re: Growing up, did your mom leave you in the car

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No, because I always wanted to go into the store.

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I would go in a department store. I would not go in a grocery store.

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We also had those triangular windows we could crack open.

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to let the cigarette smoke out

Left in the back of cars, riding on the highway in the back of a pickup. Parents smoking in the house.

It was a different time and most parents weren’t very kid centric in those days. We had to entertain ourselves before the internet, and only had pretty boring Atari video games that got old fast.

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Yes, and I put it in reverse twice :)

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Sounds very familiar...

I was 4 or 5 when my mother left me in the car in the parking lot. I think it was at Paulie's lawn mower repair and bike shop, but I'm not positive. Engine running to keep the a/c going, I guess. She took more than a minute or two, so I got bored. Started messing with the shifter and put the car in reverse. It started to idle in reverse out of the parking lot and onto Veterans Hwy. I was in the middle of two or three lanes of 1965 Metairie traffic, about to back in to a huge drainage canal, when someone - employee, motorist, I don't know - yanked the drivers side door open and stopped the car. My mother was right behind him screaming bloody murder, while occasionally hugging and kissing me.

I didn't realize that this event was going to end badly if I went into the canal. Traffic, what it was at the time, kind of came to a halt on Vets. My mother drove home (because it was obvious that I was a shitty driver. And I was in Kindergarten.) and probably spent the rest of the afternoon trying to figure out how she was going to explain this situation to my father when he got home from work.

She elected to tell him nothing, and that certainly worked for me. I never felt the urge to "drive" again.

Yep. I can remember many trips to Puglia's on St. Claude and Caffin Ave. in the Lower 9th Ward that found me and my 2 younger sisters left in the car while mom ran into the store for a few things.

We didn't have cars with A/C back in the day, so we had to just leave the windows open and sit there and sweat.

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covering her own arse

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No doubt! She already had three young (not necessarily well behaved) boys to deal with and didn't need any more headaches.

I feel like I spent half of my childhood in the back of a hot-arse car. We were allowed to roll down the windows, but that didn’t provide much relief when it was 90 degrees with the car sitting in a cement or blacktop parking lot.

Grocery shopping, clothes shopping, shoe shopping, you name it. If my mom could go inside, my arse sat in the car. And FWIW, I just turned 63.

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so he could go in to Central Hardware.

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Dude, me & my brother were left in the car many times while my dad ran into Central Hardware. Sometimes it felt like for hours, I always figured maybe they had a bar in the back.

Yep also didn't wear seatbelts and rode in the bed of the truck ...still alive

I'm sure probably to run in and grab something but not that I can recall. Certainly not at a grocery store.