Story Time: Freeway of Love

The air conditioning in the work van had gradually been dying. Every day the summer got a little hotter and the air conditioning a little less cool. My sister and I drove around with the windows down, sticking our faces out to catch breezes, but the fragile product we were selling was sitting in the back of a windowless metal box.

We had a job selling greens to florists. Each week we drove through two counties, visiting 10 or 12 florists per day, delivering the leaves they needed to make their bouquets and baskets look full and lush.

Most of the greens were what we called leather – a triangular glossy fern leaf that arrived from Florida in thick waxed boxes that were too big for one person to carry. 

We would talk with the florists, ask what they needed, and grab the orders from the van. Most greens vendors had refrigerated trucks, but we only had a large blue Ford Econoline van with wimpy air conditioning. 

The owner of our company insisted she couldn’t afford anything more, and she probably couldn’t. Her business was spotty at best. She had rapid cycling manic depression, so Laura and I never knew what we would find when we arrived to pick up the van each morning – joyful, ebullient, talkative Kim, or the Kim who would swear at us and occasionally threaten to kill herself or someone else. 

Floristry is a business rife with the crazy, the odd and the addled, so most of Kim’s customers put up with her descents into the bizarre, but often Laura and I were left to sort out her messes. Laura was much better at this than I was.

In fact, Laura was much better at the people side of the business than me. She would hang around, chat people up, ask about their families. We were working on a day rate, so I felt like time is money – get in and get out. But Laura was what kept the business going, because while many vendors sold greens, the reason people bought from us was Laura’s kind heart and genuine interest in their lives. 

If they didn’t buy from us, it was because greens which have been driven around in a hot van for a few days start to turn yellow. If they weren’t yellow when we sold them, they started to turn in the days following their sale. No one wants yellow ferns in their bouquets.

This was a constant source of stress for us. Kim would take the angry calls from florists and we would have to drive far out of our way to take replacement greens for the ones that had gone bad. I saw this as cutting into our day rate, and it made me tense, which made Laura unhappy. It also cut into Kim’s profits, which made her moods even more unpredictable and foul.

We knew that every extra minute on the road in the hot van was killing our ferns. Sometimes we would be sitting at a stoplight in midday and we would just look at each other, both thinking about the disaster taking place in the boxes behind us.

One day in the middle of summer, we were coming up the Conejo Grade when we hit a traffic jam. We had already had a long day of deliveries, and the heat was rising off the blacktop in shimmery waves.

Traffic was stopped. There was an accident at the top of the grade and it was apparent we weren’t going anywhere for a while. We sat silently, contemplating the death of our greens.

Laura reached over and switched on the van’s radio.

“Here we go,” a voice sang. 

We started laughing with Aretha and singing along, as loud as we could:

City traffic movin’ way too slow
Drop the pedal and go, go
Come on baby, go, do it for me now 

We goin’ ridin’ on the freeway of love 
Wind’s against my back
We goin’ ridin’ on the freeway of love
In my pink Cadillac

We didn’t care if the people around us were staring. It was the perfect song at the perfect moment. We forgot about the ferns, the heat, everything. Suddenly we were on the freeway of love, and all was funny and pink and perfect.