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Every June, shortly after school let out and before my mother had completely recovered from nine months of having me underfoot only after three o’clock, my parents loaded a suitcase into the car and drove me two hours out of the city to my grandmother’s house. They carried my things inside, drank something cold at the kitchen table, exchanged whatever intelligence adults considered too sensitive for children, kissed me goodbye, and disappeared for several weeks. Nobody called Child Protective Services. Nobody called anybody, actually, because long distance cost money. It was the 1970s, and this arrangement was known as summer.

Grandma lived in a world where childhood had not yet become an activity requiring adult supervision. She believed children were solar powered and consequently needed to spend most daylight hours outside recharging. Breakfast represented the beginning of your shift, lunch was an interruption, and supper meant you had survived another workday. There was no air conditioning in her house because there were windows, and if opening the windows didn’t work there were fans, and if the fans didn’t work there were shade trees. If you were still hot after exhausting those remedies, Grandma suggested that perhaps the problem was that you were thinking about being hot too much.

Her kitchen was avocado green. The refrigerator was green, the countertops were green, the telephone was green, and the stove was green enough that I have never been entirely certain whether it came that way or simply surrendered to its surroundings. Little white and yellow daisies decorated some of the cabinet doors. In those days avocado green meant modernity, sophistication and apparently an expectation that every American kitchen should resemble the inside of a guacamole factory. The seventies offered another fashionable color called Harvest Gold, but Grandma considered that showing off.

Morning began before I did. I would wake upstairs to the steady drone of the box fan and the smell of coffee that had somehow climbed the stairs ahead of Grandma. Down in the kitchen, the percolator was already burbling while she moved through a morning well underway. By the time I appeared with my hair standing up and pillow creases across my face, Grandma had been awake for an hour, breakfast was nearly ready, and the first load of laundry might already be hanging outside. Coffee was for adults, but the smell belonged to everybody.

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The sheets that came off Grandma’s clothesline had a smell no dryer sheet has ever successfully counterfeited, something involving sunshine, wind and the peculiar cleanliness of fabric that had spent an afternoon snapping in the open air. On certain summer evenings she tucked me beneath those sheets while broad daylight still poured through the bedroom window. Somewhere outside, older children were still riding bicycles, birds were arguing in the trees, the screen door slapped downstairs, and adults occasionally laughed on the porch. At nine years old, being put to bed while the rest of civilization continued without me seemed like a violation of several constitutional amendments. Fifty years later, I would pay good money for eight uninterrupted hours beneath one of those sheets while people I loved talked softly on a porch outside. 

The box fan stayed in the window all night, humming steadily and pushing warm air around with sufficient determination that we accepted the result as climate control. Speaking directly into the spinning blades transformed your voice into that of a robot, an experiment that had to be repeated nightly because scientific findings require independent verification. The fan would still be turning in the morning when the percolator began announcing another day, and the whole operation started over again.

Breakfast released us into the world. We drank from the garden hose because nobody had yet discovered that human beings required individually packaged water. You let the hose run until the water stopped being hot enough to blanch vegetables, bent it upward, and drank. The first swallow tasted faintly of rubber, brass and whatever had been living inside fifty feet of green hose; the second tasted entirely of summer. Grandma’s only concern was that we turn the faucet completely off when finished, making water conservation one of the few environmental principles she practiced without ever knowing she was an environmentalist.

The screen door announced every arrival and departure with a wooden bang followed by the metallic shudder of its spring. Grandma told us not to slam it roughly twice a day, and we slammed it roughly two hundred times. Eventually that sound disappeared into the larger soundtrack of summer: cicadas, lawn mowers, transistor radios, barking dogs, bicycle tires on pavement and somebody yelling for somebody else three houses away. Grandma never needed GPS to locate us because she had lungs, and her effective range extended considerably farther than any child wished to test.

We disappeared after breakfast and returned when the streetlights came on. Nobody knew precisely where we were, and nobody seemed particularly alarmed by this. We crossed vacant lots, wandered creek beds, climbed trees, built forts from lumber adults had apparently intended for other purposes, and rode bicycles without helmets because the human skull was evidently more durable during the Nixon and Ford administrations. If we got thirsty, there was a hose. If we got hungry, somebody had a garden. If we got hurt, somebody’s mother had Mercurochrome, which gave us considerably more incentive not to get hurt than any modern safety equipment ever could.

