I have not even fully sold the car yet but today I find myself feeling sad about the transaction. Maybe it’s the weather. I have been wandering about in the cold and rain (looking and feeling pretty pathetic) after arranging for my friend and car-buyer to take over payment for the coveted driveway parking spot I landed all those months ago. We met with the owner of the driveway and got everything squared away as far as payments and who is who now.

At some times I feel the relief of not having to deal with the vehicle, but other times I remember how I have only held on to the car for sentimental reasons. The car has never been mine. It has always been my father’s. I can not look at it without a disconnectedness, a preposterousness, a feeling that if one’s car matches their personality in any way then my personality is to be found in how I left his “emergency instructions” card in the car since 2005. That card had my name and phone # (as well as my mother’s and my sister’s) and had information about my father’s pre-arranged funeral. The card was there in case he was killed in the vehicle and such cards are common enough among older people and even not-so-old.

I removed that card today, imagining the existential confusion that could ensue if someone else were killed in the car and then, per the instructions on this card, carted off to my dad’s funeral home in Florida.

I told the story again of how my father drove that car right up an exit ramp of I-4 in Florida. Trucks, vans, cars whizzing around us at 70 MPH blasting their horns and creating a textbook example of the Doppler Effect. The rush of traffic eased and my father chomped his cigarette, mumbling “Thought this was the goddam road.” Another incident in Biloxi I only know from his account, but apparently he was hopped up on some kind of prescription medications and nearly drove the car into the ocean. He was all kinds of DUI and would easily have been arrested for it had anyone seen that little spectacle.

….

I re-arranged my bedroom yesterday, kicking up some dust and uncovering buried detritus. In that same spirit of combing through random bits of my past I also found myself in correspondences with friends old and new with whom I share some common past. One correspondence surprised me by evoking amazingly clear memories of summer camp when I was 10, 11, and 12. Another set of e-mails from my sister has me recalling with similarly surprising clarity those days in Laos.

….

Without the expense of the parking spot this month I plan to go home now and hit the “order” button on my Amazon shopping cart. $200 worth of poetry books ought to go a long way for me. I’ve been reading through Ezra Pound’s hefty volumes of early poetry, enjoying “Personæ” but feeling like an ignoramus trying to comprehend the allusive “Cantos.” He’s like Dennis Miller on “Monday Night Football”: One needs a companion volume with thorough citations to begin to get it. I can’t be the first to compare Ezra Pound to Dennis Miller, can I? Maybe a sharper analogy would be between Pound and Salman Rushdie. I uncovered my mostly unread copy of “Satanic Verses” while re-arranging yesterday.