My Honda is da bomb

Yesterday I received a letter from Honda recalling my driver’s side airbag. The letter stated, in calm language, that in my model (a 2001 Civic) the airbag inflator is under too much pressure and “could,” if the bag deploys, explode, striking everyone in the car with pieces of metal.

For 9 years, since purchasing my Civic new from a lot in Las Cruces, New Mexico, I have driven back and forth across the country over and over, an intricate criss-cross reflective of major life choices at different times. There was the meandering trip my fiancé-to-be and I took from Cruces to Seattle—his hometown—and back the first summer we were dating. (My car was “the safe one,” as his was a much older Accord; so we used it for all our travels.) After he moved to Virginia that autumn to upgrade his MA degree to an MFA at the venerable UVA, I soon followed, packing up my small adobe house—at the time, everything I owned fit in my Honda. When I developed a flying phobia after 911, I thought relying on my car to travel long distances was safer than getting on a plane to anywhere. And so I went: from Charlottesville to NJ and back for holidays with family, to Asheville twice a year for grad school, to eastern Pennsylvania for Chris’ and my wedding in a town called Washington’s Crossing, and then to our new life in, of all places, small-town Alabama—occasioned by his finally securing a tenure-track position. Two years later, the Honda followed a yellow Penske truck driven by my stepfather over a thousand miles north to Ithaca, NY and my eventual divorce. After two more years, with my boyfriend (now ex) at the wheel, it ferried our 6-pound daughter away from the hospital in her first carseat; and, recently, has delivered me back to the South and another uncertain future.

All this time I thought the car was my friend, my container, my vessel from life to life. It hadn’t hosted a first orgasm or anything (that honor fell to a battered ’77 Chevy Impala, on a hilltop covered in cornstalks) but it had pretty much been everywhere else, and gotten me home safe each time—wherever home was.

What can I know about the journeys of my life, what they mean, where they should end up? I’ve been driving around a bomb.