The garden behind Grandma’s house provided an astonishing percentage of what appeared on her table. Beans had to be snapped, peas had to be shelled, corn had to be shucked, and supper occasionally began with the instruction to go pull six carrots and see whether the corn was ready. Tomatoes rarely survived the journey indoors. Grandma would hand me one still warm from the sun along with a salt shaker, and I would eat it over the grass with juice running down my wrist and dripping from my elbow. I have eaten tomatoes for half a century since, some of them excellent, but every one of them has been auditioning for a part that was permanently cast in about 1974.

Grandma understood boredom as a correctable behavioral problem. The first declaration of “I’m bored” might pass without consequence, but a second produced beans, weeds, windows, sweeping, shelling or some other opportunity for personal development. We learned quickly enough that there was always an important game taking place at the creek just before Grandma discovered another chore. Her system worked so well that an entire generation eventually grew into adults who now spend hundreds of dollars on gardening equipment to recreate the work they once fled.

There was one telephone in the house, attached to the wall by a cord, and sometimes the line was shared with neighbors. Before dialing, you lifted the receiver carefully to determine whether Mrs. Alvarez was discussing her gallbladder, in which case privacy became less a right than a scheduling problem. The rotary dial required patience. Dialing a seven took long enough to reconsider whether the call was necessary, while a zero represented a genuine commitment to communication. Long distance was approached with the financial caution now reserved for adjustable-rate mortgages.

The television received three channels reliably and a fourth under certain atmospheric conditions or when one of the grandchildren stood beside the set holding the rabbit ears at exactly the correct angle. That child wasn’t watching television so much as working for it. Weekday afternoons belonged to Grandma’s stories, soap operas populated by people who married, divorced, betrayed, remarried and occasionally died only to discover several years later that they had been mistaken. Grandma watched faithfully while maintaining complete moral disapproval of nearly everyone involved. “That woman is a liar,” she would announce, followed five minutes later by, “He’s no better.” She trusted none of them and missed none of them.

Arguments among children were settled by the World Book encyclopedias in the den. If we disagreed about whether snakes could hear, how far away the moon was or some other matter of immediate international importance, Grandma pointed toward the shelf and told us to look it up. Research involved locating the correct letter, wrestling several pounds of accumulated human knowledge onto the floor and actually reading until the answer appeared. We probably knew fewer facts then, but the ones we acquired had required enough manual labor that they tended to stay put.

Money required labor too. A quarter was capital, and Grandma did not distribute capital irresponsibly. There were weeds to pull, porches to sweep and vegetables to shell, after which twenty-five cents could be invested at the corner store in jawbreakers, wax bottles, candy cigarettes, bubble gum or whatever other products the 1970s considered appropriate for children. We managed that quarter with a degree of fiduciary responsibility many adults never bring to their retirement accounts, standing before the candy display for fifteen minutes and carefully diversifying our portfolios.

Grandma also collected S&H Green Stamps, strips of which arrived with groceries and had to be licked and pasted into little books. The books accumulated until there were enough to redeem for some household object she could almost certainly have bought months earlier, but buying it wasn’t the point. The point was saving for it, earning it and eventually driving somewhere to collect it. Besides, the stamps were green, which made them fit naturally into a childhood in which the kitchen was green, the telephone was green, the garden was green, and the most imposing object in Grandma’s possession was greener than all of them.

Parked in the driveway was her 1962 Chrysler Newport.

We called it the Green Grenade.

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Officially it was a four-door sedan, the most popular of the Virgil Exner-designed Newport body styles for 1962, and Grandma’s was finished in two shades of green over green plaid upholstery. It possessed the kind of dimensions Detroit once considered necessary for a family automobile and the Navy now associates with coastal patrol vessels. The hood began somewhere near the house and the trunk concluded in another ZIP code, with enough room between them for six passengers, groceries, church clothes, several grandchildren and whatever else Grandma believed might become necessary before returning home.

The broad grille sat between canted quad headlights that looked uncannily like the glasses Grandma wore for most of her adult life. Once you noticed the resemblance, it became impossible to miss. Grandma would lower her chin and peer suspiciously through those lenses, while the Chrysler appeared to be doing exactly the same thing through its headlights. Either way, somebody was about to be corrected.

At the rear were small fins left over from the era Detroit had reluctantly begun abandoning, with curved vertical taillights standing at the corners. Chrome wrapped around the bumpers and ran along the body, while fourteen-inch body-color steel wheels wore chrome turbine-style covers and whitewall tires. Underneath, Chrysler’s Torsion-Aire front suspension used longitudinal torsion bars, and power steering helped Grandma point all that sheet metal approximately where she wanted it. Power-assisted drum brakes at all four corners then attempted to negotiate the final details. 

