Arthur
Katherine D. Bennett
(First published in the Lathrop News Thursday, July 17, 1997)
I didn’t get my driver’s license until the summer before my senior year of high school. I was reluctant to learn to drive; it just didn’t seem like a prudent idea at the time.
Oh, I took driver’s education my sophomore year and passed well enough; but mainly it convinced me that driving made me nervous and queasy. Why would I, a young woman if intelligence, with a life filled with such promise, hurl myself down the road when it was full of others hurling themselves with no awareness or regard of me and my fabulous destiny? It didn’t seem sensible.
At the end of my sophomore year my parents, who were wearying of hauling me around to all of my school activities and back and forth to work, announced to me that I going to use part of my savings to buy a car they had found. I had no problem with that. I
bought the ’61 Chevy Bel Air and parked it in the driveway. My friends all came over and admired it. I named it Arthur. I never even started it. My parents hauled me around.
This went on for quite some time, until my father put his foot down and announced to me I would learn to drive and he would teach me himself. To make a long story short, my father relentlessly worked with me, grimly determined to be free of my endless demands for a ride. At the end of the summer, like it or not, I was a licensed driver behind the wheel of my own car. To my endless amazement, I loved to drive.
I loved my old Chevy, too. Aside from the tendency for the doors and door locks to freeze solidly in the winter, my Arthur was a faithful, sturdy car. Good thing, too, because I managed to bump him into several unmovable objects during the first two years I drove.
Anyway, I had Arthur for a number of years, and then, he was stolen from in front of my parents’ house in the middle of the night while I was away in Alaska, working. When my father picked me up at the airport and gave me the unhappy news, I reacted with total disbelief. I was convinced my family was pulling an elaborate practical joke on me, and that the day before I returned to school they would unhide my precious Arthur. I looked in all the neighborhood garages and in everyone’s back yards. No Arthur. When it came time to go back to college, Dad put me on a Greyhound. That’s when I knew Arthur was truly gone.
Still, I have never given up hope. If any of you have seen a poor, kidnapped, tan, ’61 Chevy Bel Air that answers to Arthur sometime during the past sixteen years, let me know. I’d be so grateful. And Arthur, if you can read this... Come on home, honey! I still love you!