Sitting on floor pillows in my boyfriend’s dorm room, the smell of the cafeteria vent wafting in through his open window, I’d become accustomed to a soundtrack of The Clash, Prince, and Jimi Hendrix. But, the unfamiliar plucking of deep, upbeat base guitar started up. It was Cake’s “Stick Shifts & Safetybelts.” My boyfriend was wearing an unbuckled, yellow skater’s helmet that he’d neglected to take off for unknown reasons, except that he sometimes wore it around. Helmet on head, he offered me an outstretched hand with another hand firmly on his hip. In Fred Astaire fashion, he walked me in a wide circle and then invited me to sit on the edge of the bed next to him. He proceeded to sing the entire song, facing forward, riding side-by-side in our make-believe car. He pantomimed a steering wheel, bounced a little as we drove along, and serenaded me, fully committed to the moment. As abruptly as it started, the song ended, the helmet came off and we got lunch. I wasn’t sure exactly what had happened, but I was hooked.
I stayed in that boy’s bucket seat for almost four years. The almost twenty-year-old scene plays out in my mind like a clip from a Meg Ryan movie. In my memory, I watch the young woman play an adored leading lady in a Nora Ephron moment. It’s a little treasure that I choose to polish and keep shiny, rather than paint with the relationship’s messy ending.
Several years after the hemet-wearing Romeo, I was in culinary school. My class huddled around a chef instructor, notebooks out and toques straight, ready to learn about sugar work. Boiling the sugar to a molten caramel, the chef poured the liquid onto a rubber mat and folded it over and over again. Next, with gloved hands (because the sugar was still lava-like), he began to pull the caramel, and as though he were Rumpelstiltskin, he turned the sugar into gold. With each pull, the once amber substance developed a brilliant shine and became more yellow. He expertly flattened each strip of sugar and looped it effortlessly into a large bow, which he affixed to the top of a croquembouche. According to the chef’s explanation, as the sugar is folded, air is incorporated, which lightens the color. Then, the pulling of the cooling sugar creates microscopic fractures that reflect light to make it shine. As the sugar breaks, it becomes brilliant gold.
Things that crack and break can also be shiny and beautiful. When relationships end, the bucketseat moments often get recast with grief and anger. There is simplicity in categorical thinking, but there is a choice to step back from the microscope to remember the excitment of Stickshifts & Safetybelts. In spite of loss, I hope that a sense wonder and possibility can always be recovered. Because I think that's where love begins again.
Lyrics
Stickshifts and safetybelts
Bucket seats have all got to go
When we're driving in the car
It makes my baby seem so far
I need you here with me
Not way over in a bucket seat
I need you to be here with me
Not way over in a bucket seat
But when we're driving in my Malibu
It's easy to get right next to you
I say, "Baby, scoot over, please"
And then she's right there next to me
I need you here with me
Not way over in a bucket seat
I need you to be here with me
Not way over in a bucket seat
Alright
Well a lot of good cars are Japanese
Yeah, but when we're driving far I need my baby
I need my baby next to me
Well, stickshifts and safetybelts
Bucket seats have all got to go
When we're driving in the car
It makes my baby seem so far
I need you here with me
Not way over in a bucket seat
I need you to be here with me
Not way over in a bucket seat
Alright
Alright
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