Steel Belted Radials

One of the ways that parents have been known to torture their children is to drag them along on blatantly non-child-friendly errands.

Unless you’ve managed to successfully repress such memories, I’d venture that if you dig deep, you’ll recall at least one really terrible experience as an unassuming, angelic child cherub standing in some patently adult venue waiting for time to stop its stand-still so you can get on with your child life.

If you had a particularly cruel parent or two, you may have even been subject to such trauma in an habitually or tag team fashion. Some parents just can’t seem to help themselves.

One friend of mine said it was the fabric store.
Long, torturous, brutal sessions of textile HELL.


I can see the face of this child as the mother debates this red fabric’s qualities against the characteristics and virtues of this other red fabric which, by the way, looks EXACTLY like the first bolt of RED fabric.

Now this may be a gender thing, but I, personally, didn’t mind the fabric store, at all.

My mother or grandmother, would shop and select cloth for really practical and mundane purposes (like making me a homemade dress, which is a completely different form of child abuse if you were raised in the sixties/seventies, pre-Martha Stewart era and obviously homemade clothing was the curse of social death at your grade school). I would take their dreary intent to purchase fabric and turn it into Barbie Fantasyland.

The gold satin fabric draped across the top of my head became my luxurious long pretend princess hair.

The glittery, opalescence of pink velvet became my pretend cape/gown.

The heavy deep burgundy fabric was my pretend royal bedspread and pretend matching drapes for the pretend master suite of my pretend country castle. (Not to be confused with my pretend city castle.)

Pearly, silver white tulle was my royal, pretend princess bridal veil.

You get the picture.



Yes, in fact, in many ways I was a predictable girly-girl. Shut up. I was six, give me a break.


No, for me it was not the fabric store.

It was the . . . . . . . tire store.

My dad was a tire obsessive. Probably still is, I wouldn't know. I ran away long ago.

Why I was required to go to the tire store with my Dad, I'll never know. I do know that it was torturous each and every time, but there was this one particular day that probably violated some or all of the Geneva Convention.

I was sick: cough, cold, earache, scratchy sore throat. I felt terrible. Now I believe I let him know how bad I was feeling, (as any responsible, considerate six year old would) and his response was "It'll just be a few more minutes." He was already there and was all-in with this tire sales man and wouldn't dream of leaving now.

It was terrible.

How long did I have to endure this tire store agony?
The number FOUR comes to mind.

Now it may not have been that I had to wait there, with my completely non-interactive father, for four full hours.

It may have been the stack of four tires I sat on, while I had to wait.

It may be that it took four days to get the new rubber smell out of my hair and jacket afterward.

FOUR? It may be the number of times the sales person wanted to shoot my father for being such a jerk customer.

It may have been how many meals I missed in the time I was there.

It may be the number of years I lost from the other end of my life after inhaling those toxic tire fumes. (Four, count them. Four good years!)

It was probably the number of criminal codes my father violated by making me go with him that day.

Hard feelings? More than four, I can tell you that much.



This week I was driving up to Edmonds with my daughter, when I noticed my car was feeling funny. Now my car is like fifteen years old so it has a few noisy, rattly parts and it takes a discriminating driver to notice such nuance.

I pulled over for a quick visual inspection and besides a large screw sticking out of the tread, there was a bulge in the side of my tire.

Now the screw actually looked pretty cool. Like an automotive fashion statement. A piercing.

But the bulge? This was a bit worrisome.



The trip to Edmonds was off. My daughter and I spent a good part of the morning tire shopping. (Will the cycle of abuse never end?)

I kept telling her how sorry I was. To my parenting credit, my daughter is a high school senior and it was the very first time I had ever subjected her to the tire store trip, so she looked at me with confusion. I wore this proudly.



And I continued to wear it proudly as I, immediately after leaving the tire store:

• took her to lunch at Red Robin, onion rings, pomegranate lemonade
• took her shopping at her favorite clothing store, two Ts and a pair of jeans,
• and bought her a new car on the way home, to make up for the tire store exposure.

I'll spend the rest of my life trying to make it up to her. Well, all except the last four years.