Car Seats

      Nowadays, when you set out to take an automobile trip with a child under six or seven years of age, before you set off, you must strap the kid into the car seat.  Failure to do so may result in a heavy fine or in a worse case, injury to the kid.

       It wasn’t always thus.  One of my earliest memories stems from an automobile trip.  We were headed for town for whatever reason with my Dad and my two older brothers.   

     I was wandering around on the back seat with a new pair of shoes.  Well, not new, new to me.  Dad started slowing down to turn a corner on the country road.  I tried to balance myself and the unfamiliar shoes caught on each other, or I stepped on a shoelace, or something.

     Down I went between the two seats.  With help, I regained my perch on the back seat.  I uttered what must have been one of my first attempts at a sentence:  “’Tit over shoes, hurt hiney.” 

       The concern of the other passengers was dispelled and there was great laughter.  My phrase was repeated several times.  When we returned home from the town trip, the “boys” had to repeat the entire episode to our mother.  Everybody laughed again.  I was a hero!  I enjoyed the limelight for a brief while.

       There were no such things as seatbelts in those olden days.  We free-ranged around the back seat.  The seat backs of the front seat of our old Chevy were worn with kids standing between the seats and leaning on the front seat back.  Also on the back of the front seat back, a couple of round rope-like straps designed to be coat hangers, I guess, dangled uselessly by one end, the other end having been torn out by using the ropes for handles by the youthful passengers.

      For a few years,  seven of us loaded up whenever the family all went, such as to church or to visit our Aunt, Uncle and cousins, three of us in the front seat, four in the back.  Among  my least-favorite memories is a trip home from church on a cold winter day, Dad smoking a cigarette with the windows all rolled up against the bitter cold air.  The smoke-filled air was a guaranteed headache for me.

      There were some advantages of not being strapped in.  For a year or two, I could stretch out on the shelf behind the back seat, under the back window.  On night trips, such as coming home from a basketball game or from a 50-mile jaunt to visit the cousins, I could retreat to that bunk and go to sleep.  It left room for the other three back seat passengers to stretch out a little, too. 

      But then there was always the wakeup call, when I had to leave my cocoon and face the night air on my way to undressing and falling at last into bed.  Oh, those good old days!  Good, if you don’t look at the stats on death and injuries from automobile accidents in those good old days.

     For all the complaining about, and from, kids in car seats, it is better now, at least from a safety aspect.  Anyway, most cars no longer have that shelf behind the back seat.  Kids have to sleep sitting up.  And there are no “knee fights” as back seat passengers attempt to stake out their territory.