My dad had his mid-life crisis in a straightforward manner – he simply arrived home in a convertible.
From my bedroom window, I saw him pull up in a shiny black car, tan roof down, sunglasses on. He pulled up on the street in front of our house, rather than into the driveway or garage. It was the only hint of hesitancy in an otherwise bold move, like he thought my mom’s yelling would be worse if he brought the care onto the property, never mind that he’d already paid for it in full.
It was perhaps the most cut-and-dry mid-life crisis of all time. It began and ended there, on the street in front of our house, but you can hardly blame my mom for being mad. She didn’t know it would be a one-convertible-and-done thing. She might’ve been less bothered if she had taken the make and model into account. It was a Chrysler Sebring, selected in a very “I want to do something rebellious but I realize I’m a suburban dad” kind of way.
He’s not really one to verbalize such things, but I’m sure the convertible made him feel a little bit youthful, especially as his two daughters were getting older. I grew up in the ’90s, but my dad taught my sister and me all about the ’60s – “his” decade, the one that contained his formative years. When I was seven and she was 10, he sat us down to teach us about John, Paul, George, and Ringo. I repeated the lesson to my classmates obsessively, making me the weirdest 2nd grader in 1993. He exclusively played ’60s music in the house (still does, actually) on a good speaker system – something I learned the importance of at a very young age. When the sounds of The Lovin’ Spoonful and The Mamas & the Papas filled the lower level of our house, the ’60s seemed as vibrant and real as the decade I was in – the one that was mine, so to speak. In my mind, I had a beehive and thick, winged eyeliner that melted down my face when I screamed and pulled at my hair at the sight of the fab four. When we’d cruise around town listening to Beatles tunes with the top down (making good use of the car that had gotten him in so much trouble), the wind whipping through my hair created a similar disheveled look.
I kept it mostly to early Beatles stuff at that age. I was too young for the drugs and weird outfits that came later, some 25 years before. Once, as I was checking out library books about the band – I just grabbed them without looking too closely – I discovered one that detailed their sexual escapades. I read a passage about passing girls around from bed to bed – that was as far as I got before something about the appearance of the book tipped my mom off to its contents, and it disappeared. She firmly grabbed the wheel and turned the car around before I could travel too far down that road.
So, I went back to the innocent stuff, shimmying to “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and watching the movie A Hard Day’s Night over and over again, the plot of which mostly involves the Beatles running away from fans like me. They would’ve been wise to run away in my case. I mixed up religious teachings with Beatles teachings and occasionally prayed to John Lennon. My dad definitely did not intend for that to be the result of his lessons. It was the embarrassing advent of my own developing, weird mind. It was a little confusing, though. Both Jesus and Lennon were popular, that was for sure, and both were spoken about with a certain reverence. It might’ve been any of them, to be fair; it’s just that Lennon was the only one who had died at that point. I didn’t have the means to communicate with Ringo, or I would’ve tried.
I did have the means, suddenly, around age 11, to chat with strangers all over the world. Unbeknownst to my parents, I was using our brand-new computer to explore all the chat rooms AOL had to offer. I’ve read that people my age essentially grew up alongside the internet, and that sounds accurate. The internet was our pervy little brother. I’d enter lesbian chat rooms – it was little brother’s fault; there were just so many. They seemed, and probably were, less scary than some of the other options. I felt safe among the lesbians, and I met other 11-year-olds in their chat rooms – other people who had no business being there. At one point, I acquired a boyfriend, who theoretically was a boy my same age (I now wonder if it was a 45-year-old woman). I lost touch with him (her?) before we had the break-up conversation, so technically we’re going 23 years strong.
I also spent many hours playing Oregon Trail on that computer – probably a better use for it given my age. My sister and I would set up a tent behind it and pretend we were sitting in the wagon while acting out whatever happened (and whoever got dysentery) as the game progressed. We had one foot in the digital world and one foot in the real world; one foot in the past and one foot in the present; one foot in innocence and one foot in adulthood.
My sister, Lisa, wasn’t so interested in chat rooms. She would’ve preferred to meet a horse online. Envision the most horse-girl outfit that you can, and then envision my sister’s shirt with the heads of the horses on the front and the butts of the horses on the back (paired with jean “shorts” that reached her knees). The top of her dresser was so jam-packed full of horse figurines you couldn’t so much as lay a finger on one (which I did, all the time) without causing a terrific horse domino effect. This resulted in pained cries from Lisa, who felt every bump and bruise that they did. She tried to get my parents and me (or anyone who came within several feet of her) to play a board game called Herd Your Horses, where she pretended to be a rancher from a generic bygone era. Thankfully (and tragically), it had a one-player option, because we consistently turned her down. My parents had, presumably, regular life reasons as excuses, and I needed to hop online and communicate my age, sex, and location (11/F/Iowa), to anyone who would listen.
