Entry 8: Shifting Gears (Part 1)
September 22, 2025
NOTES FROM THE BALCONY, ENTRY #8
I cried into her shell, she floated me to safety.
Hello, friend—Thank you for joining me once more on the balcony.
Come around to this side door, we’re taking the fire escape down to the back. I have a surprise waiting. And for those landing here for the first time, you're better off coming this way, I'll have an attendant usher you to the proper starting point.
Neutral
Watch your step, there are potholes here. Some of them so deep you cannot see the bottom. I have flashlights for everyone, take one. Parked at the rear of this building is every car that has ever imprinted itself on the fabric of my life. An old Saturn, a couple of Mustangs next to that…my first car: a white Grand Am that I rocked in high school, thinking it was the coolest thing ever. Further, a black Volvo 940, an orange Supra, a silver WRX, marking the chapters I spent with my ex husband. A red Dakota and a black one, aptly named "La Noche", the first to host our nightly trash pickups. A Scion is nearby, souvenir from my college partying days. Further to the right, we have a Suburban with stickers all over it (that’s about to get towed). Parked next to it are two more cars: my little Fiat and a scarlet ember Nissan Rogue, purchased the same year I went rogue in my approach to life (2024). You may notice the back end is severely crashed. Poor thing's been sitting there over a week already.Hm, It seems something is missing. Now, what did the parking attendant do with that key…Ah, here. Behind this gate we will have to traverse some boxes of junk and a couple sheets of plywood to find what I'm looking for. Lift them carefully and there lies the most profound vessel that ever carried me.
A “tin can on wheels”, some call her, snickering. A “death trap”, others say, feigning concern. “A rolling mattress”, my dad once quipped at my cheating ex-husband, who used her for that before we split. I crowned her “Clyde”, an androgynous name for my Nissan Versa, referring to the Clydesdales, a tough, powerful breed of work horse. Always before hitting the road I, Sam Parker, invoke the spirit of my ancestors: the Comanche Parkers, who were the original horse whisperers. With a kiss to the sky, I ask them to protect us. I put my baby in gear, I cross my fingers.
As you can see, she hasn’t been driven in a while. I’ll need your help moving all this stuff tonight to uncover my old friend who is needed once more, as we find ourselves without a mode of transportation.
So let’s brush off the cobwebs as we head for another journey down the rabbit hole, through the room where Alice cried, into the keyhole and out to the open ocean...This is Notes From The Balcony, Entry 8: Shifting Gears (Part 1).
First Gear
Flick, burn, launch. Smoke and ash, tap tap tap. Why are we standing in my ex-husband’s garage? He offers me the bowl, a little green, mostly the sickening smell of glass caked in resin. Taking off dirty gloves, he puts on some music- “I Got 5 On It” blasts from a cheap Motorola phone speaker, distorting into a crackle at max level. He’s dropping an engine in a car tonight (one of many). We are ten days late on rent and need to sell it…fast. Car flipping has been his main source of income for at least a year now. He keeps telling me he's going to open a legitimate used car dealership, and I maintain the wifely pattern of nodding and believing him.
“He’s getting here in an hour! We still need to do the door jambs!” he urges. I set our daughter on the couch, turn on Curious George, follow him outside. If I don’t help, he will get angry, torment me for days like a poltergeist. I would rather comply. It’s drizzling and cold outside but we bust it out anyway—a can of PlastiDip in each of our hands, him on the driver side and me on the passenger.More than anything, I want him to love me again, or even like me. I want him to look at me the way he looks at the upstairs neighbor, or his hairdresser. At the very least, I want peace between us. I want to prove myself as his ride-or-die chick, just like those cool girls in the racing movies he loves so much. I open the car door, losing my dignity.
