When Cars Were America
From Ed Ruzicka's poetry book "My Life with Cars"
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 bit.ly/CarsPB and at Cottonwood Books. Read more of Ruzicka’s poetry at edrpoet.com/poems.