time, and I suppose I’m getting ready for it by thinking of the improved features of newer cars. But I will miss her when that happens.

— 

 Each human body bears the marks of life lived. They are scars, imperfections, and they are inevitable. As with a car, the only way not to get scars is never to do anything. Yet the very scars can become focal points of love. Your child’s dimple where he fell on the corner of a brick, the mother’s burn-scar which she got when she whisked her child away from scalding water, skin spots from a life of labor in the sun: these “defects” become dear to us because they are part of a story of someone who is dear to us. 

The analogy only goes so far. Cars are traded in, or become too expensive to fix. Our bodies, by contrast, have a post-mortem destiny: the resurrection of the body. Sometimes I fancy that we will be able to “read” each other’s life-story just by seeing the scars on the resurrected body. There will no longer be any impediments to the body doing what it was made to do, and yet: there will be scars.

The Advent hymn of Charles Wesley says this is true of Jesus. His resurrected body has the scars from the nails: his body tells the story of his life. The scars draw everyone’s attention, and they are, as Wesley says, glorious.

— 

    Out & About: I am to preach at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas the next two Sundays, Aug. 10 and 17; the services are at 9 and 11:15 a.m.

    In just over a month the Good Books & Good Talk seminars will resume. Our first discussion will be on Nicolas Diat’s lovely account of his visits to various French monasteries, A Time to Die. Monks preserve older understandings of caring for each other at the end of life—and of what happens at the moment of death and thereafter. I highly recommend this book to everyone, even if you cannot join the conversation on Sun., Sept. 14, from 5 to 6:30 p.m. at St. Matthew’s Cathedral.

    The subsequent seminars will be Oct. 19 on Dr. Wortle’s School by Anthony Trollope, and Nov. 9 on Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot.

 

ED

He taught modern dance, jazz, tap, and everything else except ballet, which was his wife’s domain. So it was he, free in the anteroom of their dance studio, who greeted me every week as I brought my daughter to her ballet lessons. He loved jokes, bad jokes, old Irish jokes, gags, all of them; and he told them as if he were on stage (which indeed he had once been).  

One day it was raining, and he had a sign: “Free car wash” it said, then in parens below, “Top only.” 

I used to try to remember his jokes, and I sure wished I could tell them as he did, with the pauses and the emphases just right. Instead, when I tell a joke, I get nervous, I don’t say things just right; and the difference between a funny line and one that falls dead is often just a half-second pause. Still, although a sort of lapsed Catholic, he respected me as a priest. He seemed to consider that we were in similar occupations, both involving a degree of showmanship; yet I sensed he knew that what went on in church was deeper. 

---

Until she went to college, my daughter took dancing lessons from his wife. The year after that my wife and I moved away, as I took another appointment. And a few years after that, not many, we got the word that he was dying of cancer.

There were emails from his wife. I wrote back with promises of prayer. And finally, we got to speak by phone. He had a joke to tell me. I told him how much I always loved his jokes. I think I said a thing or two about New York City, where we were then living. There was nothing serious in my talk; it was on the same light level it had always been. 

And then he said, “Father, you know I’m dying.”

I did know, of course. But I had said nothing about it. Worse, I had said nothing to it, nothing about the meaning of coming to the end of life. I didn’t know what to say.

— 

There I was, a priest for two decades, talking by phone for what was likely to be the last time, and I didn’t know how to talk about death. I felt like a fraud. He and his wife had been very good to us, had been with us through Susan’s brain surgery and the years that followed, had often done special things for our daughter through that time. And at the end, I was flummoxed. I was too bashful, too shy, or just too reticent—unable to know what I believed, what I wanted to say, what was possible to say, to a friend on the other end of a phone conversation who had cancer and was coming to the end.

— 

Today I wish I could go back to that conversation. I’d like to say to Ed: You know you are going to meet God. You will see Jesus. There are things you can do in the meantime. Have you told your wife, your children, all your family that you love them? Is there anything you would like to say to any of them that you’ve found it hard to say? This is the time.

I’d like to tell him, Please pray for Susan and me.

And then maybe I’d say, When you see St. Peter, tell him a joke for me, can you?

— 

Out & About: I am to preach at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas the next two Sundays, Aug. 10 and 17; the Eucharists are at 9 and 11:15 a.m.

The days are already getting noticeably shorter, and soon the Good Books & Good Talk seminars will resume. Our first discussion will be on Nicolas Diat’s lovely account of his visits to various French monasteries, A Time to Die. Monks preserve older understandings of caring for each other at the end of life—and of what happens at the moment of death and thereafter. I highly recommend this book to everyone, even if you cannot join the conversation on Sun., Sept. 14, from 5 to 6:30 p.m. at St. Matthew’s Cathedral.

The subsequent seminars will be Oct. 19 on Dr. Wortle’s School by Anthony Trollope, and Nov. 9 on Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot.

Posted by The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin with

12345678910 ... 207208

The Rev. Canon Victor Lee Austin. Ph.D., is the Theologian-in-Residence for the diocese and is the author of several books including, "Friendship: The Heart of Being Human" and "A Post-Covid Catechesis.: 

Categories
Authors
Archive