Marshmallow

A story about our family's first car, written in Bountiful, Utah, during August 1980 and originally published in the November 1981 issue of the Family Journal.

The year we were courting [1972], Claudia's parents loaned her their 1965 Volkswagen Bug so Claudia could travel the eight miles from Provo to Springville, where she would be teaching second grade.

In August of that year, about a month after we had decided to get married, we visited her parents in southern California and helped them drive the car back to Utah. As we were traveling along—her parents in their blue Colt station wagon and the two of us in the little white Bug—we decided the car needed a name. Especially since it was going to be a member of the family for the next year. So we talked about some names. We hit upon Marshmallow, and it fit, and the car had a name.

Marshmallow was already seven, going on eight, when he came to Utah. He had come from Germany originally, and Claudia remembers going down to the dock in Los Angeles or Long Beach to watch him come off the boat.

We were married on November 22, 1972, the day before Thanksgiving. It was a joyful day. From the Provo Temple, where we were married, Marshmallow ran us all over Provo and Orem and on to Salt Lake. There were pictures outside the temple, a wedding breakfast, several errands, a nap we were way too excited to take, an abortive attempt to get the train of Claudia's wedding dress out of her locked apartment, almost forgotten corsages, a borrowed tux picked up at the last minute, and rush-hour freeway traffic in Salt Lake, all of which made us an hour late for more pictures and the reception.

We were dog tired by the time the evening was over, so tired that we asked our best man to chauffeur us back to Provo, where we spent the night. He drove, and we slept in Marshmallow's back seat.

Christmas soon came. We had decorated our little basement apartment for our own private Christmas before puttering on down to California to visit Claudia's family. On our trip, somewhere between St. George and Las Vegas, Marshmallow got sick. He would backfire and sputter and cough and never exceed 45 miles an hour. Knowing absolutely nothing about cars, I decided not to say anything to anyone in Las Vegas for fear they'd put in a new engine. I'd seen that trick there before.

So just out of Las Vegas, with hours of night travel still ahead of us, we pulled over to the side of the freeway and I checked the spark plugs (I did know what they were), because it sounded like only one of them was connected. We prayed a little prayer and pulled out into the midnight desert, with a lot of faith and silent prayer, full of the daring of youth, maybe a little stupidity, and long hours later finally reached San Gabriel. It took Claudia's father five minutes to tell us there was simply no way we should have been able to make it. The distributor had come loose.

Back in Provo, after the holidays, we settled into the routine business of living happily ever after. Claudia drove Marshmallow to Springville every morning to teach her little second graders. It didn't cost us much because Springville is close to Provo, and Marshmallow got excellent gas mileage, and a gallon of gas in those days was only 25 cents.

That winter was a cold one, and though Marshmallow liked being with us in Utah, he didn't really like the cold. Probably some mornings he wished he were still in sunny California. A lot of mornings he simply wouldn't start: the cold was too much for him. I would bundle up and go around the corner and knock on the door of my former roommates' apartment and ask them to come help me give Marshmallow a push.

"What? Again?" they must have thought. "This is the fourth time this week."

They exaggerated, of course, because it was only Wednesday. But they were good sports, and so was Marshmallow, who actually was very easy to start with a little push—unless the street was too slippery or unless we forgot to turn the key on.

Fortunately, winter finally gave way to spring, and Marshmallow decided he'd stay with us. In April Claudia's parents came up for general conference. While here, they agreed to let us have Marshmallow for good. He'd only been on loan before. That was a generous gift and a great blessing to us.

I think it must have been hard for them to let him go, because Claudia's dad used to give him a bath a couple times a week and otherwise treated him with the tenderest care, probably doing things for him that to this day I still don't know you do to cars, while I grew up in a family that washed the car once a year whether it needed it or not.

A few weeks later Marshmallow became a moving van. We were moving across Provo, and our every earthly possession was hauled to our new house in a couple dozen separate trips back and forth. Fortunately, we didn't own any big furniture yet, except for a maple table that we couldn't fit into Marshmallow and had to come stuffed into the trunk of a real car.

In those days the speed on freeways was 70 miles an hour, which didn't really do us a lot of good because Marshmallow couldn't really go that fast unless he was going downhill. Then the government came along and decided that 55 miles an hour was a better speed—it saved lots of gas and lives and those kinds of things. Marshmallow felt better when all the other cars didn't zip by him so fast and he could stay with the flow of traffic.

Sometime after he became our car, Marshmallow's gas gauge broke, and we could never tell how full his tank was, and we ran out of gas a few times.

He also had a horn that mostly wouldn't work. There was a loose wire that when touched to the ignition would sometimes produce a semblance of a honk—if you knew that's what it was supposed to be. Every year at safety inspection time they would try to make it work, and it kind of did, enough to pass inspection, and then Marshmallow would spend the next 51 weeks waiting for his horn to be fixed again.

For almost two years I commuted from Provo to Salt Lake, 47 miles one way from my driveway to the parking lot at work. I was in a car pool and only had to drive Marshmallow every third or fourth day. He was a faithful and roadworthy car during the whole time, except that in the winter he was awfully drafty, especially for whoever sat in the front passenger seat.

Our first three children—Michael, Rebecca, and Rachael—were all born in Provo's Utah Valley Hospital. Marshmallow had the high honor of delivering their laboring mother each time to the hospital and three days later of hauling Mama and the new baby home. Of course, we lived only five blocks from the hospital, but they were some of the most joyous trips he ever made.

When Michael Adam was our only little one, just as parents of multiple children do, we would sometimes confuse his name with Marshmallow's. More than once I came up with "Marshall Adam."

Our second Christmas found us in California again. For the trip Marshmallow's back seat became a nursery, as we hauled every conceivable thing we'd need, and some we didn't, for a four-month old baby. Michael Adam's yellow plastic tub, lovingly filled with blankets, was his crib for the trip. This was in an era before seat belts or infant restraints. I think Marshmallow had seat belts, at least in the front, but it never occurred to us to use them.

Of course, as each new child came along, the car got more and more crowded, and we packed more and more strategically for each trip.

Finally, with child number four on the way, we faced the fact that Marshmallow was simply getting too small for us. And, as happens to us all, he was getting along in years—pushing twelve. And he had hauled people around for an impressive 170,000 miles. In the four and a half years we had him he had never given us much trouble—nothing more than rough starts on a really cold morning or letting us run out of gas every so often.

So we bought a new car in late December 1976, a green Dodge Colt station wagon, just like Grandpa Lange's blue Dodge Colt station wagon, except ours was green and newer. Try as we might over a period of several years, trying different names, we never did find one that fit our new car like Marshmallow fit our little Bug. So our second car was always simply "the green car."

We couldn't bear the thought of letting Marshmallow out of the family, so we gave him to Claudia's brother David, who was back from his mission and a student at BYU.

About a month after Marshmallow moved back to Provo (we lived in Salt Lake by then), Marshmallow got really sick—like he threw a rod or some such thing, and had to have his whole engine rebuilt for $400. Later David had him repainted a cheery yellow, the color Claudia always kind of wished he were, and he was no longer our little white Marshmallow.