Under the hood sat Chrysler’s 361-cubic-inch Firebolt V8, fed by a two-barrel carburetor and factory rated at 265 horsepower and 380 pound-feet of torque. Grandma neither knew nor cared about any of those figures. She understood the accelerator as the device that made the Chrysler proceed and the brake as something best applied well in advance of whatever she intended to stop beside. The speedometer went to 120 miles per hour, although Grandma regarded forty-one as the first symptom of lawlessness, leaving roughly two-thirds of the instrument available for theoretical research.

The TorqueFlite three-speed automatic was operated by push buttons on the dashboard rather than a conventional gearshift. Grandma started the V8, pressed D, and eighteen feet of Chrysler began moving, which to a nine-year-old looked less like operating an automobile than launching something the Soviets ought to be informed about. The AstraDome instrument cluster strengthened that impression, placing a great semicircular 120-mph speedometer ahead of the two-spoke steering wheel along with gauges for fuel, oil pressure, coolant temperature and amperage. At night the whole dashboard looked capable of monitoring missile trajectories, although the most ambitious mission Grandma ever assigned it was getting us home before her stories came on.

The seats were green plaid cloth bordered in green vinyl and protected by translucent plastic covers, because Grandma apparently intended to preserve the upholstery for some future civilization worthy of sitting directly upon it. In August those plastic covers reached temperatures ordinarily encountered in foundries. I wore shorts in the Green Grenade exactly once, lowering myself onto the rear seat and discovering several previously unexplored theological concepts at the precise moment bare skin contacted superheated plastic. For the remainder of that summer I wore jeans, which Grandma interpreted as evidence that I was finally learning to dress properly.

The Chrysler had its own smell, a mixture of hot vinyl, old cloth, dust, gasoline, Grandma’s face powder and the peppermints permanently residing in her purse. Opening the door after the car had sat in the sun intensified everything until the interior seemed to contain every mile it had ever traveled. I have encountered that smell occasionally in old cars since, and it remains one of memory’s more efficient forms of transportation.

The Green Grenade did not earn its name solely from its color. There was also the matter of collateral damage. Grandma wasn’t a bad driver; she simply came from an era when bumpers were substantial pieces of steel installed on automobiles for reasons she considered self-evident. She backed by turning halfway around, laying one arm across the seat and looking through the rear window while the Chrysler began moving slowly, majestically and with the confidence of continental drift.

A galvanized trash can beside her driveway carried a dent shaped suspiciously like the corner of a Chrysler bumper, although Grandma maintained that the can had always been bent. A concrete planter downtown acquired a white scrape at approximately bumper height, about which Grandma possessed no useful information. The mailbox leaned slightly, but that was because the ground was soft. She could explain every damaged stationary object within three miles of her house without once implicating the Chrysler, and eventually the family stopped presenting circumstantial evidence.

She never drove over forty, which somehow made riding with her both reassuring and terrifying. Grandma approached an intersection slowly enough to conduct a geological survey, looked left, looked right, looked left again, waited for every visible automobile to pass, and then occasionally pulled out in front of the one vehicle nobody else had noticed. The 361 rumbled, the approaching driver discovered prayer, and Grandma continued serenely down the road before concluding that people drove entirely too fast these days.

The back seat was broad enough for several grandchildren with sufficient room remaining for diplomatic disputes over territory. The car had front and rear lap belts, although seat-belt practices in those years existed somewhere between suggestion and folklore. A moderately enthusiastic turn sent children sliding across the plastic upholstery until cousins arrived at the opposite door in a tangled pile, whereupon Grandma glanced into the rearview mirror and instructed us to settle down as though we had organized the maneuver ourselves.

The Chrysler carried us to the grocery store, the corner store, relatives’ houses and errands whose purposes children were neither expected nor invited to understand. It also carried us to Texaco, where Grandma pulled alongside the pump and remained behind the wheel because gasoline stations employed people to pump gasoline then. The attendant filled the tank, checked the oil and washed the windshield while Grandma supervised from behind those canted glasses.

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There was a small chip in the windshield that had been there since approximately 1964. Grandma knew it was a chip. I knew it was a chip. After several visits I suspect the entire Texaco staff knew it was a chip, but the ritual remained unchanged.

“You missed a spot.”

The attendant wiped.

“Right there, in front of me.”

He wiped again, moving to Grandma’s side and polishing harder while she pointed through the glass.

“No. Higher.”

Eventually he would lean close enough to rediscover what everybody already knew, which was that no amount of Windex was going to repair damaged glass. Grandma would wait until he surrendered before saying, “Well, I guess that’s as good as you’re going to get it,” in the tone of a woman reluctantly accepting the decline of American service standards. Then she pressed D and drove away at thirty-seven miles per hour.

