Continuous Entertainment 6

As I was driving back from the cooling tower place, in heavy summer weekend traffic, I was passed by a Beemer. As it went by, speeding well above the limit (as was almost everyone else), I noticed that, in the back of the front headrests were mounted video screens.

Now, I remember many long drives with my parents–my maternal grandmother lived 485 385 miles away and we visited her at least twice a year.

They were usually pretty miserable drives. In the early years, before the opening of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, it was up at 4:30 a. m. to catch the ferry. Then down the road. The road took us through the center of every town and city on the way, including Raleigh and Charlotte, North Carolina; it was before bypasses. (I still remember the North Carolina State Penitentiary that we passed leaving Raleigh–a pretty forbidding looking place.)

If we were lucky, my parents would stop at the Red Apple Restaurant in Roanoke Rapids, NC, for breakfast; in later years, when my parents had a little more money, they would even treat us to breakfast on the ferry (it was an hour and a half crossing and all the ferries had full restaurants).

Later on, with the opening of the Bridge-Tunnel and the construction of Interstate 85, the 11 hour trip turned into an 8 or 9 hour trip.

But it was still a long time to be stuck in a car with my brother. And the feeling was probably mutual.

My parents often had to point out the center vinyl seam of the back seat and inform us that we each had to stay on our own side of the line. (When the seams disappeared, I think they resorted to masking tape, but I’m a little hazy on that.)

And, looking back on it, I’m glad we didn’t have the capability of watching DVDs. Instead, we fought; we looked out the window watching the country; we talked and read and generally had to figure out some way to amuse ourselves (it was a big treat when one of us got to ride in the front passenger seat).

I still remember the mailbox somewhere near Roanoke Rapids that some farmer had created out of a pot-bellied stove (the mail got dropped into the stove pipe), the Burma Shave signs, the tobacco barns with the ads on them, and all the bridges (I had my parents under strict order that, if I were napping, they should wake me if they were approaching a bridge).

Had we been able to watch movies, we might have been quieter and fought less.

But we wouldn’t have read, counted license plates, or done many of the other things we did to pass the time.

And we would have arrived with numb, dumbed-down brains.

It is not right for parents to numb their children’s brains for the sake of quiet in the car.

And it is not good for children not to learn how to amuse themselves.