The last time Charlie was in Oklahoma he came across a Lightning McQueen truck that stopped him for a second, and of course he called and told me about it like he still does when something reminds him of when he was little. Our truck was different from the one he saw but it still took us back to his childhood.
This truck had Lightning McQueen tucked inside of it, and that alone brought everything back in a way that made me sit there for a minute just listening to him talk about it. Because I could see it in my head before he even finished explaining it.
That’s the thing about kids and memories. They don’t really leave you. They just wait for something small to bring them back up again. I loved hearing how excited Charlie was to have found a toy from his childhood and how he couldn’t wait to tell his grandmother.
And it made me think about us walking through toy aisles when he was younger. Just me and him, or sometimes David would be with us drifting through Walmart or wherever we ended up after errands or work, just looking at things we didn’t necessarily need but always somehow ended up holding anyway.
I still remember one of those walks so clearly because we came across a wrestling ring set he would have absolutely loved when he was younger. The kind of thing he would have played with for hours, setting it up like it was the biggest deal in the world.
And I told myself right then, I might go back and get something like that for Christmas this year, just as a surprise. One of those little “I remember you” moments that doesn’t need a big reason behind it. He’s 19 now, almost 20, but I’ve learned that doesn’t mean those moments stop mattering. They just look different.
We still talk like that sometimes too, even now. Not in the toy aisles anymore, but in conversations that drift back to old memories without warning. And it all connects back to something even simpler than that. Car rides. Those were always their own kind of world.
Back when everything had to be planned around homeschool, quick stops, errands squeezed in between everything else. I used to pick Charlie up every day when he was in public school, and even when he wasn’t in school, we were still always somewhere together—running around town, stopping at stores, just doing life in motion.
And the backseat always had its own soundtrack. Questions. Comments. Random observations. And yes, sometimes the “I gotta pee” every five minutes that somehow became part of the rhythm of the whole trip whether I was ready for it or not. But looking back now, those weren’t interruptions. Those were just life happening in real time.
Even the quiet moments between stops meant something. The short drives where nobody said much. The windows cracked just enough to hear the world outside. The feeling that you were always going somewhere, even if you weren’t sure where the day was going to end yet.
I didn’t realize it then, but those drives were the in-between spaces that held everything else together. And now when Charlie tells me things like that toy truck story from Oklahoma, it all folds back into the same place in my mind. Reminding me of his childhood and how much I miss that time.
Toy aisles. Car rides. Christmas ideas I haven’t acted on yet but probably will. And all those years when everything felt busy, but also full in a way that’s hard to describe until you’re looking back at it. Time doesn’t really announce itself when it moves. It just shows up in moments like that, quietly reminding you what used to be normal. And sometimes that reminder comes in the form of a toy aisle conversation you didn’t expect to still feel so much.
Thank you,
Glenda, Charlie and David Cates