With nothing but sheets of computer paper to prevent overspray, dust flies in all directions as he begins to work on our painted illusion. This unquenched thirst for money, for a survival raft, it's not a new feeling. I get down on my knees and pop off the plastic cap on the spray can. With a stroke of luck, the new potential owner won’t know these doors aren’t the original color of the vehicle. The risk runs higher when I hear that the man coming is a cop, looking for a vehicle for his girlfriend. This car, like many that came before and after, was pieced together by my husband's zip ties and charming charisma. By the skin of our lying teeth we sell it, and a piece of my soul with it. Through nightly bouts of guilt over peeling paint and faulty engines, I comfort myself with the reminder I need to last through this long enough to be in his favor again, for him to love me like when we first met. Maybe he will wake up one day and bring me flowers, maybe he will open that car dealership, maybe something will change. I realize now that delusions like that will make you do things that stand way outside your comfort zone to please the other person. Speaking of standing, why am I even still planted here, listening to this music with him, listening to his voice, this noise? What clue from the past am I searching for in this scene? And now I can hear a sound getting louder; the clash of pots and pans rattling around in my head drowns out his warbling voice. His face twists into a grimace full of hatred. He lunges forward, grasping at my neck with both hands, I start to move, hit the clutch, shift into second— 
Second Gear
I duck my head as we sit in the Popeye’s parking lot, fried chicken crumbs in my lap. Earlier, I had taken the charter bus home from school without my parents knowing. They think I’m still in Peoria, not that I’m skipping class to spend a long weekend with my boyfriend, the one I just met after getting back from Italy. The car smells old but not gross, like one that has sat in the sun too many summers, leaving the fabric seats stale. This scent is layered between air fresheners that no doubt were placed there by him, not his stepdad who purchased it. A Toyota Supra, the sheen of a burnt orange sunset, stick shift, vintage gem from the era we were born. I never drove it, only rode shotgun… as the man who would later become my husband maneuvered it in our post-teenage rendezvous, we fell in love while rolling around trying to hide in a very conspicuous ride.
“Call me when you get back to your dorm,” he would say, our warm hands slipping away in the cold winter air. I look through the charter bus window, my young eyes seeing him everywhere between the falling snow, seeing my own self staring back in the glass reflection. I would think: “This must be what love feels like” and then it's like the window hears me, because the glass begins to tremble in response, cracking and becoming round, smoothing itself into a perfect globe. Didn’t you see it on the way in? It’s the sparkly piece on the shelf in the corner, ornate little base that one has—careful, it’s heavy. If you look closely, it is engraved with the year 2009, and beneath that: “We thought it would last”.
Whenever I walk past, the crystal winks at me, as if it holds some secret I have yet to understand. I shake it and the whole room shakes, scattering brick and building until we no longer see a theater, but the inside of an old department store.-The line is long, stretching like a snake through roped-off lanes as we wait to buy baby gear at a local pop-up event. “Do you think this is a good price for this many diapers? How long do you think we will need this size?” we whisper a million questions to each other over a plastic bag of Pampers. We ask the older lady in front of us. “Let’s see, size 1?” she says, “Probably a couple months depending on your kid, every kid is different.” A couple weeks into our news, and we were already perplexed by parenting. We start loading the clothes and diapers into the car. Everything smells thrifted. I remind myself to do laundry.
We pull off into another Texas night and look at each other. “You know we’re going to need a new car…” I say. But it’s almost like we are saying it at the same time. It seems we both suddenly can feel the largeness of what is coming, and that would not fit inside a cute little Fiat, much as I adored her. Between prepping for baby’s arrival and going through graduate school while working, we did not get a chance to look at new cars until summer.-Several months and one shotgun wedding later, Felicity arrives with a kick to the world through her mother’s belly, saying "Here I am". She sends waves of thunder and lightning across the central plains of Texas through a theatrical gush of water into the passenger seat of our moving vehicle. Honda dealership and starry night in the Fiat rearview, just getting on the MoPac expressway.
I feel the gentle rock of the car as he downshifts to speed up. He looks concerned, excited. “Are you sure? Maybe you peed yourself!” and I debate the idea for a moment as well, but with contractions two minutes apart the reality became apparent. Being a first time mom, I figured my due date was solid, not thinking for a second she would decide to come early to this world, and so dramatically, too. My labor had started when we were in the dealership. I hadn’t said anything until after our test drive, not knowing that’s what my body was signaling. “I think we should go home,” I eventually admit, “I’m not feeling well.” Nausea had constricted itself around my middle, leaving me breathless, and now the clock ticks. He presses the clutch again, saying we need to move faster...And time shifts into hyperspeed, the way it does when you have a baby.-Two months later, on October 31st, we arrive at another car dealership while the rest of the world is wrapped up in costumes and candy. There she is, shining under the light of a single pole, our new car. My glass trinket, a vessel that would carry us through many storms, long after it became just me and my girls riding passenger. I look at her metallic shine under that single light, transfixed, the parking lamp begins to flash. Gather yourselves, the floor is peeling away, moving faster. I can feel a gear change coming. And now, the lights go out—Third Gear
The manager turns on her heel and flips every light switch to the off position. The rule is we have to check each other’s purses for stolen merchandise before leaving. We exchange goodbyes between laughs over some earlier joke, walking together out the front door. I step off the sidewalk into a crystal clear evening and trot across the pavement. My dad is picking me up from work. This time, he has a grin as wide as heaven and just as my seatbelt locks into place the engine is already revving, a unique and thirsty rumble that only a Mustang Cobra can make. 
