Last night, after I warmed up our old Honda van to schlep the family to a nearby pizzeria, I was unpleasantly surprised when...goaded to movement...it sputtered into silence. Sure, the temperature was barely fifteen Fahrenheit, but it had started without a hitch, and it'd warmed up for ten minutes with no problem. I'd expected to slither it out through the eight inches of wind-driven snow without too much difficulty.
That was not, however, what the Fates had in mind. The idiot lights, suddenly all illumined. A warning on the primitive LCD informed all who cared that the charging system had failed. The lights dimmed. The engine pulsed and surged and waned, then went cold. The van was kaput. It would not restart.
It was, as intuition and a little frantic dabbling through Reddit revealed, the alternator. Almost without a doubt.
The thwarted family recoalesced into three smaller vehicles, and together we made our way to an Uno's dinner. But my mind was on the van, and the uncertain return to Virginia. My thoughts remained there throughout the night, as my sleep was repeatedly disturbed by fretfulness. Where would it be repaired? And could the repair be accomplished in time to get me back for worship on Sunday? None of these things were known, when I went to sleep last night, so Lethe was miserly with her ministrations.
But further, there was my peculiar care for the van itself. Not for its use. For what it is.
We have had that van for thirteen years. It has been, for a quarter of my middle-aged life, a perfect and practical thing. It's been a shared family space, not a home but very much homely. I have taught children to drive in that van. Eager teen canoodling has happened in that van, because, yes, my sons, I know why those rear seats were down in the morning. It has carried us all, together, to vacations and graduations, to funerals and marriages, to weeping and joy, all in humble comfort. It's a liminal space, a travelling space, a Maker of the Ways, in an Esu Ellegua/Soichiro Honda sort of way.
We've been sinking money into it lately, more and more as the years have progressed. System after system has failed, five figures worth in the last twelve months. It is a dying Honda in winter. My Scots blood knows that to continue this is madness.
Part of me...probably the Irish part...wants to hold onto it forever, like I'm Cubano and it's a '57 Chevy. But it's fading, and unreliable, and practical me struggles to justify such a romantic absurdity. It may be time, I say, and my wife...never one to care about my concupiscent lust for novel wheeled and motorized things...agrees.
It is doomed.
"I can see the van recoiling in terror," said my older son, who drove it to prom, and who was moved in and out of college with it many a time. "'No, surely, surely you won't, not after all these years,' it cries."
I too personify this object. It has the heft of time and care. I allow it to be imbued with my deep fatherly male pleasure in its function, in providing both utility and comfort and a sense that all is well, that all is safe, and that all are cared for. It is now The Van. We have named it.
Yet I remember the van that was The Van before it. A machine that held that name, that carried tiny little ones in carseats, that carried beloved family that are now ancestors, and that schlepped mulch and brick and appliances.
And though my midlife cries out in protest against it, surely and convertible yearnings be damned, there will be a van that follows the Van.
That will, in time, become the Van. As I hope, someday, not to be the Dad, or my wife the Mom. That a small voice will name another with our name, and that will be a good thing.
Assuming, of course, that the country garage that holds our van now delivers it, functioning, as expected.
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