Every year on the day my father died, I get my car washed at a beloved Bay Area spot. Turning off El Camino Real in Mountain View, I pull into Lozano Brushless Car Wash. When we used to enter the forest green girders of this mid-century modern space-agey car wash, my father was present, wholly mine for a magical half hour.

As an adult, I kept this ritual: I drive up to the attendant and ask for a full-service wash and vacuum. She hands me a ticket and while I wait for the row of cars ahead, my muscle memory takes over: roll up the windows, cram any loose bobby pins and pens into my purse, check the windows again, pop the trunk. I turn off the radio blaring the classic oldies my father used to play when he was the driver and I his joyful passenger, trusting of wherever he would take me.

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After relinquishing my keys, I walk to the pay station, grabbing a coupon from the cracked plastic brochure holder that’s been there since my father began bringing me here when I was a small child. He had been going for decades — the business opened in Mountain View in 1957, a few years before he arrived in California at the age of 17 from northern Iraq.

While in line to pay, I watch children take turns on the coin-operated Sandy horse. “Ride the Champion 1 ¢” reads the turquoise sign under the peeling chestnut lacquer of the hooves. This was my original ride, a vehicle of my childhood imagination that could carry me anywhere I wanted to go.

In the early 1990s, my father owned a car dealership, and when anyone asked him where to clean their cars, this is where he sent them. They’ll never ruin your paint, he’d proclaim in that charming way he had of stating opinions as facts.

By the time my 2007 Mercury Milan emerges into the light, my eyes are full of tears.

In the partially enclosed waiting area, parents stand on both sides of me, hoisting their kids onto their shoulders to watch the cars glide through the tracks of swishing cloth towers. I remember the way my father would teach me about different cars as they emerged through that dark tunnel. The makes, the models, the mufflers that could furnish even the junkiest car with an impressive sound — how every detail felt like a secret he was revealing just to me, his only child.

Coming to Lozano’s was our weekend ritual for much of my childhood, before my father........

© Salon