It’s been a few days since I’ve written anything. I’ve actually had several consecutive good days. Still, I realized, if I am going to use this as therapy, I need to be recording the bad and the good. Not that I plan to turn this into a diary (Today I tried kale. It sucked. The cute cashier smiled at me. Blah, blah, blah.), but if I’m going to try to parse out the bad parts of my life and try to find either a source or a relief, I also need to understand the good parts as well.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, nostalgia has been very present in my life lately. As an example: I spent an amazing summer in Long Beach, CA with my aunt and uncle when I was 17 (This would be in 1997.) and I found myself using Google Street View the other day to “walk” the places that were on my daily routes there.
Some places were gone: RIP Space Invaders.
Some had changed: MVP’s the new place looks amazing, but I miss the little burger stand next door to my uncle’s house. The new place just doesn’t have the same charm 🙁.
Some were exactly the same: One day, on my way to the beach, a man inside the fence of The Long Beach Sagely Monastery gave me a beautiful and intricate flower made of red and gold paper, and it made my day. I wish I still had it. The Monastery is still there and looks exactly how I remember it.
So, I have been thinking and discussing the past with my family. Part of it is due to the fact that I’ve gotten into genealogical research (another “hobby” to keep my mind occupied) and part of it is because my family has some great stories.
My family is…..odd…. I spent a large portion of my life thinking we were normal; that everyone behaved the way we do, but that just isn’t so. I guess some people can go months or even years without talking to extended family like uncles and cousins. We are a tight-knit group. This can be amazing and terrible all at the same time. Amazing because you know someone is always going to have your back. Terrible because you know that everyone not only knows your business, but has detailed opinions about it and they’re not afraid to express them. On top of that, we pick on each other. Mercilessly. If you become part of our group and after a few meetings we are still polite to you, we either don’t like or don’t trust you. We show our love with pranks and punches.
When I was little, one of the perks of my dad’s job was he got a company car. Every other year or so, they upgraded and it was always exciting to see what he was going to come home with. One year he got the most amazing car. The previous ones had been sedans, but my little sister had been born between the previous car and this one, so they gave him a “family” car. It was the most massive station wagon that had probably ever been on the road. We are talking Death Star huge. The sides were covered in this fake wood veneer that was, to my undeveloped mind, the height of class. It had a luggage rack (we will circle back to that, either on this post or a future one) and best of all, a third seat in the “way” back that faced the rear of the car. You couldn’t have built a more perfect car for my six year-old self if the manufacturer had sat down with a pen and paper and allowed me carte blanche to list my demands. Well, it didn’t have a unicorn anywhere in or on it, so dock a point, but you get the idea.
One thing it had that we had never seen before was a large red button under the dash. As an adult, I know that this button is meant to pop the hatch door open from inside the car. As a child, I had never seen one before. We asked my dad what it was and he told us, with much sincerity, that it was the “Car Blowing Up Button. To be used in extreme emergencies only.”
Now, at six, your father is akin to the voice of God, so of course we believed him. For an entire summer, my little brother and I dared each other to push the button. One would hide behind the fence in the front yard (a distance we deemed safe from exploding station wagons) and the other would tap the button, never hard enough to engage the mechanism, and run away screaming. The one viewing this from behind the safety of the fence would swear that the car started smoking. And so it went for much of that summer.
As it is with most of my childhood shenanigans (At least the ones my father wasn’t directly involved in. We’ll circle back to that, too), we thought our parents were oblivious to them. But not my father. He was watching. And waiting.
So, one day all of us kids were loaded into the back of the station wagon (but not the way back because my mother, in a moment of authoritative cruelty, had deemed it “unsafe”) waiting to go to Wichita to visit my grandparents. My dad was sitting in the driver’s seat. My mom had forgotten something inside or was locking up the house, but she wasn’t yet there. This is important, because mom is the police. My father, very casually, but dramatically enough that we all notice what he is doing, reaches over and pushes the Car Blowing Up Button. My mom, from her viewpoint outside the car, described it thus: “The trunk popped open and you all freaked out.”
