The Legacy

My mom & her Subaru in the Northern New England Review

The Backstory:

Recently I was on a meditation/writing retreat (my ideal combination) at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. William Edelglass gave us a prompt about relics — sacred objects imbued with blessings and wisdom, with a palpable life-force about them.

What might we consider sacred objects in our own modern lives, he asked.

Off I went to sit in my favorite window seat and write about the first thing that came to mind…. my mom’s old Subaru.

Vermonters are a proud stock and those in our group who read it liked the reference to the state’s iconic green license plates and encouraged me to submit it somewhere New England-related. It just so happened that the Northern New England Review had a deadline 1 hour after our retreat conclusion with the theme “abundance.” So I pushed "send,” and here it is, published this month.

If you’ve ever loved a car, or your mom, or your family, or a state, maybe it’ll resonate…

Oh - and I have a prompt for you at the end!

The Legacy

It was a creamy white Subaru Legacy. In our family, where cars are driven until they have to be given up for scrap, this was the one my mother said she’d drive straight into the ground with her when she went. She was seventy-two.

And drove it she did. To church every Sunday, to her job volunteering on a memory care unit one town over, to the store to buy her grandchildren’s favorite foods. When she came home from the hospital with a diagnosis of an enlarged heart some years later, she would sometimes turn in her recliner, away from the view of the hills, remembering something ordinary again. “Please take the car for a ride,” she’d say. “The engine needs to turn over from time to time.”

So I would dutifully head out.

One day I noticed it could use a little fuel, so I pulled into the gas station near the Trader Joe’s. I didn’t know which side the tank was on, so I took a guess and pulled in to the left. In Jersey, we don’t pump our own gas, so the attendant walked over. I didn’t get a look at his face, but he made a kind gesture with his hands — pull forward, then back into the other side. No big deal, except that I’m not particularly skilled at forward-and-back maneuvering, especially in a Subaru too old to have a backup camera. It took more than a few minutes.

I put down the window. “Fill it with regular, please,” I said, a little flustered.

It was only when it came time to pay that he bent down to my level. His lined face was warm and glowing, and to say there was a holiness about him wouldn’t be exaggerating. He put his hand on his heart over his puff jacket. I felt like we were meeting somewhere far beyond that suburban intersection. “Bless you,” he said closing his eyes. “I send blessings for you and your entire family.”

I felt unexpected tears welling up. When I got home, I announced to my mother that I had met the Buddha at the gas pump.

Oh, you mean Waleed, she said.

My mother never rode in her Subaru Legacy again. After she died, my brothers and I were gentle with each other. “Take it,” one said to the other. They looked at me. “I live in the city — I don’t need a car.” It went back and forth. It should be yours. No — you could use it more. And so, with hardly a worthy blue book value, it ended up sitting in my brother’s small driveway, unused, the fall leaves piling up on the windshield.

When my youngest son Drew went off to college in Vermont, the world held its breath behind KN95 masks. My own health wasn’t great then, and neither my husband nor I were in a position to be driving him back and forth to school five hours away.

“You know Mom’s old Subaru?” I asked my brother. He looked at the leaves, now snow-dusted, on the windshield. “Can Drew use it?” he asked. And just like that, he signed over the title to my son.

Drew and I blessed that car before he drove it north. From the rear-view mirror, he hung a small yellow prayer tie, stuffed with tobacco, that I had made while visiting Lakota friends on the Pine Ridge Reservation. On the dashboard in front of the passenger seat sat a tiny clay Buddha he had made as a child and painted in gold.

Vermont declared the car vintage and issued it the state’s minimalist green plates, which Drew affixed proudly. He learned to replace the brake pads himself from a YouTube video. He polished it whenever he could, spending hours vacuuming the inside. Then he installed an enormous subwoofer that took up a good quarter of the back. I could always tell he was arriving because his music would vibrate in my chest a full mile before he got there.

He named it the Nana Mobile because he had loved my mom thoroughly and unabashedly. It carried him through countless icy rides around hair-raising bends to the local ski slope, and on dates with an adventurous girl who also liked to hike and swim. I never worried about him in that car. We had blessed it. And more than that, I was certain my mom was watching over him, as he sat in that same worn seat she’d once sworn to drive into the ground.

The week before Drew graduated, the check engine light began coming on with each turn of the ignition. It smelled of burning oil. It stalled and sputtered and rumbled. He tried to trouble shoot it himself, then brought it to four garages. No one could diagnose the problem.

We had a family meeting — my brothers included. It’s time to let it go, we all agreed.

Which is how my husband, sons and I found ourselves in his college parking lot one snowy night in thirteen-below weather, waiting for father and son mechanics who Drew had befriended, who’d agreed to buy it in cash. It would barely cover Drew’s attempts to diagnose and repair it himself. But he liked them and they liked him back, so it was all good.

They were running late. We were freezing. But I didn’t mind…because Drew and his older brother had cranked up that subwoofer, thrown open the hatch, and were dancing wildly in the parking lot. And as I stood with my husband’s arm around my shoulder, I dreamed of my mother’s kind, ever-enlarging heart — its pulse rippling out to my boys, to my husband and me, and to the father and son who were on their way to receive the continuing blessings of her Legacy.

A prompt for you:

Write about a relic that you’ve inherited from someone important to you.

and/or

What is a relic you’ve left or would like to leave behind?