Bright Red Stick Shift Aerostar Minivan

There are things that only slightly upset me, like BMW's and Dancing with the Stars. Then, there are things that really upset me: tweed, crowded grocery stores with old women who tell you you have too many items in your basket and that you should get a cart, that psychic guy John Edward who preys on families who have lost loved ones and tells them that they are "in a better place," and hot, humid, middle-of-July type of weather. There's also a long list of things that creep me out as well.

I've decided that minivans creep me out. Not in a soccer mom entitlement kind of way, but in an intense, I just watched an actual scary movie kind of way. Today I was behind this silver minivan, New Jersey plates, a black turtle compartment on the top, visible passengers throughout the van which I had to strain to see through the tinted windows. I'm guessing it was in case they wanted to watch a DVD while on their five minute trip downtown. I know this because I drove behind them all the way from my apartment complex to the parking garage. The driver was doing the type of driving where he was either talking on his cell phone or having some sort of important can't pay attention to the fact that I'm driving kind of conversation. And something about the whole thing creeped me out.

Growing up, my family had a bright red stick shift Aerostar minivan. My brother eventually took it with him to college, and we promptly replaced it with a black stick shift Explorer. We are a stick shift only family. I eventually learned how to drive a stick shift car in the parking lot of my old elementary school with my dad yelling, "Clutch! Clutch! Now gas! Gas! Goddamnit!" It is one of my most pleasant memories of growing up. By then I was used to my dad yelling things like goddamnit, but usually it was from the backyard while he was working in his garden or from upstairs when he was installing the window air conditioners in mid-June. The best part of that whole experience was our neighbors letting us know how great it was to hear him yell goddamnit son of a bitch every Saturday afternoon when the lawnmower broke or the rabbits ate all of the lettuce. He once killed a possum with a pitchfork. We didn't hear any cussing when that happened and I didn't learn about this story until I was a teenager. At the time I was embarrassed by all of this, thinking that everyone thought my dad was hard to deal with or a disturbance, but it was something that I learned to love and appreciate about my dad. Most of the time he would trap the animals that disturbed his precious garden in a silver cage and take them out to the woods and set them free to disturb somewhere else.

Other things that creep me out: that weird guy with the round-faced body, unibrow and that weird girl he's with in the yellow dress on that e-harmony commercial. They stand together and talk about communication and how hard it is to talk about themselves to each other and how e-harmony helped them find each other. And I think to myself, that's exactly what happened you sad fucks. They are very, very creepy both alone and together. I'm actually glad they found each other because all I can think about is his round unibrow face sitting at a bar asking the bartender what time she gets off work after she's watched him unsuccessfully present himself to a variety of unattractive, lonely women all night. And when she promptly says no as well, he decides that e-harmony is his online lonely bar ticket to love.

While I was doing my year as an Americorps*VISTA working in Boston, I had a friend who lived out in Holyoke, Mass. (FYI: It's the birthplace of volleyball, right next to Springfield, the birthplace of basketball). We used to drive up to the "mountains" (after living in Boone, North Carolina for four years, nothing's ever really mountains anymore), and then over to Northampton, Mass. He had this tape of Jeff Mangum playing live at Jitter Joe's and throughout the whole thing there is a baby talking and crying in the background. And it always creeped me out because on top of his music and his voice there's this baby crying and then the sounds of clanking of plates in the restaurant. Part of me doesn’t want to listen, but part of me wishes I had been there at Jitter Joe’s.

For some reason when I was behind that minivan today I really wanted to see what it was like inside. Get a closer look at this family that who stored extra DVD's of A Night at the Museum and Shrek II in their black storage turtle. Because while I was growing up we sat in the back of that bright red Aerostar, air conditioning never really reaching us, half cracked windows that slid to the side, and gray, soggy seats. And from the outside, without tinted windows, everyone could look in and see us.