What I found in my glove box
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A week ago today I was in a seemingly minor car accident, a fender bender in which I narrowly avoided T-boning a car that pulled out in front of me. I was found not at fault and was grateful that the other drivers’ insurance would take care of the damage, and dropped the car off at a body shop a few days ago for an estimate and repairs. The damage proved greater than it seemed. Yesterday the insurance company called to tell me they were treating the car as a total loss.
I’ve never been sentimental about cars. I can regard them only as tools, as mere machines. I’ve never thought of them as having personalities, just mechanical quirks to tolerate or have fixed, and I’ve almost never given them names—at least, no names beyond nicknames meant to transmute irritation into humor. When I was in grad school I drove a 1985 Camry that had belonged to my great-grandmother, and where my best friend and his brother named their cars Dapple and Rocinante, the perfect blend of fun and well-read names, my car, when I called it anything at all, was “the Punishment Hut,” after the place where Alec Guinness is locked up for the first half of The Bridge on the River Kwai—a tiny metal box built by the Japanese to torture people with heat. That’s about my speed.
So when the insurance company told me I should go clean out this car and hand over the keys, the pang I felt surprised me.
It was a 2011 Ford Fiesta. It technically belonged to my wife. We were dating when she bought it, but when we got married it became ours. We left on our honeymoon in it, shared it on our morning and afternoon commutes every day for over four years, and brought two of our children home in it. When I went to clean it out I felt, for the first time, that I was losing a little something in losing this hunk of steel. As I dug through the glovebox and trunk and the cupholders I realized that if time is a river, this car was a whirling eddy where flotsam gathered and, saturated, sank, gathering in sediment at the bottom. Now, having dug the sediment out, I’ve left that eddy behind, never to go back.
Near the beginning of his great essay “A Piece of Chalk,” Chesterton wrote that he “once . . . planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.” I don’t intend to shape an epic out of the things I found in the car, but I did want to catalog a few of them. (And Chesterton may not have composed his epic, but he did write an essay about the things he found in his pockets.) I have the kind of memory that fixes on and is most rapidly stirred by particular things. Take virtually any book from my library and I will remember when and where I got it and at least one of the times and places where I read it. All of that is imprinted in me with the object itself, and as I cleaned out the car I found myself reliving many years in tiny snapshot moments.
Here’s some of what I found:
At least a hundred napkins and assorted plastic cutlery and straws gathered from probably a half-dozen different Chick-fil-As.
Some favorite CDs, including O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which I’ve owned since high school, and a two-disc set of Seamus Heaney reading his translation of Beowulf, a set I bought in college. I remember listening through this Beowulf several times as I worked a temp job in a tiny cubicle to earn the money to buy Sarah a ring.
Two copies of the Georgia Mountain Laurel’s annual wedding issue in which our wedding was featured.
A fabric “eyewear retainer” in desert MARPAT, purchased on my first trip to Texas a few months after our wedding.
Several years’ of visitor ID badges for my wife’s school, and one small staff hangtag for the year I tutored a German student there. That was the year our daughter was born, when I was working four jobs.
The roll-up sunshades for the back windows, which we bought somewhere between Newnan, Georgia and St. Simons Island the day after my brother’s wedding. The low, sharply angled sunlight, already hot in the central Georgia morning, had been making our infant daughter cry.
A tiny clip-on hairbow, the kind we used to put in our daughter’s hair when she didn’t have enough for real bows. She’s almost five now.
A CD of Sunday school songs in earworm kids’ choir styles, a great favorite among younger passengers on our trips around town a few years ago.
A small green envelope with my name written on it in my late grandfather’s handwriting. It held the money he gave me for Christmas a few days before he died.
And perhaps the greatest surprise of all:
The keys to the Punishment Hut.
Then there were the things I couldn’t take with me—a bumper sticker for my brother’s company; the parking decal for my first teaching job, an oval sticker now bleached white by the sun; and most especially the flecks of yellow paint from where our friends decorated our car during the wedding reception, baked onto the rubber windowseals and hanging on for almost seven years.
What struck me is that none of these objects, in an of themselves, have value or really matter. Certainly not to anyone else. But taken together, as bits and pieces of life built up like silt that machine, which I so often took for granted, they mean so much more than whatever matter they are made of. They are pointers, not just showing the way but bringing us into the presence of immaterial things—memories, times and places and people. Everything I noted above came back as I fished these odds and ends out of the car, and when I was finished I found I had a hard time closing the doors and leaving the Fiesta behind for the last time.
As I have come to understand and appreciate more and more the sacramental vision of the world offered by the oldest forms of the faith, I see that God gave us his good physical world precisely to point to the things not just beyond the matter they are made of, but that are embedded, imprinted into the things we see and touch and feel every day. The whole world is an eddy silted up with meaning, a car full of the bits and pieces of everything you’ve lived. And that’s a blessing—you reach into the glovebox and touch little reminders of eternity.
“You have never talked to a mere mortal,” CS Lewis wrote. And I have never driven a mere machine.
