When Cars Were America

Poem: When Cars Were America

By Ed Ruzicka

Granny got a Caddie.

Got a hold of gold keys given

by her doctor son one Christmas.

She said, “Pile in my polliwog.

Pile in the back seat.”

She’d fly off to Seven-Eleven

for Icees after pre-school.

Big air-puffed Coke, strawberry Coke,

you suck down with a fat straw.

Gives you shivers in your throat-back

in the deep comfort of “Grannys” Cadillac.

Blue as the big, blue sea, Granny’s

Caddie whizzed along the fast lanes.

It had photosensitivity too;

a bitty-chip that shut the

lights down. Shut the lights down

when stubby-as-a-gremlin Granny

didn’t remember to do that thing.

How she grinned to tell her cousins

that the M.D. son gave his mum

her big, blue Caddie Christmas.

Knew she knew they knew

she’s the very one that made it.

Became the apple in the family pie.

Then went zoom-zoom on and on.

—From "My Life in Cars," a collection of poetry on the cultural seat of the automobile in America, written by Baton Rouge writer Ed Ruzicka and published in November 2020 by Truth Serum Press. Available at truthserumpress.net and at Cottonwood Books. Read more of Ruzicka’s poetry at edrpoet.com/poems.

Photo by Charles deGravelles.