Ride of a Lifetime

Last Wednesday was my mom’s 80th birthday, so this past weekend Lynn and I drove down to Greensboro from Bethesda, and my brother Ken and sister-in-law Cindy traveled from Roanoke for a family celebration. This featured dinner at a nice restaurant, desserts from a fabulous local bakery, a champagne toast, and gifts that included a stay at the stately Hotel Roanoke and a handsomely packaged reproduction of the entire New York Times of October 5, 1931, the date of my mother’s birth in that city.

It was clear, however, that my mom’s favorite gift was one she’d received the day before her birthday: a ride in a red sports car. She’d mentioned every now and then for years that this was something she’d someday like to do. Not to put the pedal to the metal herself, or even to get behind the wheel at all, but simply to be in the passenger seat of a sleek crimson convertible as it sped on down the road. For a woman whose life has been the absolute antithesis, in daredevil terms, of that guy I recently saw on 60 Minutes who scales sheer cliffs barehanded and sans safety equipment, this seemed the ultimate adrenaline rush.

To make a long story short, I made it happen. Given the name of a foreign-car dealership in Greensboro by a friend who lives there, I lucked into contacting a salesman who’d graduated from my high school a year after I did, with whom I’d probably even shared a school bus. That bond, plus the fact that he’d thrilled his own elderly mother with a ride on his Harley-Davidson just years before her death, meant he was only too happy to help make my mom’s dream come true. My dad delivered her to the dealership at a pre-arranged time, and the salesman took her for an exhilarating spin in a turbo-charged Porsche that had carried a $174,000 price tag when it was new three years ago. It had been owned by some Raleigh millionaire who’d traded it in for a new Ferrari.

Everything about this gift—for which I wasn’t charged a dime—worked out perfectly. My dad cannily planned the event for the day before my mom’s birthday so she could have the pleasure of telling the story to everyone she saw on her big day. Which she did, by his account and her own, and which she still was doing when we saw her over the weekend. No friend or even casual acquaintance was spared the story of how she had zipped along on NC 68 at speeds of up to 70 mph on a 45-mph road, of how an impressed trucker had looked down from his lofty rig at the spectacle of the Old Lady and the Porsche and given his horn a hearty toot, or of how she’d left her hairnet in her purse and simply let the wind blow through her tresses. (Given my mother’s impenetrable perm, this amounted to something considerably less than letting her freak flag fly, as it were, But trust me, for her to have gone hairnet-less was, in its own context, as much a statement of abandon as is that free climber’s distain for ropes and harnesses.)

The sports car ride actually was the perfect gift for my dad, too, in that he’d never before planted his ass in the seat of a vehicle worth more than twice what he’d paid for his current home in 1972. The words “one hundred and seventy-four thousand” were something of a mantra the entire weekend for my tightfisted father—in much the same way, I imagine, he might have chanted the words “filet mignon” during his Depression-era childhood had he ever lucked into such a meal.

Of course, I came out of Operation Red Sports Car smelling like something of a genetically engineered Super Rose—the devoted son who had taken a mother’s passing wish and turned it into a dream gloriously realized. In baseball terms, if my mom hadn’t dared hope for more than a clean single, I’d nevertheless drawn a bead on the ball and socked it completely out of the park.

So it was that I got back home yesterday feeling pretty smug. Delighted for my mom, to be sure, but more than a bit taken with my own success in taking an open-ended desire and transforming it into something my mother surely will remember for the rest of her life. Last night, when we picked up our dog Bean at the home of our friends Joanne and Eric Scott, Lynn prompted me to recount the story. I modestly filled them in on the details. They beamed at the image of my octogenarian mom basking in the pleasures of the open road, and in the knowledge that her youngest son had turned out so outstandingly.

I continued riding that high all the way into this morning, when Lynn suddenly jogged my perhaps willfully spotty memory about What Really Happened.

Didn’t I remember that conversation back in August, Lynn queried, when she’d asked my visiting mother what she wanted for her 80th birthday? Didn’t I recall how my mom had jokingly referenced that oft-mentioned sports car ride, clearly not thinking it ever would come to pass? Didn’t I recollect how she (Lynn) subsequently said we needed to make that happen?

Lynn no sooner had completed the questions than I sensed my Super Rose wilting and its divine fragrance dissipating. Just two minutes earlier, my mental sequence of the events leading up to The Car Ride had begun with my having brilliantly brainstormed to Lynn that our friend Kenneth in Greensboro, a well-connected local attorney, might be able to recommend a car dealership to target. But now, in an instant, I realized that the impetus for my decision to e-mail Kenneth in the first place had been Lynn’s identification of the Perfect 80th Birthday Gift.

“It’s fine,” Lynn assured me. “I don’t need credit. But it was my idea.”

Every piece of that, I immediately understood, was absolutely true.

It honestly is fine for a mother to think that her son came up, completely on his own, with a wonderfully thoughtful way to make her 80th birthday extra special.

Lynn doesn’t require credit. If she did, she could’ve demanded and received it any number of times over course the weekend, on each occasion a new person heard instead the tale of The Car Ride and the Amazing Son.

The ride was her idea, as Lynn reminded me. In the code of marital scorekeeping, she had deemed it important to keep me honest. I totally get that, as I tend to do the same thing.

So, yes, it was Lynn’s conception. I executed it, with an assist from Kenneth in suggesting the dealership, and with monstrously huge thanks to one Reade Fulton, now my favorite car salesman in the world, who soon will be receiving a generous gift card from me.

My mom literally enjoyed the ride of a lifetime. My dad savored her excitement and his own brush with affluence. I loved playing a key role in making my mom so happy. And Lynn got the satisfaction of being quietly virtuous throughout. As returns on investment go, this one was turbo-charged.