The Passenger Seat

By Jonathan Ryan Patterson

When you’re five years old, your father is the biggest man you know. He knows where he’s going, he knows how to fix things, and he knows when to stop. You don’t know enough to question any of it. You just climb into the passenger seat.

For me, it was an old Mitsubishi Mighty Max. Coffee on the dash, sunflower seeds one at a time, Sonoran dust and Tucson sun passing outside the window. I was a kid. I didn’t know I was watching anything. That’s the strange thing about being young. You think you’re just living your life. You don’t know you’re collecting it. I was learning what a man looked like. Not from anything he said, just from watching him drive, watching him work, and watching how he held the wheel.

I grew up in the shadow of Sentinel Peak, what everyone back home just calls “A” Mountain. There was a horse corral a couple houses away, and my cousins were always somewhere close. We rode bicycles through the dirt and mesquite, climbed the rocky ridge, and walked the rim of the quarry pit. Sometimes we went farther out into the desert than we were supposed to, and sometimes we got lost on purpose. We always found our way home. We rode our bikes all the way into downtown Tucson simply because we could. There was no destination, and there didn’t need to be. We were kids, and that was plenty.

My mother wasn’t a woman who wasted words, but she was bold. When she spoke, you listened, and when she didn't, a single look across the room told you everything you needed to know. She knew how to hold a room without raising her voice, and she knew the standard she expected from me. My family called me mijo.

My Nana knew how to cook, and to this day none of us are really quite sure how she pulled it off. We had very little, but she could stretch almost nothing into an entire feast, and everything that came out of that kitchen tasted incredible. Christmas meant everybody eventually squeezed into Nana’s house. Tamales, posole, platters of tacos, cousins running through the rooms, and voices talking over each other. I wasn’t much help with the tamales; I was mostly waiting for them to be finished. There was menudo too, and I ate it for years until the day I finally asked what it was made of. Once I found out, I switched to posole, and nobody gave me grief about it. That was the thing about where I came from. Nobody gave you a lecture about belonging. You just belonged. You learned it by being there.

Creosote after a desert rain is still my favorite smell in the world. Nothing has ever come close. One breath and I’m back on the west side. Some things get into you before you’re old enough to realize they’re never leaving.

You spend your teens thinking your father doesn't understand the world, and your twenties realizing how much weight he was carrying that you never saw. Eventually you stop measuring your parents against what you thought they should be, and you see what they actually gave you.

I’m forty-one now, with three boys of my own. Now I’m the one behind the wheel.

There’s a BC 1000 in my garage, raw, unpainted steel sitting on an old wooden stump. The boys drift in while I’m turning a wrench. One holds the light, one hands me a socket, and they argue over which bolt goes first. Sometimes one disappears into the corner and comes back with a piece of hardware I didn’t ask for, convinced it belongs on the motor plate. I know it doesn’t fit, but I let him try anyway. You don’t build a man by doing everything for him. At some point, you have to let him put his hands on the metal, get it wrong, and figure out why on his own.

My oldest looks me in the eye now. I remember when I had to look down to hear him talk. That change happens so slowly you don’t notice it, until one day you look up from the workbench and realize you’re standing where your father stood, and you’re the one being watched.

They take pieces of you out into the world. A habit, a standard, the way you treat somebody when nobody important is looking, the way you keep your word. You think fatherhood is about teaching your sons, and then you realize they were taking notes on your silence the whole time.

I can’t write their script, and I can’t live their faith for them. I want them to be good husbands and proud fathers who know who they are when the room goes dark. All I can do is put something honest and sturdy in front of them, and trust God with the rest.

My father never gave me a lesson on manhood. He kept the truck running, kept his word, and let me sit beside him long enough to see how a man carries himself. My mother lived her standards with quiet strength and never compromised them. They never gave me instructions. They gave me evidence.

If we do it right, our boys won’t understand all of it while they’re under our roof. They’ll just carry it until one day they smell rain, open a toolbox, or catch themselves saying something they heard at home, and for a second they’re five years old again. That’s when they’ll understand. We don’t get to choose what our children remember; we only get to decide what we put in front of them.

This morning I walked out to the truck and set my coffee on the dash. I didn’t think about it; it was just muscle memory. Then I saw it there, and for a second, I wasn’t forty-one. I was a kid in an old Mitsubishi, sitting beside my father, watching the mountain disappear behind us as we headed into a Tucson morning.

I finally understand why he never seemed to be in a hurry.

He knew I was watching.