We Are Family

Road trips seem to be very Dickensian in their nature: they are both the very best and very worst of times.  People always comment that we are so brave or fun-seeking or crazy because we drive places all the time, but the simple truth is that it is a lot cheaper than flying.  We are not looking for road warrior status; we are just looking to save a couple of hundred dollars.  Sure, I’d like to get to Chicago in two hours instead of 18.5, but I would also like to eat when I am old and maybe send my kids to college.  Maybe. 

I will start with the worst of times because our ride home was heinous and it has taken me two days being back at home to be willing to talk about it.  The ride home is always the worst because your body and brain remember just how long it took to get here and they start protesting before you even get in the car.  It’s going to be long and uncomfortable and you and everyone in the car with you knows it.  We are tired of music, tired of podcasts, tired of road noise and tired of each other.  We are driving way too many miles in one day to try and not have to drive way too many miles over two days.  No restaurants look good and would it kill the state of Missouri to have more than two Starbucks in it?  The heaviness of sitting and only sitting for so long weighs on you and it becomes harder and harder to unfurl from your car position when you stop even though you are desperately longing to move, to stretch, to bend, and straighten.  You eat Chex Mix by the handful in a desperate attempt to curb your bathroom breaks because every minute stopped is a minute you are not moving ahead.  This works well but also gives you swollen ankles and all you can think of is how desperately tight your socks feel.  The boredom is so prevalent: the same dead winter landscape in each state, the same reminders to put your shoes on as the car glides to a stop at the gas station, the same thoughts buzzing around and around your head, the same nothingness.  We are in limbo.  The ride home is most definitely the very worst of times.

This trip home from Chicago had all of the weariness listed above as well as hellacious rain and terrible driving conditions.  I am not going to complain about it one bit because we were fortunate to have a good vehicle, fortunate that Bill is an excellent driver and fortunate to have missed the freezing, flooding and tornados.  It was intense.  It was crazy-scary and at one point I had to move to the back and move SG to the front because the incessant rain on the windshield was making me tense.  Then in the back, I had to talk myself down the crazy tree because it was so much smaller back there and the rain still would not let up.  It was not a pitter patter of rain; it was a constant, incessant deluge. 

So why do we do it and is it worth it?  It is always worth it because we get to where we want to go.  We see our family and watch our kids with their cousins and think it is totally worth it.  We explore new cities and take pictures in front of cool things and the time in the car disappears.  We stay at a relative’s house and live their life for a few days and know them better.  We have fun, we stay up late, we visit local haunts and we eat all the food.  After a day or two at our destination, we don’t remember being in the car at all.

And, every now and then, I take a good picture!

The ride to our destination is so often the very best of times for us.  We are all excited about going on our trip and have saved up new music, new things to entertain us and new things to talk about.  We flood the car with our words and our laughter.  We sing along, loudly, to all the songs.  We complement each other on our range or remark how we didn’t know that the other person even knew that song.  (Bill McMahon knows all the songs.  All the songs) We pass snacks back and forth that are purchased for road trips only and everyone smiles and savors them.  We are no longer four people leading four different lives that intersect; we are four people with one common goal.  We are less interested in all the things that make us “us” and more interested in what we are going to do as a “we” over the next few days.  We shed the weight of our lives as we click off the miles and we laugh more, we talk more and we enjoy each other more.  We like the closeness the car brings and we talk more openly and honestly and we listen more clearly than we ever do at home.  There are fewer distractions in the car and sometimes as a family, you need that.  We remember that we are a family, that we love each other, that we are living our lives together and not just along-side one another.  We are a family.  That is worth all the miles down the road and back again.

Bad Books, Bad Books

This time of year, I normally like to write a review of the best or worst books I have read and encourage you to pick them up to enjoy or throw them across the room in disgust.  I usually reserve one sentence for my complete disdain of Little Bee even though it’s been five or six years since I actually read it and can’t remember why it is I spew vitriol at it again each year.  But tradition is tradition, right?  Even though it has been a disappointing year for books, I will still share what I’ve found and I will malign Little Bee.

It has been a tough year for me and books. I have started more books than I have finished.  I figure by this time in my life and with the multitude of books out there, if an author can’t grab my undivided attention by the third chapter, I am moving on.  I want to fall into a book. I want to lose all sense of time and purpose as I flip pages. I want to be wowed or moved or flipping frantically to see what happens next.  I have not found a lot of this out there this year.  I also incredibly impatient with YA because they are all trilogies and that is two books too many.

Probably way better than most of what I read.

As I grew tired of being disappointed by the banal selection of fiction I came across, I moved on to read more non-fiction books this year than in my whole life.  I read one about a guy who retraces the Oregon Trail in an actual covered wagon.  It wasn’t the best book, but I did learn a lot about mules and the history of mules in America.  This was not at all fascinating or interesting, but it was something.  I also read Missoula by John Krakauer and strongly feel it should be mandatory high school reading.  Boys and girls need to be aware of what consent is: what it looks like, what it sounds like and how to stop in a situation where it is not given.  Girls need to learn to never leave their girls and boys need to learn stop and all of them need to learn what a dangerous situation can look like before it becomes dangerous.  I felt fired up after I read this book and disgusted and alarmed, so it was probably one of the best ones I read this year.  I also tried to read The New Jim Crow, but I borrowed it from a teacher at school and found I was more interested in what she annotated on the side than the actual book, so I will try again once she finishes the book herself and annotates the rest of the chapters for me.

