Apnea Babies

Read a really interesting piece today about how writing – and writing for the internet in particular – should be about telling authentic stories from our lives. About the importance of returning to the crux of narrative, whatever the topic.

And it made me think of little stories from my life that I can tell.

For some reason, I feel like I spent a lot of time as a child in the backseat of the car with Hilary. I realize that this can’t really be true, because I think when we lived in Paris we barely drove anywhere. Certainly I have vivid Paris memories that have to do with other forms of transportation, the sing-song way I used to say Sol-fer-ino every time we passed that metro stop being one of them.

But, the car. I have a lot of memories of time in the backseat of the boxy navy blue Volvo station wagon. This was before the Volvo designers got all aerodynamic and fancy. It was a navy blue rectangle. And I used to chant, as Mum tried to get it to start in the morning in the freezing cold North Cambridge morning, “Go car go! Go, car, GO!”

I have no recollection of carseats. Am pretty sure there weren’t any, because one of Hilary’s and my favorite games was to each sit with our back against one of the backseat doors (obviously impossible had we been in carseats of any kind). We then bent our legs and put our (always bare, always dusty and dirty) feet against each other. The game was to see who could straighten her legs first. Apparently we had a lot of faith in the Volvo designers’ mechanisms for closing those doors – some of these battles were heated enough that I’m kind of surprised neither of us got ejected onto the highway.

Another game that we invented was called Apnea Babies. Hilary, who was a preemie, had apnea as a baby. I understand this now to be a serious and scary disorder, but for some reason she and I both saw great comedy in it back then. The game was simple. One of us had to stop breathing and hold our breath until the other one noticed. Then the other sister had to rush to stuff a McDonald’s straw up the non-breathing sister’s nose. Thus, by putting our sister on a “respirator,” we had saved a life. There was no winner in this game, but we played it incessantly.

The final thing I remember is the ankle grab. We used to sing a fair amount in the backseat, or talk, or ask questions, or, likely, argue. When my parents had tired of our noise my father would reach back with his big hand and grab the nearest ankle. Whoever had her foot closest to the hump on the ground in the backseat was shit out of luck. Wow did he have hand strength. I remember those ankle grabs and the subsequent, agonizing squeeze that followed. Unfortunately for Dad, I think that move resulted in more and not less noise, but it definitely made an impression.