This beast is ready to eat the cold air of a crisp fall night. With intense anticipation, we glide next door to the empty Dominick’s parking lot. I know what he is about to do, and I’m ready for my free rollercoaster ride. He presses the pedal to the floor and the engine lets out a roar that echoes across town…..he puts it in gear and with precision lifts his foot and I am sent sailing through infinite layers of joy, laughing my head off into the stars above, my daddy doing the performance of an olympic ice skater on wheels…and I get to be in on the secret. “Don’t tell your mom about this!” he says between chuckles. A tornado of smoke and dust, we become the cartoon Tasmanian Devil tearing up the road in a whirl of lights and color as the town is thrown into a blurred abstraction. Reaching its peak hysteria, the Cobra's tail whips across the ground in a wild motion that goes so fast it pauses, suspending stardust all around us. This breed of snake can hypnotize, and I am lost to her power awakening in my spine. In this moment, I love the feeling of my stomach pressed into my back, blonde hair moving in tandem with the centrifugal force of our crystalline rotation as this snake twists upward into the sky, into my highest chakras. When I catch glimpses of the ground outside the Cobra’s chromatic tornado I can already see an image forming on this massive impromptu canvas. It was cursive on concrete, reckless graffiti, art in pure form, and it was totally my dad.
We stop by the edge of the lot the next day to assess our drawing from the previous night. Satisfied, our moment left in circles and figure eights, a faint smell of rubber still lingering. We vow to do even better next time.-I can hear his voice now from far away: it is a memory still alive, preserved in the amber of my heart. “You’ve got this, kid” he would say, letting me practice driving manual on his Cobra, painted a rare chameleon colorshift straight from the factory. From one angle: a deep purple almost black. From another: teal-blue with a glimmer that liquified the sun into turquoise fire. My dad's sunglasses boasted a similar color palette and sheen, blocking his eyes from my view. He pointed at the lot, reminding me to look out for posts and potholes, talking over a lump of chewing tobacco wedged under his lip. The Cobra blubbered, choked, and died repeatedly under my light teenage foot. It was almost as if this car were protesting, asking me: “Are you sure you’re ready for this?” while her 600hp engine rebelled against my shoe, mocking me without words. 
I wasn’t sure if he was letting me get behind the wheel as a real driving lesson, or as a form of mild afternoon entertainment. Laughter ensued, flanking my intermittent frustration with the process and naive insistence on trying. His laughter was patience embodied as I clumsily attempted to emulate his swift gliding movements in the parking lot, one failed shift after another, not so different from a toddler learning to walk. Back in my body, I want to execute this like a professional. I gaze forward but my eyes see a table instead of pavement and I think of my Granny's hands, the way she would handle an apple with the same confident precision in her fingertips as she peeled one continuous spiral of skin off the outside, setting her knife down to hand me a bowl of perfect slices. I sit across from her, frustrated at my own lack of skill while we prepare apple cookies. 
