The Carpool of Truth

This Fall when I went to Oktoberfest in Kalona, Iowa with my husband and my brother.


We moved to Iowa in August and proceeded to put together our house. The hubby prepared for Law school and I prepared for the job his brother helped me get at a private college in Illinois.




Luckily, a great group of people carpool there from Iowa City (an hour and ten minute drive) and I got to join them. My group, the Tuesday and Thursday group, consisted of me and two psychology doctoral candidates from the University of Iowa who were spending a year teaching at this school. They were interviewing for their internship jobs elsewhere and I got to learn a lot about the graduate track in psychology. They are wonderful people and I call them my Carpool of Truth, because they never sugarcoated the weather I would be facing in Winter. I spent 4 hours and 40 minutes every week with them for 20 weeks. We certainly learned a lot about each other; the honest truth sessions about weather solidified our trust in each other’s judgments and lead to great discussions about pretty much everything.




We were busy settling in to Iowa and just getting used to the fact that family was 1 mile away, 1 hour away, 2 hours away, 4 hours away, 5.5 hours away and 9 hours away. This was so close compared to when we were in West Virginia. I could drive to both my brother’s houses in a day and not be exhausted when I got there. And they could visit us. And they did.




The weekend of Oktoberfest, my middle older brother, the second child (I am the last and third) came up to visit us. I was excited about this because my older, the eldest, brother had recently visited with his whole family and we had a lot of fun. I wanted that same kind of experience with my other brother, who like us is adventurous and had recently been spending a lot of time working in the Czeck Republic. I knew that this Oktoberfest would be nothing like what it would be like in the Czeck Republic, but I thought it would be fun anyway. The Kalona, Iowa beer is locally brewed by a long lie of German descendants. How could that be bad? It wasn’t.




My brother came out on a Friday (which I had off as a part-time instructor traveling 2 days a week to teach 3 writing classes—nice huh). We headed for downtown Iowa, which I barely knew having just moved there. He insisted on driving his nice new car—a Ford Focus with the voice command options. Let me tell you. That was nice. You can say Johnny Cash and it plays Johnny Cash.




My brother is an engineer and I remember when I was little and he was a teen that he took everything electronic apart, to see how it worked, and then could put it back together again and it would work like before. My eldest brother can draw and make things from his drawings. Both of them used to make, together, little rockets every year for the fourth of July. We would light them on the 4th at the family celebrations at my Aunt’s house 2 blocks down the road from our house. It was also my cousin’s birthday, so it was a big deal. They would shoot into the air and arc and fall to the earth. I would wait for those rockets, our finale, to be sent off all night. And the next day, we would search the field for them.




Mom recently recalled how they took apart one of their cars one year and put it back together. They worked on it often at night and I would go out there and watch them and look for my cat, who often was around too seeing if one of us would feed him. She and I remember some extra parts we both asked them about when they proclaimed they were finished putting the engine back together. They said they had no idea what they were for and were not worried about them since the car ran. And it did, without problems from lacking parts. I am amazed by both of their abilities.




Once when I lived in the dorms and was talking to the middle brother, he spent two hours on the phone with me telling me how a car engine worked. I was not at all surprised that he bought a car that could understand his verbal commands or that he wanted to drive it after driving it for 4 hours that day already.




So we headed downtown in his car, walked all over downtown Iowa, meet up with my husband and some of his law school friends for lunch at a Korean restaurant, and missed the tapping of the beer keg ceremony at Kalona.




Doh.




We did go the next day and walked the streets of Kalona, mainly a series of shops selling food, wine, beer, household items, and anything else a tourist might buy. It was a cloudless, bright day and chilly. The wind was cold, but sitting under a tent, listening to a German band play all the old German songs various relatives would hum or sing as I was growing out, was pleasant. And the beer was good. A nice glass of stout always makes for a good day.




I drug the men to the loom factory. I love looms. And they had the big industrial kind. We saw a hold-two-mugs-of-beer straight-out-to-your-sides arm contest and walked the streets of Kalona, and even though it was not a rip roaring time, it was great to be together in the same place having the same experiences with two people I love.




For days after that weekend, I had those German songs rattling around in my head. They had not been there since childhood, but they reminded me of relatives long dead and relatives now closer in physical distance to me now that we had moved to Iowa. I felt grateful to those long gone for their lives—grateful for my relationship with them and for being the wanderers they were. I was also grateful for those alive and closer in distance to me now—grateful for my relationship with them and their desire for me to be closer in distance to them.




It strikes me how much truth can be revealed in the relationships I have with others about me and what makes me who I am. What a gift our family and friends, our chosen family, give to us. Truly, together, we are a carpool of truth.