On long drives to New York City to visit our grandparents we took the Taconic Parkway and then the Sawmill River Parkway, and then other roads before we got to Gun Hill Road, where the grandparents lived.

Theses drives seemed endless to a young boy of perhaps 5 or 6 or even 7 or 10 years old. And I would look out the car window and imagine that my favorite toy, a Matchbox brand bulldozer, about two inches long, was racing alongside us, over and around every obstacle by the side of the road.

It had perfect little rubber treads that actually went around when I rolled it along the bedroom floor, probably making little bulldozer sounds.

I was old enough to know that that little bulldozer could not race alongside our family jalopy, going sixty miles an hour. If you had asked me if that could happen I would have explained that, no, the treads would rupture and break off if the little bulldozer was pushed along at anything more than little boy arm speed.

But that knowledge never stopped me from imaging, for the whole hour ride, that the little bulldozer was in fact running on the shoulder of the parkway next to us, miraculously finding its way through dirt, drain grates, curb cuts, beer cans and even occasional flat squirrel remains.

I certainly never told anyone in the car that I was seeing the bulldozer racing along, vividly. Sharing this would have solidified the family view that little Jonny was an idiot, or so I assumed.

There are other memories of that drive to New York City and back, none quite as pure as the little bulldozer, but I clearly remember seeing flocks of groundhogs grazing in the wide grass margins beside the road, particularly on the Saw Mill.

And driving home one winter night, when the snow was really coming down, the car started sliding all over the road, my father pulling the car over and big brother Fred getting out, pulling the rusty chains from the trunk, and putting them on the tires. If I was 5 years old, Fred was 14, so it was somehow obvious that such a task was his, not my father’s. And I, and middle brother Dan, just stayed warm in the back seat while Fred wrestled with the chains, attaching them to the wheels out in the cold and snow, using rubber bands cut from old inner tubes to keep them tight.

I could not imagine my little bulldozer driving beside the car at night because it was too dark for me to guide it around all the hazards. But I do suspect that when we drove to New  York in snow in daytime that little bulldozer would plow its way through all the snow with its little yellow bulldozer blade.