My effort to keep up with her pace morphs into an internal challenge. It's the same mindset that makes me want to learn cursive before our teachers introduce it in the classroom. Hours at her table, pen in hand. Some would call me an overachiever, I always found myself to be helplessly enamored by the process of learning, feeding my constant curiosities. My attention snaps back to the scene.-“It’s time,” he says, getting out of the car. We trade places. He tells me we will try again tomorrow, and I feel excited. But as I sit in the passenger seat and click my buckle into place once more, the whole sky outside starts to evolve. Buckets of rain pour on all our tomorrows, darkened by the storm of his struggles and addictions. Once that first cloud rolled in, the weather never seemed to improve. Every one of the cars in our perfect suburban driveway was eventually crashed, repossessed, or sold for too little. Including the Cobra. All our possessions were turned to dust by 2010, around the same time many other Americans found themselves in economic peril. We represented just one family: a tiny fraction of the carnage of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. Some have still not recovered, like my parents (Gen X), and some never got a fair shot to start, like me and my sisters (Millennials). One by one, I see our furniture being carried out the front door. One by one, I see shirts still with tags sold at mom's garage sale for a dollar. I see myself next, closing the Versa door in my husband's face. It is raining outside, early morning. I depart Columbus with Felicity and nothing but whatever I could fit in my car. Chicago-bound, I leave him permanently, close out the bank account. End it forever. Thinking back on this, my stomach flips like it did so long ago, but the flip doesn't feel good anymore. The flip signifies danger, worry. I look down at the shift knob, wanting to grab it again, wanting to take back control, wanting to warn the girl inside the snow globe, and my hand slips. With a shatter that echoes across the theater walls, I escape the past like a genie. A new part of me is free, and I lose control of the car.Fourth Gear
The phone buzzes, it's a note from my doctor: "You have moderate osteoarthritis in your hands, degenerative disc disease in your back". I feel stunned seeing it, a text with the permanence of a stone carving. I've known for about a year, without confirmation. The first time I realized the severity was when I could no longer do certain things like remove the cap from a can of spray paint. I felt embarrassed by having such limitations at the young age of 36, and ever since my car accident in the Rogue this month, the pain has tripled, from my neck into my arm and hand, one side much worse than the other. I've had to cut back on work, at a time when it feels counterintuitive to slow my pace. 
Sometimes moments like that can be a blessing in disguise, though, because now I am going to be receiving physical therapy. Knowing myself, I would not have gotten checked out for a long time, choosing denial over treatment, potentially making the problem much worse. Maybe it took the Universe sacrificing one lifeline to save another. I think about this as my hand holds the steering wheel of this faithful fossil, my Clyde, still here and ready to roll, to hold all my worries and tears within her fabric walls. My other hand, the better one, grips the shift knob, and we move into a steady flow of traffic, my eyes fixated on the clouds and horizon line.-
When I was in high school, there was a group of us from the neighborhood who more or less had grown up together since elementary, and we were all still friends. Every afternoon, a bus took us on a little journey northbound, through a murmur of gossip, jokes, and general noise. English Meadows was the subdivision; it sounded so fancy, like something out of a Jane Austen novel, with street names like Lexington and Lenox. I kept bragging to my friends the summer we moved. “It’s a *model* home” I’d say, impressed with the terminology emphasized by the realtor. This house was a 90s Midwest dream: complete with trimmed bushes, faux shutters, plastic plants, and brass fixtures. We even had two fireplaces and a foyer with a piano. The performative artifice of it all was palpable to me even at ten years old. Our home, like so many others in the neighborhood, was a vinyl prop posing as a suburban castle. Parked in the driveway was our family van and my white Pontiac Grand Am. Inside the garage were my parents’ cars: always the hottest ride from their favorite brand: Ford. 
The American Mustang: a small mixed breed horse with a reputation for being wild and free, was the preferred choice of the Comanche. The horse's lack of pedigree, as compared to its competitors, set the central conflict of the story in the movie Hidalgo, where Hopkins' horse is described as the "Horse of the Red Indian. From the Spanish 'mesteño.' Meaning 'untamed.'" Back then, effective mounted combat defined the Comanche Empire, making the mustang crucial to its dominance over the plains of West Texas stretching as far as Wyoming. They are known for being able to thrive in challenging terrains, with an endurance that outlasts any other American horse.-My friend Tom had a Mustang once, older though, a boxy style from the mid '80s—my personal favorite. His was a gorgeous blue with a white drop-top that you had to get out and fold back. The thing was madness on wheels, a mechanism for letting out our teenage need for chaos on all types of pavement. Of course, being that we were mostly spoiled suburbanites the rest of us had our own cars, which was oddly a fleet of Pontiacs, each of us trying to be cooler than the other, but if we had the choice to ride together it would often be in the Mustang. Oh, look! Someone pressed the button to open the garage door. The sun is so bright, all I can make out are the shadows of these boys: Tom, Johnny, Zach, Mike, Keith. There are others on the periphery, their shapes hardly visible. But as we step into the sun there they are, cargo shorts, baseball caps and all. Dressed as teenagers. I look down, yellow sunflower halter top tied with a little string, golden hair wild and flowing, a pair of flares, Doc Martens on my feet, painted nails chipped. I can hear his car pull onto my street before I even see it. They always make me ride in back. Why, because I’m a girl? I choose not to overthink it, close my eyes, let the breeze flow over me. I want them to like me, accept me. I imagine, this feeling may repeat itself one day, in a more dangerous form. The thought presents itself for a moment like a whisper from the clouds. I catch my breath, hop inside.
