I don’t know where it came from (a made up superstition maybe) or if anyone besides our cousins did the same during car trips.
The game was kin to the one we played when we spotted a busted, old car - one more janky than our mother’s station wagon.
“That’s your car,” someone would say.
We’d all laugh like jerks.
Our mom’s station wagon was a beast like nearly every American car built before 85 or so.
That was not necessarily a good thing.
We were raised in the days before playgrounds with soft surfaces. Nearly everything was metal and nothing seemed to be made with child safety in mind.
The olive station wagon’s metal seat belt buckles got so hot they could almost fry an egg.
They were part of a game. Neither they nor the belts they were attached could contain my unbridled enthusiasm for life.
As soon as my mother started the car, I’d unclick and performed what must have looked like gymnastics in her rearview window.
My imagination was huge, my head was hard.
I’d play with the door handle and pop the metal lock button up and push it down time and time again as my mom screamed, “Girl, stop playing with that button.”
Mine was a game that played back one particularly summer day as my mother barreled down the busiest streets in our neighborhood.
She must have hit a bump or something as I pulled the handle. That would explain why the olive green station wagon’s back right door flung open and I was sent flying.
There I was, a 5 or so year old, spinning on my backside in the middle of the avenue.
Cars swerved as pavement cut lines into my tender skin.
My mother slammed on the station wagon’s brakes and swooped up her screaming and bleeding little jerk.
That oddly was not the only time I fell from the station wagon. (I Told you I had a hard head and a soft back side.)
I’ve thought about that story a lot lately and the lesson it eventually taught me.
When you play with fire, you get burned.
When you play with the door handle you fall out.
When you don’t heed warnings about a potentially deadly virus that has launched our nation into a long, dark tunnel...
The principle of causation is hard to grasp when you are a little jerk in the back seat of an olive green station wagon traveling down a busy road.
It should not be so hard for adults, but some people are ducking their heads down as we travel under the bridge and through the tunnel.
Coronavirus treatments and vaccines are in the works.
We can see the light, but we are still in the dark.
Some of us will be hurled from our stations in life and left to swirl on the pavement.
Let’s hope we can giggle like jerks on the other side.
Columnist Amelia Robinson is this newspaper’s community impact editor.
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