The Song of Songs

At the beginning of my sophomore year in high school, before I had my driver’s license, my friend Scott McClendon used to drive a group of us to school in his 1960s-era white Ford Galaxie 500—a car that holds a mythic place in my memory of that now misty era. I recall that Scott’s birthday was in late August or early September, so he was driving before the rest of us. That was a bit of serendipity too, because Scott, or Woody, as we all called him, was a master of what he termed “fancy driving.” He could make that Galaxie 500 do things with its fabricated metal mass that some circus performers could only dream of doing with their far more pliant corporeal selves. Among many exploits, I remember watching him drive down an important thoroughfare at a fast clip, slam on the brakes, and spin 180 degrees, skidding into a perfect parallel parking spot on the opposite side of the street with the panache of an Olympic diver executing a flawless double backflip before splashlessly entering the water. I have recently learned that this kind of technique is now referred to as “drift parking.” Such a term seems to imply a far too self-conscious and premeditatedly technical maneuver when glossed against my memories of Woody’s impromptu shenanigans behind the wheel.

One of Woody’s favorite after-school activities was to lock the Galaxie into a spin in the middle of a neighborhood street that curved alongside one of the little triangular esplanades that provided a modicum of variety to our otherwise unremarkable suburban neighborhood design (which I learned, much later in life, was modeled after Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Broadacres City” concept). On one drizzly, late fall afternoon, the curve from Doliver into Rocky River was in ideal condition for the daily celebratory afternoon McClendon spinout, so we angled into the curve and Woody locked up the brakes and jammed the steering wheel hard to the left, and we began to experience the donut of all donuts, the spin of spins, the acme of after-school fancy driving bliss. The street was just wet enough for all the residual street-surface auto oil and fluids and water to mix, and about 280 degrees into the gyre, Scott and I looked at one another with a giddy, oh-my-God-this-is-cool-and-we’re-here-for-it kind of amazement as the Galaxie continued to spin, finally coming to a stop after a full 540 degrees. From time prior and thenceforth, I am fully convinced that never has a more accomplished example of fancy driving been executed in such a relatively confined space in the neighborhood of my wide-eyed salad days. It was like time was standing still and we were in the middle of some kind of cosmic wormhole through which the Galaxie 500 had transported us—both of us acknowledging the awesome coolness of the spin and hyper-cognizant that there was nothing we could do but attempt to appreciate the experience fully during the fleeting seconds of its duration.

I recall another case of mutually apprehended awe during a similar, surreally protracted experience during that same era. It happened one afternoon as I sat on the little love seat on my mother’s side of my parents’ bedroom. My mother was born without a sense of smell—a deficiency also known as anosmia that my father credited as the secret to the success of their marriage. Although my mother’s forbearance regarding many of my father’s other habits might have warranted far more awe, her absence of a sense of smell would prove itself to be a not unwelcome handicap in her connubial sidecar next to the self-exalted bed of Fred.

My father seemed to be as impressed with his ability to break wind as he was with his oratory and singing skills—the nether end of his alimentary canal providing him with as much pleasure as that which took in the mayonnaise-slathered morsels that, doubtless, lent such an inimitable freddish timbre and vibrato...