Taps

There: two taps! I knew it. I didn’t used to recognize it when I was younger, but now I see the cogs in your winces, the springs in your gulp, the tick-tock-cockadoodledoo-clockwork moments before your superstition. When it’s a green, you just smirk and stare with your hands on the golden years’ ten and two. When it’s a yellow, you tap twice on the dashboard—ba-ba—your wrists resting on the wheel like children on a teeter-totter. When it’s a red, the tap becomes a pricklin’ pop be-bop beastin’ beat with mad flow for hip hop: ba-Ba-ba-Ba.
When I got my license and the car, it became habitual for me, too. No reason, no thought, no conscious will purchased the eccentricity for the fee of solidarity. I even improved it with a waltzing ba-ba-Ba for greens. After a few rides in, my friends sitting shotgun would—no blitz and no bullshit—tap their own approval out. Some stoics like Colin and Erich would even break out their falsetto guffaws if we tapped simultaneously, same accent and all.
Eventually, that jinx would be a cue for the prestigious front seat passenger to break out a gut-busting dashboard solo. Colin set a record once, finger-licking for ten minutes straight. He even managed to incorporate the silences and poetry-beats of the Granny Smiths, Goldens, and McIntoshes overhead in three-block measures along Main Street. Erich got a bit more creative, though, and started incorporating the ledge of the glove compartment, lilting his index fingers between the dashboard and glove compartment like a high-low cowbell. “Don’t Fear the Reaper” and the demo bridge of “Kids” never sounded better as with his assistance to the car’s tinny speakers.

You’ve been doing this for years and I really have no idea why. This time, we’re driving together to Bob and Marsha’s while I’m home. Good, wholesome people, fine family-friendly friends. We’ve been lucky so far, going through four greens rowing, but then we come through a yellow and you don’t tap. It is an omission I am entirely aware of yet it doesn’t register immediately.
“What was that?” I say. I take a stab and speak up.
“What was what?” I’m surprised you even speak back to me. In this family, car rides (and dim evenings before bed) are spent in silence. They’ve always been that way. I never liked it.
“Why didn’t you tap? We drove through a yellow light and you didn’t” I tap out the expectant ba-ba which has come to comfort and satisfy me as much as the click of a seatbelt.
“Oh. I stopped that a while ago. I guess we haven’t driven together in a while” you say. “It began as the whim of a superstition I held but—I mean, c’mon—I’m old and wise, young grasshopper.” You glance at me with one of those weird duckbill smiles. “Can’t do that kid stuff anymore. Don’t do it anymore. Kid stuff.”
“But you did it all the while that I was growing up.”
“Yeah…true, but you were small and weak, then. Oh wait!” You chuckle at the cruelty you believe to be a snarky humor that I’m apparently man enough to take.
“Dad—“
“I’m sorry, bud. Seriously though, here’s why it began, though it continued out of fun: when you were still an infant, I began to get the idea—no idea where it came from, maybe a dream or Gary, you know ‘im, that crazy beard at the deli—I began to get the idea that airbags weren’t as safe as they could be unless I tapped out air pockets. So I made stoplights checkpoints, and had a little fun with the radio while I was at it, in case Wa-POOOOSSSHHH! we hit the 0,0 coordinates of some drunk idiot coasting along his Y-axis while we were innocently cruising our X-axis. Now they got those laws about no kids in the front seat. But at the time, we didn’t know any better. It was a safety precaution. For you. Not based in science at all, I didn’t think but now know no, but yeah: air pockets bad, tap ‘em out good, keep your tiny noggin safe.” You glance with a smile at me.
I am stunned. Dad, you never told me you loved me. You never kissed me. You never hugged me. You didn’t know I wasn’t a boy scout, lost my virginity at sixteen, consoled Mom whenever you left before you came back for good. You never even shook my hand. I learned to drive, to change a tire, to balance a checkbook, to shave, to be chivalrous, to be a gentlemen, to moderate my alcohol consumption on my own. No you. Never you. There was never a you there. You were never there. But here you are, explaining to me that this stupid nuance in your life that’s become so ritualistic for me and my friends began as a safety precaution. For my sake. From you. So you cared. Once, you did. You did care once.

You’re gone now, Dad, and I brought up this experience in my eulogy at your wake. It was one of the few memories I have of us together where I didn’t hate you. Between the drinking, the obsession with algorithms, the serial abandonments, the distance…the, hm. Listen, I—my life’s been slim pickin’ for father-son story time. Just about a year or two before you passed, there in the car tapless you finally implied that you cared for me once. It was short-lived and subtle like a blink, but it happened. It doesn’t make up for jack. But it existed. I existed for you once. I’m at a green light now: ba-ba-Ba.