Small Family Car Rides

My Dad left when I was seven years old. He and my Mum had been together for a while before I had been born and the loss was hard on both Mom and I.

But we had family not too far away.

My Grandmother and several Aunts have always lived, if not on the same road, at least in the same region of New Hampshire. And they were there for my Mom to help pick her up and keep her sane.

So we would drive out there a lot. In Mom’s red Subaru hatchback and later in the teal Impreza sedan, then the white Impreza hatchback. We were a Subaru family. I remember the padded cloth seats and the nylon seatbelts and the checking on the edges of the rear windshield.

But I mostly remember the music.

Mom and I were a team for a long time, we were joined a few years after Dad left by Maxx, my Jack Russell Terrier. And like any good team of heroes out on our own we had our theme music.

We went through phases.

Tom Petty got lots of circulation. The Beatles, too. I remember considering the album artwork all rectangled and squared behind the hard plastic. The green of ‘Rubber Soul.’ Tom Petty’s skeletal frame behind the Rickenbacker on Damn The Torpedos.

But we really loved Paul Simon.

Those trips between Sebago, ME and Lee, NH were scored by Graceland probably more than anything else. At least they are in my memory.

Mom loved the man whose folk music carried her through the 70s. Loved that he was successful again, loved the wonderful new sounds coming from the speakers. I loved them, too. I didn’t have the history with Simon that my Mother had, of course, but I could feel that she did.*

And this album about travel and heartbreak and finding something seemed to be the perfect accompaniment. Route 202 was our Mississippi Delta. We weren’t received in Graceland, but in my Grandmother’s kitchen in Dover or standing over the hot air register at her duplex in Barrington.



The three of us - Mum, Maxx and Myself - would leave our home which, for all the love, still bears the scar of separation and pile into the car. Crack open the tape cassette and let that asthmatic accordian carry us down King Street. The bass kicks in as we turn onto 114 and by the time we’re up to speed Mom and I are both singing along “It was a slow day and the sun was beating on the soldiers by the side of the road.”

We’d pass signs and talk and lose our place in the music and come back for “the bomb in the baby carriage was wired to the radio.”



My relationship with Mum was really defined in those rides, I think.

The home - where my Mother still lives - was still freshly marked by Dad’s absence. My Grandmother’s house was a comfort but there were always other people there. In the cars and the roads and the music we could carve out a space for ourselves and that new void we were still feeling.

It’s important to note that I love my Dad very much and I always have. But for some time it was hard to reconcile those feelings of love with the shattered trust of seven year old Krister.

I can’t imagine what it was like for Mom.

In New Hampshire Mom got to rebuild herself with her mother and sisters, the same people who had been there the first time she built herself up. And I got to know and love my Aunts, Alis, Ann and Bonnie.

When feelings were still raw and exposed, I considered changing my name from Krister, which is my father’s name. And the name that I landed on was Al. Seven or Eight year old Krister, I can’t remember exactly how old I was, loved the song. I also adored my Aunt Alis - or Al, if you will - and that may have also played a factor.



I’m not really sure what changed my mind. I think my Aunt was part of it, I seem to recall some sage advise about “giving it time.” Even then I understood that she was mad at my Dad and would have liked to see some sort of vengeance but that approach was not the healthiest.

Of course, I’m glad I stuck with Krister now and have been for years. I’m proud of the connection I have with my father regardless of what was a difficult separation.

Echoic Memory is the term for the way a sound can trigger a recollection. Sometimes it can hit as a full immersion into a past experience. Graceland for me, every time I hear it, pulls out little bits of this whole experience. Of car rides through Southern Maine. Of the freshness of discovering my new relationship with my Mother and my Dog. Of finding out who my family is. Of finding out who I am.

*This part of the post, and in fact my whole inspiration for writing it, really must go to Nell Boeschenstein's ruminations on Graceland for In This Recording.