Vacation

I once had a three week vacation, when I was ten. Like all vacations involving my father, it had it's fraught moments. Like the accident on the way to the airport, four way stop, and neither father nor truck could manage it. But I was put on the plane, my first flight, in my stiff cotton, mom-made dress (because pants were just not right for an airline trip.) I took many pictures of clouds, endured the long hours listening to the loop of questionable music (is this when I started to hate easy listening?), trying not to feel hurt by the man in the suit who wouldn't talk with me.

My brother and his wife picked me up at the airport, and for the first time I experienced the shock of teleportation as the Phoenix July heat blasted me. Parents and brother Bill, and I visited them two years before, a long roadtrip, taking in the Rocky Mountains and Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. So I knew this was furnace to my Michigan summer steamer. But that moment of transition felt like a door into another universe.

Vacation trips had always been gradual, before. My father got two weeks off in August from the factory, and we were piled in the car in the cool of the pre-dawn, so we could get some miles in, and were driven to a national park, hitting roadside attractions as we went. My brothers and I played games and looked for cheap motels with pools in the AAA book, and preceded the car in the Triptick map, reading the towns to come beneath the yellow highlighter line. We went to the north, and the Sleeping Bear Dunes, or to Canada and Niagara Falls, the Thousand Islands, the interminable Agawa Canyon (slower-than-imaginable) Railway, Virginia Beach, Stoney Creek beach on Lake Erie, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, the Smoky Mountains, Loray Caverns, and then the marathon cross country slog, justified by my brother being stationed in Arizona. Not a single one missing the essential element of my father exploding into a embittered rage, personal and petty and mean.

This one I would do all by myself, and eager, even after the crash. Although, my sister-in-law's ill defined notion of discipline, her nascent pregnancy, left me confused. She wanted to entertain me by giving me as much sugar as she wanted, and I never had so much candy, pop and coke slushies in my life. I baffled her utterly, often as not refusing sweets, happily poking around in the desert field behind their house, and reading anything I could get my hands on. Her friend lived in a complex with a pool, and I spent hours each day with the other children diving for a ring thrown in the bottom, floating on inner tubes and generally baking myself brown and freckled. She shushed her friend when they started talking about periods, information I could sorely have used within four months. I worried for her child to be, knowing that as badly as I was being raised, she was not going to do much better.

My brother worked too many hours, and my dreams of re-connecting with him were disappointed. They often had friends over, and drank more than I had ever seen anyone in my family drink before. They made brownies once, chocolate was irresistible to me, and I ate from the wrong half. They left me as they went to a party. I saw She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, in color, on their B/W TV. I found out when I was 20 about the hash, and to this day they think it was funny. To leave a ten year old, unknowingly tripping, alone, and have no regrets. The story is funny. The reality, especially that they had two daughters of their own, is not.

During those three weeks, my sister-in-law had an accident, was hit by a drunk driver. She had whiplash, and wore a neck brace. My brother took us to a cookware version of a Tupperware party. Their dog Boo would sit on me at night, keeping me awake, despite my many attempts to shove him out. He was a pushy Border Collie, completely not trained. Plus two cats who jumped back and forth over the sproinging doorstop in my bedroom. My bed an air mattress on a camp cot. I was up early because I was three hours ahead of them. I became deeply sleep deprived.

We went out to the desert with their friends one night, and as it got later and later, I grew overtired, and fell into a disturbed sleep on a concrete picnic table, feeling like excess baggage. I didn't so much want to go home as to simply stop existing.

I had stepped outside my disturbed reality when I most needed to keep my head down. I found out way too much about another family. I flew back in a dress too tight, bursting at the seams, after wearing nothing but shorts and borrowed jeans (my first pair, how I loved them) for three solid weeks. The intense GREEN of a Michigan summer enveloped me, comforting and homey. The mosquitos didn't love me anymore. I never quite fit anything there again.

I have not yet had a vacation as long. I'm wary of trying.