Sunday belonged to the Green Grenade more than any other day. Church happened regardless of weather, illness, visiting cousins, nuclear attack or competing programming, and Sunday morning began with clean clothes accompanied by strict instructions not to get anything on them before leaving the house. Grandma’s purse contained peppermints, and the church pew contained cardboard fans advertising a funeral home, which seemed a little aggressive when you thought about it.

There came a predictable point in every sermon when childhood endurance approached structural failure. Grandma somehow sensed it without looking. Her purse opened, her hand disappeared inside, and a peppermint emerged without words or eye contact. It was mercy administered in cellophane, and she timed it more accurately than any preacher ever timed his conclusion.

After church came the Sunday drive, and the remarkable thing about the Sunday drive was that there was no destination. We simply went somewhere without needing to arrive anywhere. Grandma pressed D, the TorqueFlite engaged, and the Green Grenade eased away while the windows remained down and the little fender-mounted mirror flashed in the sun. The 361 murmured ahead of us, the bias-ply tires hummed beneath us, and the Chrysler floated along county roads at a speed that permitted us to inspect the scenery without placing any of it under unnecessary pressure.

Grandma might turn down a road because she hadn’t been that way lately, and then the history began. “That’s the Henderson place,” she would say about a house where no Henderson had lived since Eisenhower. She knew who built the barn, whose daughter married badly, where a house had stood before it burned, who owned a field before the bank got it and which family had once had money before something occurred that she would not explain in front of children. The countryside wasn’t geography to Grandma. It was biography. Every house belonged to a story, and every road seemed to lead backward.

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Sometimes the drive ended with soft-serve ice cream, and sometimes it didn’t. Grandma never revealed in advance which sort of Sunday we were having, giving every intersection a degree of suspense normally associated with espionage. The Chrysler had a Golden Tone push-button AM radio, but Grandma rarely required it because she supplied the commentary herself. There were crops to assess, clouds to interpret, drivers to criticize and people’s yards to evaluate. “That place used to look nice” was four words capable of condemning an entire family.

Time was different inside that Chrysler. Gasoline was inexpensive enough that adults could burn it merely to see what was over there, and Sunday afternoon was spacious enough that nobody felt guilty about spending it accomplishing nothing. I have owned and ridden in faster cars, quieter cars, safer cars and cars with air conditioning capable of preserving meat, but I have never felt wealthier than I did on that plastic-covered back seat with no idea where we were going and no reason to care.

The rest of summer moved at much the same pace. We caught lightning bugs after dark in Mason jars whose lids Grandma perforated with an ice pick, but she insisted we release them before bedtime because, as she explained, “They’ve got work to do.” I never learned what employment awaited lightning bugs at eleven o’clock, but Grandma respected working people and apparently extended the principle to insects. 

We drank red Kool-Aid from aluminum tumblers that became painfully cold in your hand. Tang appeared at breakfast because astronauts drank it, and nobody in the seventies argued with astronauts. A transistor radio played baseball or country music while beans were snapped on the porch, and another might find its way beneath a pillow at night, with distant AM stations drifting in and out until a baseball game dissolved into static. The world seemed larger when voices had to travel through darkness to reach you.

Hand-cranked ice cream required ice, rock salt, towels, children, adults and most of an afternoon. Everybody took a turn until the crank became difficult, at which point the youngest child was placed on top of the freezer to provide ballast while somebody stronger finished the job. “Almost ready” could mean anything from three minutes to the following Thursday, but eventually a remarkably small quantity of ice cream emerged from an enormous amount of collective labor. It tasted better because we had suffered for it.

Some evenings Grandma unfolded the TV trays and permitted supper in the living room during The Wonderful World of Disney, an arrangement that felt vaguely criminal because meals belonged at the table. Family gatherings produced gelatin containing fruit and occasionally sitting on lettuce, which adults referred to as salad with perfectly straight faces. Somewhere on Grandma’s kitchen wall hung a decorative copper mold whose existence suggested that gelatin might eventually be shaped into wildlife. The seventies were fearless that way.

Sometimes, on summer nights, the Green Grenade carried us to the drive-in. We went in pajamas because Grandma understood there was no realistic chance of children remaining awake through two movies. She brought grocery sacks filled with homemade popcorn because concession prices offended her on moral grounds. Before dark we played beneath the giant screen, then piled into the Chrysler while the metal speaker hung from the window and the first feature began.