To satisfy Lisa’s horse needs, perhaps, our dad signed us up for the father-daughter group Indian Princesses. It was an alternative to Girl Scouts for the slightly more culturally curious girl with a fondness for leather fringe vests. We’d all hop in the convertible and head to another era, which was located at Camp Wapsie, just a 40-minute drive from home. Our overnight stays at the camp were a horse girl’s dream. Not that it actually involved horses, but we got as close as we could without actually having any. Our whole feather-clad look suggested that horses might come running in at any second, which pleased Lisa. Gleeful, culture-appropriating babies that we were, we all chose “Indian names” at the suggestion of the camp organizers. (Mine, “Hungry Deer,” strongly implies that I was a large child, but I was regular-sized. I just hadn’t eaten lunch, apparently).
A short time after our participation, the group was renamed to something less offensive (and less memorable, I’m at a loss to say what it was called). I think even then, we knew it was crossing a line when a “medicine man” (someone's white dad) danced around the fire each night. But my dad bonded with us by helping us add beads to our bear claw necklaces and straightening the feathers on our headbands.
There were no levels in Indian Princesses – once a princess, always a princess. But while we eventually outgrew the group, we kept our taste for history. We’d be at the computer one minute, staring into the future, and at our town’s historic village, where we spent many summer days, the next. By that time, we were old enough (sort of) to be left to our own devices, so my dad would drop us off with a wave as he pulled away in the convertible. Ushers Ferry hosted Civil War reenactments and, to our great excitement, balls (as in dances). Usually, one led right into the other, the band starting up while soldiers were having their legs amputated a few feet away. The houses and buildings in the village were largely from the 1910s, but it was the closest thing we had to the 1860s. (Confusingly, they also held WWII reenactments, a Buckskinners’ Rendezvous set in the early 1800s, and Wild West weekends. Today, they host weddings for anyone who desires a history theme – any part of history.)
My sister and I spent summer afternoons volunteering for Ushers Ferry’s historic tours, mainly because it meant we got to put on old-timey dresses. The dust on the clothes was extremely realistic – like they’d been stored for 130 years until the moment we signed up to volunteer. We were supposed to say a few scripted lines to the people walking through the village, which included an old schoolhouse, a Victorian-looking residence, a saloon that mostly sold stale candy, and a supposedly haunted hotel. I was much too shy to open my mouth (although bizarrely loud online), so instead, I silently floated around the Victorian mansion avoiding the guests, effectively making it haunted, too.
When it was time for us to attend the ball, Lisa and I got as dolled up as we’ve ever been. My blonde hair was pulled in a tight bun, and I wore a pink, lacey dress that had built-in space for pointy Madonna boobs that I didn’t fill, leaving the points hanging in space. I spoke to no boys whatsoever while desperately wishing one of them would ask me to dance. None of them did. I can’t imagine why. My silent staring, my deflated boobs, and my severe-looking hairstyle (which, at least, held up to the wind of the convertible ride) added to the whole vibe I was giving off. Who was I to say what was attractive in the 1860s? Or have any idea what hairstyles of the 1860s looked like when the internet didn’t yet have Google?
When I call my sister, she reminds me that the dresses were from Goodwill, and likely bridesmaid dresses from less than five years before. It was as close as we could get, and relative to our age, they were pretty old. To us, everything was either contemporary or a million years old – there was no in-between. We lived at the dawn of the internet, and everything that came before it might as well have been covered in dust.
Around the time I was getting over the Beatles and accepting their 1970 break up, my dad took me to see their impersonators. They rocked the full look, going through the entire decade of the band’s existence in one concert by changing outfits and putting on long-haired wigs halfway through. It was an impressive effort, but with only one outfit change, some of the nuances were lost. There were the innocent Beatles, who were basically like a boy band, and the not-so-innocent Beatles, with nothing in-between. One would assume the show was an odd experience for my dad, like if I attended a Backstreet Boys concert composed of people who were born in 2010. But I remember him smiling and swaying to the music, happy as can be. And I guess if my niece suddenly starts singing “I Want It That Way” (and quizzing me about why the lyrics make no sense), I’d be pretty jazzed. I just hope she doesn’t start praying to Brian Littrell. (Although, with that blonde hair and those abs, who could blame her?)
Even as we got old enough to drive our own cars, my dad would ply Lisa and me with the promise of ice cream if we’d go for a summer cruise with him. His favorite place to go was the A&W drive-up, a tired, worn-out version of the ones he’d go to in the ’60s (although their onion rings were still top-notch). You got the sense it was about to close any minute, maybe before they brought you your shake. Soon enough, it did. After that, we made do with crunch cones from Dairy Queen, negotiating with my dad to turn on our music for the ride. He winced as the sounds of “Larger Than Life” filled his convertible while Lisa and I grooved in the back. Music appreciation didn’t go both ways in our house, but we loved the way our tunes sounded in his car, floating out into the world unconstrained by a roof. One day he got a wild hair to pick up the speed, and ice cream blew everywhere, decorating our hair and the back of his car with crunch pieces. The wind and the music made it too loud for him to hear, so we just laughed as he sped down the road, blissfully unaware of the chaos his daughters were causing behind him.
Jessica Carney is an Iowa-based nonfiction writer and humorist. She is the host of the new podcast, “And Then I Quit.” She works as a community event planner in addition to freelance writing. Her essays have been published at startrek.com, Livability, and NBC News, among other outlets.