Evergreen: A memoir of one afternoon

I. The Time Machine

It began with a question about a country club. Shore and Country Club, East Norwalk, Connecticut. My family belonged in nineteen sixty-nine, nineteen seventy, and nineteen seventy-one. I wondered what it costs now.

But that's not really where it began. It began, as so many things do, with the white LeBaron in the driveway.

The car arrived in mid-June - a nineteen ninety Chrysler LeBaron convertible, white with blue interior and a black top. Car number twenty-nine in a collection spanning thirty-six years. I drove it today for the first time with a DJ tape from May nineteen ninety playing - a tape I'd kept in a box for thirty-six years, waiting without knowing it was waiting.

Driving it today was like being somewhere else.

The club had slatted wood floors in the open-air locker rooms. Each family had an assigned locker. The old clubhouse was a stately manor home, long since replaced by a thirty-thousand-square-foot expansion with a ballroom for two hundred guests. The world that was is gone. But I was there for it.

I was thirteen in nineteen sixty-nine. My sister Barb and I took sailing lessons on a Sailfish. We played tennis. Dad was out on his boat on weekends. During the week I'd be nagging Mom by ten thirty in the morning: when are we leaving for the club? Poor Mom had work to do. We were just watching TV and having a goof-off summer.

We piled into the Corvair - no seatbelts, beach towels, shorts, striped t-shirts, flip flops. We called them scuffs, from the sound they made on pavement. WABC seven seventy on the AM radio, top forty all day long. I had a transistor radio for the beach. The route was almost always the same: East Avenue to Gregory Avenue with a twist and turn along the way. Less than thirty minutes.

The car and the summer memories as a thirteen-to-fifteen-year-old are wrapped in the club and Pleasant Valley Lodges in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire on Lake Wentworth.

Then I said something I hadn't quite realized until I said it: the LeBaron is the redo of the Corvair. It's the only other car in my history with blue interior, white paint, and a black convertible top.

The same color equation. Completely different universe of experience.

II. The Collection

I've been building a museum of belonging for most of my adult life. Each car in the collection is a retrieval. The nineteen forty-nine Dodge Coronet like Papa's. The two thousand seven Solstice like Dad's nineteen fifty-four Corvette. The two thousand five HHR in orange - Dad's nineteen fifty-seven Chevy station wagon in the same color. The nineteen seventy-two MG, a redo of Mom's nineteen seventy-two MG Midget from nineteen seventy-five, when I was in college.

Each of those cars is about someone else. Papa. Al. Helen. Tributes, essentially. Loving recreations of their vehicles.

The LeBaron is different. It's about me.

And it connects everything. Al and Helen were alive during the entire LeBaron chapter - nineteen ninety-one to nineteen ninety-five. They saw that car in the driveway every night. Paul was thirteen years old in nineteen ninety-one, the year I acquired the original. He was thirty-four when we met for the first time in twenty eleven - the exact age I was in nineteen ninety when the tape was recorded. My childhood at the club, Paul's thirteenth year, my thirty-fourth year, Paul's thirty-fourth year. My parents still alive. The car connects all of it.

It's literally the one vehicle that connects my entire life. And I adore it.

The other cars are fixed. They point at one person, one memory, one retrieved moment. Beautiful but singular. This one is a portal to any of it. I can feel almost any age and year I can imagine while driving it.

H.G. Wells fascinated me as a child. The idea that you could move through time while staying in your own skin. I've been building my own version, it turns out. Not a machine with levers and a spinning disc. A collection of cars. A box of tapes. A farmhouse full of World Book Yearbooks being read in sequence. A novel. A five hundred-year ancestral document. A summer vacation list going back to nineteen fifty-seven.

I don't just have a past. I curate it.