Echoes of '59

The closest I ever came to the supernatural was that summer of ’59 in Eugene, Oregon. My dad was a teacher, and he would fill his summer break each year by accepting a National Science Foundation Scholarship. One year it was Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Another it was Ball State in Muncie, Indiana. That summer it was the University of Oregon.

That summer was weird and wonderful, filled with unexplained events that still mystify me. I was only four, my sister Carol was three, and it was our first real experience away from home, so maybe it was just the exotic newness of the locale. My parents had rented the top floor of a big Victorian house, set spookily on top of a hill (probably not that big of a hill, but impressive enough to a family from Michigan’s flatlands). Male college students occupied the first and second floors.

I remember the piercing introductory music of Perry Mason, my mother’s favorite show. Carol and I would hear it from our beds and shiver. I remember my first pet, a turtle that I took out onto the roof in the mistaken belief that he needed more sun. He required much less attention after that. I remember getting mad at Carol and shoving her down the stairs. In a normal world, she should have been maimed or killed, with me suffering horrendous guilt the rest of my natural born days. Instead she tumbled down like a gymnast doing an Olympic routine, popped up at the end of the stairs, and came flying back up ready to kick some brother butt. But what I remember most was the car we brought back to life.

We were playing in the front driveway when we got bored. So my sister conceived of a tag game where we would chase each other like idiots unless we could touch the safe spot first, which she decided in her infinite toddler wisdom should be a yellow Ford Mustang belonging to one of the college guys. Remembering Perry, the fried turtle, and Elastic Girl tumbling down the stairs, I said, “Are you crazy? That’s not our car! What if we break it or something?”

Carol laughed. “Stupy boy!” which, in her lingo, said it all. And then she proceeded to show me that it was okee-dokie to touch the car. She raced up to it and gave it a little whack on its front hood. I was paralyzed by her effrontery, but we were both horror struck by what happened next. The car started to back out the driveway, then turn into the street, and started to drive away! The college guy whose car it was came bursting out of the house, cursing us as little brats, and went running after his suddenly untamed Mustang.
Selective childhood memories repress what happened after that. Maybe we were spanked, maybe the college guy saddled his car before it wrecked, maybe his car made it to the fields where Mustangs roam free. I don’t know. It wasn’t until years later that it occurred to me that gravity and parking brakes could have played a role. I still prefer to think of it as I did in my youth, as one of those rare times when real magic echoed through our souls.