Disappointing new books led me digging around the classics in hopes that older is better.  The Awakening reminded me a lot of Madame Bovary and I could see where it was headed so I opted out.  I did discuss it with someone who had read it and she confirmed and elaborated on the doom I had sensed coming.  Confederacy of Dunces was amusing in its preposterousness and reminded me a lot of Candide.  And is it wrong to admit I enjoyed Lolita?  Seriously, the main character, Humbert Humbert, is such a creepy perv and the books centers on pedophilia but the writing and story-telling were spectacular. 

Looking through my paltry list of books read I see that I did give four books more than one star.  I guess I do have some books to recommend after all!    I’ll Give You the Sun was amazing and a YA book that is not part of a trilogy.  I also enjoyed The Truth According to Us.  Historical, witty and voiced a little in letters it caught my attention and held it.  If you liked Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, you will like this one too.  I stumbled across American Housewife Stories and giggled and guffawed through it.  Written by Helen Ellis, I had to keep reminding myself it wasn’t written by David Sedaris.  I know you Santaland Diary haters won’t be picking this one up, but I picked it up, I passed it on and I highly recommend it.  The best book I read in this year of blah books was A God in Ruins.  This is Kate Atkinson’s follow up to Life After Life and it is just as good.  It is full of captivating characters, excellent writing and an ending that is more philosophical than conclusive.  Read it and tell me what you think of the ending.  I had a lovely discussion with a coworker as to what we thought it all meant.  I thought the ending was daring and thought-provoking and dare I say provocative?  I dare!  It was provocative!

I wonder if because people skip proofreaders and editors and self-publish we are flooded by a tsunami of poorly written fiction as a result.  Or is it because everyone gets a trophy and thinks that they can sing or dance or do whatever that they also think they can write? I realize that these are bold words for a woman who writes without an editor and usually publishes her work with some sort of grammatical error.  However, you don’t see me publishing a book, so I feel confident in maligning others.  Maybe I am just tired at night and would rather stare at the TV and watch crazy people in Alaska fight for their survival.  Or perhaps I have read so many good books in my life that I deserved a year of ho-hum books.  I am not really sure what this whole year of bad reading was about, but whatever it is, I hope this was just an off year in a lifetime of good reading.  Well, minus that time I suffered through Little Bee.

Jingle, Jangle, Juggle

Picture it, if you will, Josh Groban’s “O Holy Night” softly streaming through the speakers on a crisp morning.  This invokes feelings of peace and joy and happiness, right?  Yes, unless it is playing in my tiny Prius as three people search, scramble and throw things around looking for a pen while yelling at each other about not being prepared.  I needed a pen to write a note for tutorials on the back of the HEB receipt we found stuck to the floor of the car and neither child had a pen or pencil in their enormous, voluminous backpacks.  They tried to turn it on me but I quickly deflected all blame and responsibility and ruined the boy’s life by actually walking him into middle school and asking the first person I saw for a pen.  

This is going to be my Christmas season this year: soft rumblings of holiday bliss in the background drowned out by the craziness of our lives.  I usually write something about pausing to enjoy the season or not getting caught up in the crazy but I am fully onboard the crazy train and I say let it rip!  Basketball games and gifts to get each week before the games?  Sure, sign me up and don’t let me know until the night before.  Winter Concerts where kids need to be there ten minutes before I get home from work?  Totally doable!  Cookies for this, beverages for that and White Elephant gifts too?  God bless us, every one. 

This is just the way life is this year and it would be silly to think that the magic of Christmas would slow things down.  I am a little sad that the busyness is creating havoc with some of our normal traditions, but I think that is part of the kids growing up and turning our lives into a whirlwind.  During one of my unemployed years, I crafted an advent calendar out of trees made from colored Christmas paper and not only did it actually turn out, the kids loved it. I know they love it and while I know that, I forgot to buy candy to put under the trees until December 2^nd.  The candy I bought didn’t fit under the trees and while trying to make it fit and doing homework with the boy and putting together lunches for the next day, I gave up.  I knocked all the little trees over, piled the candy in the middle and considered it done.  Maybe I will buy one of the nicely packaged ones from Starbucks and let my children feel the love from a giant corporation this holiday season. 

Timber!!!

 I drank so much coffee yesterday my heart hurt, but in kind of a good way, like it was finally keeping up with my brain.  Work is just as crazy as everyone is trying to cram the last few weeks of the semester in.  One of the things I do here at work is personally visit students in class with very overdue books.  They love (?) the personal attention and it helps me put a face with a name.  Yesterday, as I was running around to classes trying to hunt down overdue books, I found a kid lying unconscious in the stairwell.  It almost didn’t surprise me.  Later on this same day, a teacher yelled out to me as I was once again on the hunt that someone in her class was having a seizure and could I help?  Of course I can help.  Thinking about this later I think that all the busyness of our lives has brought me to the realization that everything and anything is going to happen every second of the day.  I don’t have to be prepared for it; I just have to go with it.  I am going to apply this to the Christmas season too.  I might not be able to stop and do all the tiny things that make used to make it enjoyable, but I can still enjoy the blur of lights as I run along.