Our young pilot hits the gas and sends us flying, faces contorted by wind and joy. We leave reckless circles swarming over the concrete, our early 2000s version of a cave painting. These marks on the ground will mean nothing to anyone but us, the ones who wanted evidence of our rebellion against rules, of a thirst for freedom more powerful than fear. We laugh about it over a bonfire later that night, feeling powerful, sticking pretzels in our mouths and pretending to smoke. This was our way: trading stories and quick bouts of sarcasm over the occassional concealed bottle of Mike’s Hard, sometimes in a forest full of paintballs, sometimes under zipped tents. 
Our younger siblings linger on stage left and right. Most have kids now, degrees, spouses, careers. Some unfortunately did not make it that far, but persist in memory. The framework of today pulsates through the memory of yesterday and we push-pull through the folds of time from Samantha to Sam to Sparker, and somewhere in there is Sammie, too. My vision is blurred by bright sun and wind. I hear the screech of tires and am pushed deeper into my seat by the g-force. Gears grind as we punch into fifth, hearing a crackle on the radio, warbling lyrics through the speakers, broken up by glitches and chatter, I catch the first few lines, and it's Oasis—
Champagne Supernova, Oasis, Released 1995
Fifth Gear
My friend Lauren is driving. We’re leaving my dorm in her tiny white Scion coupe that was passed down by her brother. She cranks up the system and we sing along to Champagne Supernova. I try to turn it up further, my usual move, but go for the A/C instead which sends us into fits of laughter over this ritual mistake. We are heading to a Halloween store, getting costumes for an upcoming frat party. No flyer or text chain needed, word was already spreading like wildfire across campus. We are joking about some boys we had just met from the hockey team, flipping each other off sarcastically, dishing about our dysfunctional families, when she decides to change the station and it’s Dean Martin for a flash — I am in my grandparents’ silver Saturn, staring up at the sky and singing along with them as we head to Wisconsin for ice cream, falling asleep wrapped in a cozy blanket as we drive — she changes it again, exclaiming that was “old people music”. I roll my eyes.
Then through crackles and a twist of the dial — Boston’s “More Than A Feeling” comes on and I’m driving my Grand Am up to my friend Tom’s house to say goodbye as we part ways for college. Before I get to feel his warm hug, exchange a joke, help put a single box in the trunk, Lauren changes it again — static, then a few guitar notes tumble out: Jackson Browne’s “Sky Blue and Black.” The sound is faint, muffled, like it’s leaking through a wall from another room, another life, sending me into a strange man’s arms, white satin fabric and tulle rub against my belly, I look down. I am a bride. I am pregnant. I feel scared. 
My heels click and I am looking at my father’s face for an answer, validation that this marriage is wrong, guidance that I don’t have to stay. He looks at me with tears and says nothing. My mother carries the cake. I look out at the crowd, back at the stranger holding me. He is dressed as a groom. He is drunk, smells of cigarettes. The dance feels like a performance for our guests as I move stiffly in pantyhose slipping down my legs, wanting to tear apart the whole ensemble, a performer’s costume stitched by my own hands. Through my fishnet veil I view a spectacle so upsetting it shatters the surface of the object-souvenir that contains it: a rear-view mirror. His smile is thinly-veiled menace, his eyes tell me to shut up and fake it. I fear him already. The music turns off and a voice interrupts the scene, cutting through the air like a blade: “Ummmmmm, are you okay??” my friend asks. Suddenly, I’m looking at myself in the mirror, and a warning: “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear” catches my eye. Kanye West is playing softly in the background. “Yeah,” I mutter, “Just a weird vision.” And the mirror winks, holding a secret.*Author's note: Split for space: Sixth Gear and Reverse get their own laps on the Balcony later this week. Buckle up—fasten your heart, and bring your escape plan, it's going to be a bumpy ride.