A Brief Passage

This is another passage from the new piece of writing that I shared yesterday. I think I'll post another excerpt from my upcoming book at the end of the week. In the meantime, I hope you like this.


My mother hates driving with the windows down. She is one of those women who cares deeply about her hair, through no fault of her own, but my father was always a windows down kind of person. Maybe that should be a lesson to those young lovers out there. If you have different preferences when it comes to driving with the windows down, don’t get married. You’ll only end up divorced. There is no way I could count the number of times I heard the exact same argument. Being an only child, I was very attuned to my parents’ arguments, as I had nothing else to listen to during the car rides to whatever hellish amusement park/plaster statue haven we were driving to. This is before the days of portable CD players and the like. I tried to bury my head in my books, but the lack of volume a book has did not serve me well. On a particular trip, (I believe it was to the grand canyon), my mother insisted that the Arizona air that was whipping through the windows (her words, not mine) was dying her hair red.
“I can see it now,” she said, running her hands through her still very blonde hair and looking at what I could only assume she thought was the culprit. “Look at this, Gene, look! I’m finding red particles in my hair from this terrible dry air. It’s grand canyon dust, and it’s turning my hair red. I hope you like being married to a red head, because that’s what you’re signing yourself up for now. Look at this! I’ve never seen such a thing. Who needs to buy hair dye at the grocery store when you can just drive through Arizona?”
“Jesus Christ,” is all my father could muster as he rolled up his window with his left hand and drove with his right, the signal that my mother could do the same if she so desired. My mother believed the grand canyon was dying her hair red.