"Time to play Need for Speed: Late for School edition." We drop into bucket seats and back out of the driveway. I accelerate into a dip: the wheels drop out from under us and the chassis plummets onto its soft suspension, nearly scraping bottom. I accelerate into a rise: the wheels rise up to meet us, knocking the chassis into the air. We float. Then we feel the drop in our stomachs as the chassis falls and clanks back onto the axles. Butterflies in their stomachs, the kids whoop. "Whoo-hoo!" "Wow!" "How fast are we going?" This is a new minivan, but it remains a minivan, rolling like one of those old metal playground ducks or unicorns bolted to an ancient rusted spring. If I stop at an intersection and then accelerate into a right turn, the weight of the minivan rolls too far centrifugally left, resulting in an overturn that threatens to spin us into a ditch unless I fight the wheel and release the gas, straighten us out and then floor it, which is when exactly nothing happens. Time stops. Gas floods, the fuel line clogs or whatever, the whole cramped-up apparatus groaning like a big man pushing himself up off the couch. And so I have plenty of time, there in the middle of the morning's commuter traffic, to ask the kids if they have all their homework in their bags, their lunches and books and papers, the money for the field trip, the form for the class photo, and they say yes yes yes yes yes already yes. I ask them what CD do they want. They sing a few bars. Dunh. Duh duh dunh dunh. Wahn wahn. Dunh. Duh duh--yeah, yeah, White Stripes, I say. Where did they come from? Detroit, I say. How old are they? Oh, I don't know, six, eight years. Something like that. They're kids? No, the band is that old. They're, I don't know, my age. I don't know. Maybe younger. It's the new album, Get Behind Me, Satan, which is appropriate since I believe Satan is behind us honking like crazy, but anyway the kids like three or four songs from the album, and the music is something we can all listen to and be not yet sick of, unlike Smashmouth, unlike Fatboy Slim, unlike, well, anything on the radio. Can't listen to rap or hiphop without rumps dropping and shaking that bleep for me, girl, and so on to classical or jazz, safe and soothing and it puts me to sleep until I feel a movement, like someone gently pushed in a chair for me and I sway back a little and then move forward with it. Trees walk toward us, waving their branches. Fenceposts click by, one, two, three. Is the cow walking toward us or isn't he moving just a tad too fast? A chubby brown cow, briskly walking. Wait, no, we're walking. I mean, moving. We're moving. The van is finally accelerating, and we're moving again. White stripes on the asphalt blur softly under the wheels. Velocity. Forward motion. Straining against whatever was holding us back, now we get the past behind us. The kids cheer. On to school, the river of time, the debatable need for relative speed. We're rocking back and forth, rolling with the turns, suspended so softly we barely feel the days go by.