Come On Barbie, Let's Go Harley

by Matthew J.X. Malady

Twenty years or so ago my father refused to buy us a Barbie car. He restored this Harley instead & it’s still pink: pic.twitter.com/n8lQcwwQp7

— Casey N. Cep (@cncep) April 30, 2015

Casey! So what happened here?

Turns out this was more than twenty years ago, but anyhow, my sisters and I all wanted Barbie cars. You know, the plastic toys that are designed for children to drive around for ten minutes before they go kaput. We each wanted our own, and we wouldn’t stop asking for them. Endless appeals were made to our parents and then even to Santa Claus.

My father was determined not to waste money on three plastic toys, so he found this old Harley Davidson three-wheeled golf cart and decided to restore it. I don’t know where he got it, but he fixed the steering and the batteries and the seats. Then he and my mother painted it Barbie pink. My mother even painted our names on the back above the bumper and made us these little driver’s licenses.

We didn’t know any of this was going on — they kept the whole thing a secret by storing the golf cart in my godfather’s garage until that Christmas Eve. We always woke our parents up at an ungodly hour to open presents, and that year there was this mysterious key on the tree. We tried it in all of the locks around the house, but when it was finally light out, we found the driver’s licenses in our stockings and the golf cart in the front yard.

How was this awesome thing used during playtime? And was it the functional equivalent of a Barbie car, or something more? It looks like it could probably go faster than a Barbie car, for instance.

It’s so much better than a Barbie car! I mean we still tool around in it all these years later. I tweeted about it last week when I was helping my father move some tree limbs around our farm. We used it for everything, all the time. Our log cabin has wood stoves for winter heat, so we’d use it for hauling firewood up to the porch. We’d use it in the garden and the peach orchard. My sister would cart around hay and straw. We’d drive it up and down the lane to get the mail. We loved when it snowed because we’d use it for sledding: two sisters would be in the cart, one driving and another one looking back to make sure the third hadn’t fallen off the sled.

Obviously only one sister could drive, so there were squabbles about that. I was a little ornery, a little more wild than my sisters, so I would sometimes hide the key, but then one of us realized the ignition would accept almost any key or key-shaped object. For a few weeks, we used a butter knife. It’s a wonder it survived.

Lesson learned (if any)?

I don’t know! My parents are wonderful?

Just one more thing.

Really, my parents are wonderful. Looking back, it’s one of many magical things they did: My father would pack honeysuckle in our school lunches, my mother would make slushies from snow in the winter, they would encourage all of these silly stories about dinosaurs and other creatures on our farm. Just so much care for and delight in their children. So maybe that’s the lesson? Love children, of course, but also enjoy them.