The mornings have turned chilly and the dog, always a lazy sort who likes to sleep in, has burrowed under the covers, lying in bed with my daughter. Only his head is visible, resting on a pillow, his ears covering his eyes like a sleep mask.

It is clear he wants no part of this new early morning routine, the return of school after a carefree summer. Neither do I, but for different reasons than sleeping in.

My daughter Pickle is 16 years old, a junior in high school, and today is our last first day together. She will of course have another first day next year when she is a senior, but I won’t be a part of it, not really, because by then she will no longer need me to drive her to school. My chauffeur days will be over come this winter when she gets her driver’s license. I won’t even be a passenger, my status shifting over the years from man behind the wheel, to shotgun seat advisor after she received her permit, to some guy who waves goodbye from the porch.

I give Pickle a nudge. “Time to get up,” I say.

She groans. The dog snarls. I head downstairs to help my wife Cathlin with breakfast, returning to Pickle’s room from time to time to move things along.

At 7:15 a.m. we are in the car. My hand trembles a bit as I turn the key in the ignition. I see Pickle in the back seat as an infant, then a toddler and preschooler, strapped in her car seat, digging into her snack cup for more Cheerios while looking pensively out the window. Her brother Hardy is back there too, chattering on about a book he read, or a Lego city he was building, and I am in the front seat, inventing characters and songs to keep them, and me, entertained.

Hardy is in college now, his days in the back seat long past. He has become an intermittent guest in the house, his bedroom mostly a way-station filled with laundry and random boxes, a sprawling clutter we hurriedly clean up when he comes home to visit.

There were school buses and parental carpools available all these years but I decided against those routes early on. My time in the car with my kids felt like a sacred place, an encounter with a defined beginning and end where problems small and large could be discussed in bite sized morsels, or the gift of silence enjoyed while watching the world pass by outside the window.

It could also be a lot of fun. I reveled in making up characters in the driver’s seat. Cousin Burpee was a drooler of immense proportions who encountered the world with an endless stream of profanity. His polar opposite, The Big Tinkler, wanted to bring about world peace through group tinkling (trust me potty humor will always be a hit).

One year, Pickle and I formed a car band called the Rabid Rabbits. The group experienced mild fame with hits like the country and western lament, Boat in a Field No Water Nearby, and the head-banging punk rock anthem, What’s Up With That Guy. Perhaps you’ve heard of us and wondered whatever happened. Many do.

As a father behind the wheel I could somehow be freer and weirder than at any other point in my life, a direct result, perhaps, of having an audience literally strapped in and unable to walk away.

I turn the key. Pickle queues up the morning playlist. Who’ll Stop the Rain by Credence Clearwater opens the set, followed by Ventura Highway by America.

While driving I look over at Pickle as she checks her phone, reaching out to friends. It is a familiar sight, along with the music, much of it debuting when I was her age, over 40 years ago. How had this happened — this passing of time, both in my life and hers?

For much of my parenting experience I have lived a double life, the man existing in the present, juggling responsibilities and worries, and the boy I once was, also worried but about much smaller issues: an upcoming wrestling match, how to approach I girl I had a crush on, the shifting alliances of adolescent relationships. As a parent, I have found solace and advice from my younger self, urging me to remember what it was like to experience the world at whatever age my children were at that time.

This portal to the past has also been a fountain of youth of sorts, keeping the boy I once was in the game, not as a mere memory but as an active participant. But with each driving hour completed, each registry of motor vehicles milestone checked off, I feel that little boy drifting away.

Another song comes on, something current that I do not know.

“Who’s this?” I ask.

“Marcel by Her’s,” Pickle says.

Next song.

“Who’s this?”

“McKenzie by Houndmouth.”

Then Pickle looks at me. “Wait a minute,” she says. “Why are you asking me about this? Are you writing right now?”

“Who me?” I say, but she has caught me, noticing the questions and how I am now in the car and also far away at the same time. How I smile to myself when I capture a particular phrase in my mind or purse my lips searching for words and images to record later when I have a pencil and paper in hand.

“Dad,” she says. “We have talked about this.”

Suddenly, the car becomes a type of intervention space as she reminds me about my promise not to write about her anymore.

“But I have to,” I say, trying to explain how the act of writing for me is how I see more clearly and feel more deeply. It is how I recall, in exact detail, the day I picked her and a friend up from school when they were in third grade, how they were both giggling as they slid into the back seat and threw a crumpled up piece of paper at me, and how a few moments later they began sobbing. When I pulled up to the house, they ran from the car as if being chased. I unfolded the paper.

“Dad,” it said. “We are sorry but we no longer believe in Santa Claus.”

More memories. They arrive in a rush, a current too fast to navigate, the two of us sitting together in the car, talkative or quiet, sad or nervous, having just fought and yelled at each other or laughing so hard we can’t catch our breath. A car ride to school has that power. There is proximity and there is motion, and the end is just down the road.

Just like this morning.

Going to California by Led Zeppelin comes on and my breath catches. Recently, Pickle spoke of touring colleges in California.

We pull up to the high school. I roll down the windows, threatening as I always do to yell off-kilter platitudes so loudly that her classmates will hear: “Roll this day up like a messy burrito.” “You are the one the clouds dream about.” “Make me proud Pookie.”

She silences me with a look. Then, as she gathers her things, she says: “Okay, you can write about this.”

And then she is gone, merging with the other students, all making their own way to another first day of school.

We wave goodbye, the boy I once was and the man I have become, but Pickle does not look back. And so we turn the wheel and drive away, both of us wondering what happens next.