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I rarely knew much about the second feature. At some point I would fall asleep across that enormous back seat while movie dialogue floated through the open window, and later I became dimly aware of being carried into Grandma’s house. I always pretended to remain asleep, the adult carrying me always knew I was awake, and nobody violated the arrangement. Childhood contained treaties that were never written down.

One night I woke when the Chrysler turned into Grandma’s driveway and decided to try the same strategy. The V8 settled into its idle, the transmission clicked into Park, and the engine stopped. I heard Grandma’s door open, then her shoes approaching before that enormous rear door swung outward. I kept my eyes closed because there remained a chance that she might carry me inside.

There was a pause long enough for hope.

“Wake up. I’m not hauling you.”

I opened my eyes.

“Thought so.”

That was Grandma.

I don’t remember her sitting me down and explaining how much she loved me. Perhaps she did and the words disappeared, but women of her generation often seemed to consider declarations unnecessary when the evidence was lying everywhere. Grandma punched holes in the lightning-bug jar so the insects could breathe. She knew exactly when I needed the peppermint. She washed sheets and hung them in the sun, kept Kool-Aid in the refrigerator, handed me tomatoes from the garden and paid a quarter for work worth a nickel. She surrendered her house every June to children who tracked dirt across it, let the screen door slam two hundred times after telling us not to slam it, and sent us outside because she trusted both us and the world enough to believe we’d come back.

She drove us to church. She drove us to the store. She drove us for ice cream. She drove us nowhere at all, which may have been the best place she ever took us.

By late August, the days began getting shorter. Nobody explained this to a child, but you noticed it anyway. The streetlights came on a little earlier, lightning bugs appeared sooner, and occasionally the evening air carried the first suggestion that summer was mortal. Then one afternoon my parents’ car appeared in Grandma’s driveway, the suitcase came downstairs, and belongings accumulated beside the door. Grandma packed food we did not need because apparently there was a genuine possibility of starvation during the two-hour drive home.

I don’t remember speeches when we left because there probably weren’t any. Grandma wasn’t built for speeches. There was “Be good,” followed by “Mind your mother,” followed inevitably by the discovery that I had left something upstairs. Beside us sat the Green Grenade, two-tone avocado green in the afternoon sun, chrome flashing and canted headlights peering at the world with Grandma’s own suspicious expression.

At nine years old, I thought it would always be there.

Children believe that about everything important. The house would always be there, along with the garden, the screen door, the box fan, the telephone, the World Books, the clothesline and the porch. Grandma would always be standing somewhere in the middle of it, finding something useful for idle hands to do and maintaining opinions about neighbors who had been dead for years. You leave childhood without understanding that you’re leaving because nobody tells you when the last ordinary thing is happening.

There is no announcement before the last summer you catch lightning bugs in that yard. Nobody tells you this is the final tomato you’ll eat over that patch of grass, the last morning you’ll wake to her percolator, the last time the screen door will slap downstairs while you’re supposed to be asleep, or the last Sunday you’ll sit on hot plastic while Grandma points the Chrysler down a county road for no better reason than she hasn’t been that way lately. If we knew which moments were the last ones, we’d probably ruin them by trying too hard to remember.

Years later, I can look at a 1962 Chrysler Newport and appreciate it as an automobile. I can identify the canted quad headlights and little fins, admire Exner’s peculiar styling, recognize the AstraDome and explain the Torsion-Aire suspension. I know about the 361 Firebolt V8, the push-button TorqueFlite, the turbine-style wheel covers, the plaid upholstery and those curved taillights. Those are facts, useful for describing the car to someone who wasn’t there.

Memory doesn’t need any of them.

All it needs is the color.

Then I’m nine again, and the screen door has just slammed behind me. The kitchen is avocado green, the percolator is muttering, and somewhere inside the house Grandma is watching people lie to one another on television while announcing that she doesn’t trust a single one of them. There are beans waiting to be snapped on the porch, my bicycle is lying in the grass, a Mason jar will be needed after dark, and I have a warm tomato in one hand and the salt shaker in the other. The box fan is waiting upstairs for a bedtime that will arrive while the sun is still out.

And parked in the driveway is an enormous green Chrysler whose headlights look exactly like Grandma’s glasses.

Tomorrow is Sunday. After church, at the precise point when I think I can no longer sit still, a peppermint will appear from her purse. Then we’ll climb into the Green Grenade, the 361 will turn over, Grandma will press D, and that great green Chrysler will ease away from the curb.

Maybe we’ll get ice cream.

Maybe we won’t.

We have nowhere to go, Grandma is driving, and there is all the time in the world to get there.

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