For the Love of a Bus
A story for Father's Day, "Spirit of '76" from the new Bus Love anthology.
My short story, “Spirit of ‘76,” came out last fall in the wonderful anthology, Bus Love: Stories of Life and Adventure with the VW Bus. I promised last winter that I’d soon post this special story for my $ubscribers—but now is the perfect time. It’s got all the good themes: Summer vacation. Growing up. Nostalgia. Travel. Adventure. Creativity. Family. And VW Busses! It’s also my first literary portrait of my complicated dad, who’s been making a few appearances lately. (In a box. And at the piano. And in my audiobook.)
Next month, I’ll be reading it at Beast Crawl, Oakland's Premier Festival for Literary Arts & Performance! The theme of our reading is THE EDGE and yes, this story takes you to the edge…of a good time. Of puberty. Of the end of life as we know it!
Save the date! Check back for time and place closer to the event.
Now fasten your seatbelts!
Spirit of ’76
Had my parents allowed me to use a blowtorch, Hoggie would have been my first art car. I would have welded a giant spring to the rear hatch to make a curly tail, and painted two black spots to imply snout-holes on the white vinyl cover of the spare tire mounted on the front. But I was only ten and didn’t have such creative license just yet. At least mom and dad laughed at my idea. Dad even suggested we name our new ’67 Sunroof Deluxe VW Bus “The Road Hog.”
Hoggie came honking its stuffy-nosed horn into our lives one spring afternoon in 1975. My brothers and I raced to the front window to see what the beep-be-beep beep was happening. A boxy, green and white vehicle was trundling down the driveway like a giant planter box on wheels, with leaves and branches waving through the roof. “It’s a greenhouse model,” Dad called out to Mom, whose face showed a happiness that excited me. My father, whose name meant forester in another language, had expressed his own creative license by transforming our house on the edge of the Colorado prairie into an oasis. He had planted Russian Olives, Blue Spruce, an entire fruit orchard for the back yard, most of them started from sticks and cuttings. The day Hoggie came home, he brought home a king and queen maple that towered over the other trees the day they were planted.
Today any vehicle with sliding doors that hauls kids and trees from nurseries with such ease would certainly be called a minivan, but Hoggie was a Bus. Bus is a much more communal word than van. A van is a service vehicle, something perhaps to carry praise-singing youth groups with good insurance and carefully monitored morals. A Bus is a bigger idea, something bigger than a company car, something you get on in good faith with a spirit of adventure and ride to wherever it’s going. Even a Microbus. In the Summer of Love, Hoggie had still been brand-new, and it would always carry within it the rebellious romance from that year.
My brothers and I could feel it. We were planning to take our own magical mystery tour this summer—family-style. We heard our parents talking about exploring Indian mounds, crossing Lake Michigan on a car ferry, camping out in the Land of the Jolly Green Giant, and visiting places with unusual, beautiful names. Sandusky, I would repeat over and over in my head for weeks. Cahokia.
Mom used her creative license with Hoggie when she got a bolt of cream-colored cotton cloth featuring red and blue fife-and-drum players. The ragged little men and boys printed on the fabric wore tattered breeches and carried a flag twined with ribbons bearing the words Spirit of ’76. The whole world was excited about the upcoming Bicentennial, Coloradans even more so, since our state would be one hundred years old. Everything was about 1976. Next fall, my big brother Cosmo, eleven months my senior, was entering seventh grade, and I the sixth. Seven, six. I would be independent from him for the first time as big (wo)man on campus at our elementary school, while he forged ahead as a lowly junior high sevvie. Oh, and I weighed 76 pounds.
Perhaps Mom felt something for those little figures on the fabric, whose job it would have been to keep time so the soldiers could keep going in the toughest of times. For weeks she planned and measured, folded and sewed, tacked and tied. Then one day when she picked us up from school, Spirit-of-’76 curtains hung on all of Hoggie’s windows. The whole interior of the bus had been transformed for our bicentennial odyssey with accessories like fabric trash bags, book bags and pillow-covers. Mom even made matching Spirit-of-’76 bandanas for herself and me. And lunch bags with those little fife-and-drum guys on them that we could carry through the last week of school to anticipate our trip, then again next fall and throughout 1976. Mom had made our Hog a home on wheels for our summer tour back East.
The night before we left, Mom and Dad wrestled ….
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