Leaving An Impression 

 There we were, tooling along the autobahn outside Zweibrücken in my father’s almost-new 1954 Chevrolet. Not sure where we were headed, but when you’re four years old, you’re pretty well unaware of everything in the universe except eating, playing and elimination.

I think it was a cloudy day, although remembering details like that - literally from another century - is iffy at best. I know for sure I was in the front seat, sitting between my parents. Presumably I was there because my sisters were in the back seat, and that was the way my parents kept us from squabbling. In fairness, we were trying to keep it to a minimum (one of my father’s favourite phrases), because my mother was pregnant and that’s what you did around pregnant mothers, ‘keep it to a minimum’, whatever that meant.

Anyway, we were cruising along, and knowing my father, we were probably following the rules of the road, which on this road wasn’t a long list. Autobahnen were designed for Porsches and other cars to zip along at speed, which meant we were getting passed, a lot. My father was an engineer in the RCAF, and he knew all about motion and inertia and the various ‘laws of physics’ (again, whatever that meant). So trying to pay attention to those laws, while still keeping order in the car, meant he had his hands full. For my part, all I was doing - aside from keeping it to a minimum - was trying to sit up straight enough to see over the dashboard.

The dashboard in a ‘54 Chevy isn’t very busy. Speedometer and a couple of gauges over on the left, a glove box on the right. Right in front of me, above the Chevrolet insignia, the dashboard was one long expanse of curved blue sheet metal, blocking my view of the road. That’s what I was trying to look over, to see what was ahead.

Until we came to the dip.

When you’re four years old, you don’t have much if a sense of rhyme or reason, you just take what the world gives you and try to process it. So when the dashboard dipped, and I was able to see the road ahead, I wondered why a truck had sort-of pulled over to one side, partially blocking a lane. A man was standing beside it, near the front end, looking underneath.

The sight was so unexpected that all the cars in front of us were slowing down. And because they slowed down, my father had to slow down, quickly. He uttered something – probably ‘damnation’ – and the car lurched. And then it was sliding, and there might have been tires screeching, or maybe that was the sound my mother made. The truck was much closer, and then it stopped us.

That’s how I thought of it, that the truck ‘stopped us’. Later in life, after various fender-benders (and two write-offs), you have a much more sophisticated sense of timing, physics and impending doom; when you’re four years old, the truck ‘stopped us’.

And by ‘us’, I mean it stopped the car, not the people inside the car. This being 1955, seatbelts were something that pilots wore when they flew in jets, not what passengers wore when they drove on the autobahn. So everyone in the car slid forward, even my sisters in the back seat. Which meant I slid into that long, smooth expanse of sheet metal right in front of me.

I have a vague sense of the next few minutes, cars stopping on the highway, people milling about. My mother was bent over, holding her face in her hands. Because she was pregnant, and because there was blood, people were worried. Everyone seemed to be talking at the same time, probably a mix of English and German, although it was all the same language to me, not that I can get past guten tag these days.

It turned out that my mother had a cut on her forehead from the broken windshield. An ambulance appeared and patched her up, but otherwise she was okay. She walked around with a bandage over one eye for a few days, but no one worried anymore about ‘the baby’ (my future kid brother). 

And much to my surprise, a week later the car was back in the driveway of our PMQ on the base, good as new. (The ‘PMQ’ was our house, but everyone called it a PMQ for some military reason). Whoever fixed the car had done a good job on the bumper and front end; you couldn’t even tell it had been in an accident.

But they missed the dent.

Right in the middle of the long, smooth dashboard, there was a small dent. I remember my father looking at it, frowning, then looking at me. Without prompting, I leaned forward  and put my forehead in the depression. Fit perfectly, which for some reason made me proud. I don’t remember hitting it, but then a whole lot was happening all at once, way too much for a four year-old to process. I vaguely remembered sliding into the dashboard, but it’s not as if I cried or anything; I left that to my sisters.

All I know is that for the next several years, every time we got in the car, my father would look at the dent and mutter ‘we have to do something about that’ and then forget about it. I was glad he never fixed it, because it reminded me of that weird day, with all those people and all that excitement.

Once in awhile, though, I wonder if hitting my head on the dashboard explains a few things about me. Then I realize that that would be way too cynical.

Tom New