Girla

Daddy's girl

Last evening on the Historic Vehicle Association News I watched a delightful video in which an elderly woman showed a 1934 Chrysler Airflow sedan and reminisced about it, the car and the trips her family took in it, including the time they pulled a large travel trailer across country and over a high mountain pass, and a picture of that memory. Original and immaculate, the Chrysler had been her daddy’s car. In a photo of the car with her standing in front of it with her family, I reckon she was six years old at most, so if the car was new she would be 87 now. As she finished narrating the little video she added, “I was daddy’s girl.”

She was daddy’s girl, I reckon. I reckon she was, and I know how that is, “daddy’s girl.” And I was thinking what a blessing she was to him, and he to her, filled his life with love, and it seemed pretty clear that the love went both ways such that if one laughed the other was happy, if one hurt or was afraid the other wept, if one rejoiced that was all it took to fill the other's heart up to busting. I know how that is too, all of it, and I was touched at the love still between them stretching across time and the ages. So car and girl and love get mixed, stirred up in my mind, heart and soul. We live at the condo now; but when we lived at the house, one of my dread moments was when daddy’s girl left after an always too short visit. The car backing out and driving slowly away as the horn toots, and turning the corner, and me waving at her, and her waving back at me and then her car window goes up and she heads back into her own real life, and here I am left in memory.

Several years ago my mother watched that scene yet one more time again, suitcases taken out, the car packed, hugs and kisses, and the car’s people get in, the car backs out and I stand in the middle of the street and wave as the car turns the corner and drives away with its little family of four: a man, a woman nearly middleaged with touches of gray in her hair, and two more little girls. That Sunday afternoon as I went back in the house I overheard mama say to Linda, “She’ll always be his baby.”