Weird Things I Remembered in the Car Wash

I
"I think I can, I think I can, I think I can," Mother repeating as she leaned over the tub to wash my hair.

II
Discovering what I forgot when I read The Little Engine That Could as an adult: the little blue engine's female gender


III
Lazy Sunday mornings at the Tchoupitoulas Pig and then the Uptown Car Wash & Express Lube, watching my Mazda move through the long tunnel, enjoying the hand buffers' banter.

IV
A poem.

One Boy Told Me
by Naomi Shihab Nye 

And I will be deep water too.
Wait. Just wait. How deep is the river?
Would it cover the tallest man with his hands in the air?

Your head is a souvenir.

When you were in New York I could see you
in real life walking in my mind.

I’ll invite a bee to live in your shoe.
What if you found your shoe
full of honey?

What if the clock said 6:92
instead of 6:30? Would you be scared?

My tongue is the car wash
for the spoon.

Can noodles swim?

My toes are dictionaries.
Do you need any words?

From now on I’ll only drink white milk
on January 26.

What does minus mean?
I never want to minus you.

Just think—no one has ever seen
inside this peanut before!

It is hard being a person.

I do and don’t love you— 
isn't that happiness?

V
Rocking in the wash and melancholia: an oddly pleasurable combination.

Enclosures

I

While the technician prepared the machine and spread the gel on my leg, I asked, "Aren't you going to look at my foot?"

"No," she said. "He wants me to get the veins, thinking maybe there's a clot."

"Oh! That makes sense since my whole leg is swollen, not just the area around the ankle."

I showed her a little bump on the back of my thigh, discovered this morning in the shower. "That's probably just a blood vessel right near the surface. No biggie," she said.

It's a weird thing, lying in a mostly dark room with a machine clicking and whirring at my shoulder, staring at acoustic tiles in the ceiling and reflected in someone else's photographs hung on the wall, while a pleasant stranger is probing into my deep tissue, looking for something out of the ordinary.

Dressing afterwards, I asked, "Mind if I take a picture of that reflection?"

"No, of course not! I thought maybe you wanted to photograph the screen."

"May I?"

"Sure," she said. "After all it's got your name on it and it's your body!"

II

In the car, I wrapped my ankle, and headed out to grab groceries and wash the car.

I love sitting in my car, inside the dark tunnel, facing a treed corner anchored by the Monteagle Inn's sign, letting the car-encompassing machine track itself down and back, spraying and sudsing, brushing and whooshing, rocking the car slightly, creating designs on windows and mirrors. It's almost like being suspended deep in a womb-like whirlpool, only without getting wet.

III

My first day of new enclosures in many days of being shut in proved oddly relaxing (even knowing what the test showed).