by Shannon O’Hearn Downing
Published in Private Lives on April 29, 1994
Listen to my story!” they demand, day after I,day. In the beginning, my third-graders struggle with what it means to be a writer; they try to tell exciting stories of broken bones, video games and hot amusement park adven- tures. I hang in there; it is always slow at first, but for the patient and the believing, the reward of helping children find their writers’ voices is like none other.
And then they come; those stories that tell of young lives dirtied and smudged with the grit of getting by, of just living. All too often these children are unwilling participants in poverty, emotional unrest, hopelessness.
Sometimes — no, every day – I fear for the future of these children whose parents are distracted at best, abusive at worst. Then, once in a while, they turn from the unsettling stories of their present lives to a time long ago, a happy time, usually with a mom and sometimes a dad, when they had something to look forward to. Almost every child can remember taking a summer trip to see family.
Listening to these recollections of visits “up North,” I am reminded of the trips my family took from Wichita Falls, Texas, to St. Petersburg more than a quarter of a century ago. I remember that my brother Patrick and I didn’t care that we traveled in an un-air-conditioned car in the height of a southern summer – we were going to the beach!
I looked forward to the ring of my grandmother’s soulful laugh, and hunting sand dollars with my feet in the brown saltwater of Fort DeSoto Beach. Our searing car trip across the delta was no less part of the adventure.
In those days, before the invention of cholesterol and fat grams, we thrived on vacation food. This was special occasion food, kindred spirit to the metal-trayed TV diners saved for babysitter nights and was the rare, cherished repast of all children.
When the early summer sun warmed and woke us from our back seat sleep, Patrick and I scoured the highway for a Stuckey’s Truck Stop sign. Breakfast meant bacon and eggs, biscuits and gravy and pecan waffles. While Mom and Dad lingered over coffee and the road map, Pat and I snooped through Stuckey’s gift shop and investigated the bathrooms. We often ate lunch and dinner at a Dairy Queen or an A&W’s, where we gorged ourselves on corn dogs and onion rings and root-beer floats and ice cream.
Nothing topped the late afternoons, though. Hot and impatient for the day’s end, our legs slippery with sweat and stuck to unforgiving vinyl seats, we were desperate for the motel.
We always stayed in motels, the kind you drive up to the door of. My favorite motel was Holiday Inn because you knew what you were getting-the beds, ice buckets and bathrooms were very clean (as evidenced by that official-looking paper strip safeguarding the toilet); they always had other families with kids; and they were close enough to the road for the passing night trucks’ song to comfort us in our strange beds. But the best part of any trip was the motel pool.
We never stayed in a place that didn’t pass the pool test: There just had to be one. We didn’t care if it had a diving board, but we searched far and near for that exquisite find: a pool with a deep end and a curving slide. Every KOA Kampground seemed to have one, but we never got to stay at one of those.
As soon as we found our motel room, Pat and I snatched our nubby-bottomed bathing suits from our suitcases, tugged them on and pushed and raced all of the way to the pool. I am unsure of what our limp parents did while we were swimming, but among their joys, I imagine, was absorbing the white peace of the rasping room air conditioner amid the screaming silence of recently departed children.
At the end of every summer road were Florida relatives. There was always an uncle’s home or cabin to sleep in, and several cousins to reacquaint with. We went to the beach and got coquina shells stuck in our suits; we earned cruel sunburns that later were sprayed with soothing salve for crimson fools; we ate lots of fried chicken, boiled shrimp and potato salad.
The parents and grandparents always played cards at night, and the children shared cots and sofa-beds. We fell asleep listening to the plastic chink of poker chips and our parents’ familiar laughter.
Inevitably, the cousins quarreled. We all got a talking to, the theory being that no one starts a fight unaided. This was our parents’ vacation, too, and they were not going to put up with disharmony.
With clean laundry and a few tacky souvenirs, we packed up with heavy hearts. There is a special love cousins have for one another, and nieces and uncles, and grandparents.We knew things might be different the next year. Maybe an uncle would take a job and move his family too far away. Maybe our cousins would grow up too much and wouldn’t want to play flashlight tag or Yahtzee with us next summer. What we dreaded most was the lost celebration of mirth we beheld in our overworked parents once a year. We loved to hear them laugh-that resounding chorus of contentment saved for family vacations.
As I listen to the stories of my third-grade children, I imagine they have bathed in the laughter and love of a family’s summer trip. Maybe, like Patrick and me, they too have the fading photographs and tacky souvenirs to remind them they once knew happiness.