CHANGING GEARS (for

dad)

Me between the cradle of his knees, a chew of steering wheel on puppy fat, eyes, round as sixpences from the dare of a wide-eyed lane, my hand, parcelled in the plump pads of his own big hand, churning up the gears.

A decade later, when he taught me properly to drive, that passenger seat roar of his to brake – Brake!

An impatience of aging, the superiority of youth, the vow to my mother to never get inside a car with that man ever again.

There were things I never fully understood, his sudden coming home too early in the day, work keys tossed, their uses temporarily obsolete, the threat of being ‘burnt out or leave’ still thundering behind the surrender in his eyes, staff cars spared only because he’d done as he was told.

Then the serious stuff of family business, steered from the office of a bruised oak desk, the writing of cheques for our educationbe frugal, be kind, be fair, and that thing he knew most how to give away, chiselled from his own unspoken past, the sense of what was right and what was wrong.

Later, a slow shrinkage of the father we knew, hurrying slowly, his neck curved as though he’d spent a lifetime ducking under doors. And the final humiliation - you must not drivefilching his freedom and swallowing up the grim shadow of the road that lay ahead.

But there he is, with the wind salting his cheeks, an elbow slack on an open window ledge, spills of sunshine kaleidoscoping the windscreen. Now he has all the time in a very long time, freewheeling the highway and raking up the gears, finding that endings can sometimes be beginnings in disguise.