I remember the certainty of doom that my father had brought upon us. My skin shrunk to half its normal size and yanked my limbs up close to my body. Both my heart and my bladder did flips in their respective cavities. Have you ever been so scared that you thought the top of your head was going to pop off?
My father says our screams are still probably echoing out in deep space. (Yes, I know. No sound in space. Dramatic flair. Eat a dick.)
The epilogue to that story is our trip was delayed so my dad could change his pants, having pissed them from laughing at us.
My dad….. Father’s Day, recently come and gone, gave me a chance to reflect upon the man with whom I share half my genes and a large chunk of my dark sense of humor. There never has been nor never will be, in my humble opinion, a better father to walk this earth. He is kind and loving and funny and would gleefully jump into whatever schemes my brother and I came up with to “have fun”, if he wasn’t already the direct engineer of them. And everything was a lesson. Countless family vacations and even short road trips were derailed by his pathological inability to pass up a road-side attraction or a historic marker.
The Corn Palace in Nebraska? Seen it. Pea Ridge Battlefield? Walked it and stepped in a snake hole as big around as my leg. He once found a marker denoting that the Santa Fe Trail crossed the spot we were at and, indeed, you could still see ruts in the ground from the wagons. He decided we were going to follow it for a while. Now, part of living where we do is the complete disregard for boundaries and privacy. If your door is unlocked, people will walk in. If you hang a no trespassing sign on your property, my dad will push it aside as he lifts my brother and I over your barbed wire fence. I don’t know how far we followed the trail, but we were obviously deep into some farmer’s land because we crested a hill and found ourselves nose to nose with a large herd of long horn cattle that did not look pleased to see us. My brother and I may be the only people on earth who have seen the Santa Fe trail upside down and at high speed as our dad tucked us under each of his arms and beat a hasty retreat.
Speaking of upside down, he taught us the right way to eat pineapple upside down cake. Which is off the kitchen floor whilst dangling by your ankles.
Oftentimes he would share punishment with us when we either refused to rat on each other or my mom decided each of us was as much at fault as the other. He shared many a corner and time out with my siblings and I.
His ideas were the best. My siblings and I can only dream of having the capacity for chaos and fun that my father does. He once bungee’d my brother and I to the luggage rack of the aforementioned station wagon and drove through Wildcat Canyon at what was, from our vantage point, an alarming and exhilarating speed. He once wrapped us in a hide-a-bed mattress, secured us with rope, and spent a diverting evening pushing us down the stairs. He once took us into Devil’s Den cave in Arkansas and pretended on the way back out to get stuck in a crack and told us to pick straws to see who got to eat his feet first. Once my sister woke up crying because she thought she saw a ghost and whilst my mother comforted her, he put a sheet on his head and ran up and down the hall booing and wooing and shrieking.
My dad is not a man. He’s a character.
As I mentioned earlier, I’ve spent time recently asking for family stories. My dad told me this one:
It was a family tradition for his family to go see a movie the day after Christmas. They lived in Derby, but would take the short drive to Wichita because it still had one of those big old-fashioned movie palaces and they liked it better. This year, the movie they decided on was Papillon. While they were waiting for the movie to start, my dad noticed a girl struggling to make her way down the aisle. My dad said she had red hair and was on crutches due to a cast on her leg clear up to her hip and was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. Years later he would still think about her and wonder what she’d done to hurt herself and how he regretted not getting up to help her so he could talk to her. Many years go by and he marries my mother, but he still remembers the girl with the crutches. At some point told her this story and, after comparing notes and dates, they realized that the girl he had seen was her. She had recently had surgery on her leg because she had hurt herself in a fall while cheerleading. So, in the end, without realizing it, he had married the beautiful red-headed girl he saw while waiting for Papillon to start.
I don’t really have a point to this post at all. I didn’t start out with one and I was hoping to maybe find one on the way, but I just ended up reminiscing.
Let’s go with this: Sometimes you meet the girl of your dreams ten years too early, but still find her anyway. Sometimes a station wagon can be much more than it really is. Sometimes you can have glorious days in the middle of terrible ones and they are the ones that make all the difference.
The Art of Panic 