“Don’t you wish you could take a single childhood memory and blow it up into a bubble and live inside it forever?”
― Sarah Addison Allen, author of Lost Lake.
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“I get sleepy riding in cars,” a friend admitted as we embarked on a road trip a couple of weeks ago.
“I loved sleeping on road trips as a child,” I responded.” Especially at night. Stretched out on the back seat. Or in the back of the big ’58 Ford station wagon my parents had.”
But I never sleep while traveling in a car anymore.
Which is different than sleeping while driving in a car. I mention that only because researching “sleeping in cars” for possible background on this piece turned up Googles brilliant top choice: “Is it safe to sleep in a car while driving?” Let that sink in for a moment. Considering the hype we hear about artificial intelligence when common sense intelligence seems to have gone to sleep at the wheel.
Abandoning the lack of intelligence on the internet, I turned to childhood memories. Recalling when sleeping in cars was commonplace as a kid for vacations and for going to my grandparent’s house. Put the kids in the back seat, toss ’em a blanket, a pillow, and a “License Plate Bingo” game. Dad at the wheel and Mom unfolding the Texaco road map. Done. Hit the highway.
But that was before seat belts. Before child’s car seats built like the cockpit of a Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor fighter jet. Before increasing numbers of smart cars and drivers who are anything but smart.
Daughter Robin and I agreed a few weeks ago that regardless of how smart cars get, we are not relinquishing control of the steering wheel. “Jon’s got it figured out,” she said, referencing her hubby. “He says they have to make cars smarter now because drivers don’t know how to drive anymore.”
Both of my children, Robin and Lee, are veterans of back seat sleeping as kids. Great memories for generations.
Even experts agree. One sleep study suggests the gentle rocking movement of a vehicle can make anyone sleepy at any age. Just like parents rocking children to sleep. Or, as in some cases, “drove us to sleep.”
According to my parents, a 15-minute drive around town was sweeter music than a lullaby when I was an infant. “You’d be sound asleep before your father got back to the house,” Mom always said.
I don’t remember that far back, but I remember my best backseat sleeping memories. In the family’s 1950 Studebaker Starlight Coupe that featured a wraparound rear window surrounding half the back seat. The package tray, as the area behind the seat is known in automotive vernacular, was recessed about four or five inches. Perhaps Studebaker considered that a safety feature. Hoping to keep everything tossed there from taking flight when sudden braking was needed. Likely not in the Studebaker sales brochure, however, was how that drop down area also provided a sleeper berth of sorts for a small child.
Short excursions or a family reunion road trip to Kentucky, memories of lying in the big back window and drifting off to sleep remain. Moon and the stars above and the highway’s hum below.
Almost as memorable are trips from my grandparents’ East Texas home out west to ours in Seymour. A couple of weeks with my Dad’s parents was a summer ritual then. The journey to get me home usually fell to my grandparents which meant an early trip. Unscriptural early.
“Come on, Sister,” my grandfather would say to my grandmother. “It’s almost three. We need to be on the road.” He always called her Sister. Never by her real name of Hattie Lois. Why? I don’t know. I did know, however, that the back seat of their green ’57 Ford was where I finished my night’s sleep. Still in my PJs. Slumbering from Pittsburg to Greenville, always his first stop.
The Ford didn’t offer a panoramic rear view as did the Studebaker. Lingering sensory sensations from those snoozes were A&P coffee poured from S.V. Aldridge’s metal thermos and Prince Albert tobacco smoke from his pipe.
Why was Greenville his first stop? Because he enjoyed breakfast at a small roadside cafe on Highway 67. Back before the interstate came through. Floyd’s, I think it was called. Had a plate hanging on the wall inscribed with, “Elvis ate here 3-14-58.”
Scrambled eggs, biscuits, and coffee were the attraction for my grandfather, not the King of Rock and Roll. I’m wagering a waffle breakfast tab at Denny’s he would have looked at that plate and asked, “Elvis who?”
Up at three and breakfast at Floyd’s put us in Seymour early in the day. Visiting with my parents for one night. Up long before daylight the next morning. “Let’s go Sister, it’s almost three.”
Grandaddy didn’t linger long with his visits.
I told my friend last week not to linger long trying to stay awake. Car naps are good. And not to worry because sleeping while driving was something I had not had time to practice yet.
Today, on the rare occasions I might get tired of counting sheep while trying to fall asleep in my bed at home, one sure cure for insomnia is easy. I just close my eyes and recall the childhood memory that still sends me off to slumber.
The moon and stars through the back window of a 1950 Studebaker Starlight Coupe and the highway’s hum below me.
—Leon Aldridge
(Author’s note for photo above: A die cast model of the insomnia curing 1950 Studebaker Starlight Coupe in the same green color as the one in which I used to snooze on road trips. To the right is a photo of me and my younger sister, Leslie, with Dad’s Studebaker in the far background. The photo is dated on the back in my mother’s handwriting, March 26, 1950. According to the paperwork in the foreground, Dad bought the car December 20, 1949 at Dillinger Motor Company in Ballinger, Texas for $2,095.71 that included tax, title and license.)
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Aldridge columns are published in these Texas newspapers: The Center Light and Champion, the Mount Pleasant Tribune, the Rosenberg Fort Bend Herald, the Taylor Press, the Alpine Avalanche, The Fort Stockton Pioneer, The Monitor in Naples, and Motor Sports Magazine.
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