It became clear shortly after my daughter turned 13 that there was not enough breathable air in Springfield for both of us. We suffered through until finally, at 17, she found a way to trim a semester off the four-year sentence she’d been serving at Springfield High School. She bought a 25-year-old Buick and drove off for Mississippi to get to know her father. She may have needed a starter, a battery, new brake lines, brake pads, brake shoes, and a couple of tires (all of which I provided), but she did not need a mother. Soon I got a phone call. She needed gas money, another tire, and a copy of her ACT scores. I followed the cryptic instructions and sent money, as parents do, hoping that the beautiful, loving child locked up inside of her would be ransomed. A week later I got a call from the Elvis Presley Memorial Trauma Center in Memphis. “You have to come,” she said, and her voice stretched over more than miles. “I need you.”
She survived and continues to fill my life with drama and love. Not all daughters are so mercurial. In Pat Martin’s “The Little Red Car,” the turmoil is all internal when her bright, successful daughter drives off into the world as daughters do. — Carol Manley, guest editor
The Little Red Car
Leaning against the porch railing
I wait for one more hug
before you, impatient to be
on your way, dash through
the rain-swept air to your little red car,
overflowing with law books, new suits,
fuzzy pink bathroom towels, bedding,
wild dreams. You turn on
the windshield wipers, back
onto the street, hesitate a moment,
a drawn arrow homing in
on its bull’s-eye. Too soon
shifting into drive you jerk
toward the skyscrapers of Chicago.
I watch all the way
down England Street and still
watch for a glimpse
of your little red car
as you head north on Houston.
Back in your room, my heart slips
into small pink ballerina slippers,
a bubblegum bank, the big yellow
Pac-Man Mike won for you
at the state fair. Then
a pair of seam-split, left-behind
khaki shorts slides off the bed
and onto the no-longer-
cluttered floor.
Patricia Hartsfield Martin is a poet who divides her time between Springfield and Taylorville with occasional visits to her happy and successful daughter in Indianapolis.
Send submissions to Jacqueline Jackson Presents People’s Poetry to editor@illinoistimes.com or to Illinois Times, P.O. Box 5256, Springfield, IL 62705.
This article appears in Jul 13-19, 2006.
