Happy Cars

As I eluded to earlier, we drove a lot as a family. We drove everywhere - all summer long - every summer and every point in between. Day trips, weekend trips, month trips. No distance was too far.
This was my brother's standard position on most trips. (Yeah, I know. I don't think our car even had seat belts.) His other favorite was the same, but with his arms around my Dad's neck - practically shoking him without understanding.
My spot was lying down up on the ledge between the rear of the back seat and the back window. My Dad had built another 'bed' out of plywood that fit over the drive shaft hump on the floor in the back seat. Technically, my brother was to lie down on the floor, I got the window ledge and my sister got the bench seat. But my brother preferred lying on my Dad's shoulder.

For most of my Dad's career, he taught kindergarten. Not always, but always elementary school in some capacity. Because of this, we always had games to play on these long rides (or maybe he taught kindergarten because he was so good at the games). We would guess distances, we would make sayings out of the letters on a license plate, we would see if we could get long-haul truckers to honk their horns for us, we took turns with the coveted task of throwing money out the window into the toll booth basket as he sped through and hoping all the dimes went in. Sometimes they didn't and my Dad stepped on the gas anyway. We were hysterical! Regular outlaws.
My brother's favorite game was one that I never understood. To this day, I still don't know how to play. My Dad got it. My Mom got it. You would have thought they would have explained it to me - nope. On my own inside the group as usual.
The game was called "What Kind of Car?" It was simple really. All you had to do was look at an oncoming car and determine what type of car it was. Something about the way the front end looked made the ditinction clear to everyone except me. They were either 'happy' or 'sad.' The part I didn't understand was the criteria. Some looked 'happy' to me that were categorically labeled 'sad.' The opposite happened too. To this day, I'm sure there were strict rules. My Dad didn't typically enjoy games that were subjective, but he did like tricks and jokes.