Road Trip: Conversations

Donnie, Doah, Noelle, and I took off on Tuesday for Delaware, Ohio to attend the wedding of our nephew, Jacob, to a young lady whom we like very much, Jessica. (Jacob is Rollie’s youngest child.) Since Noelle has long been no candidate for air travel – the airlines have to forklift her up to the plane and two baggage handlers have to wrestle her into her seat , we rented a wheelchair-accessible van and set out on the long, but quick, journey from California to Ohio. Road trip, road trip!

Now, on road trips, there are the sites and the sights, the stops and the gas (perhaps of more than one type), and the to-go snack and sit-down meal. Most interesting of all, in my mind, are the conversations. Here are snatches that I have heard over the past three days (we are now in Delaware):

Neighbor (30 minutes after we left): “Your porch lights are not on; I thought you told the Sheriff that they would be on so that he could check your place whenever he happens to be in town.”
Oops – text message to Shane: Pls turn on porch lights
Next day msg from Shane: porch lights now on.
Whew!

Doah (one hour after we left): “Are we there yet?” (This conversation repeated every 30 minutes or so the entire 2500 miles. Now settled in here in Delaware, I am certain he is busy re-winding that tape for the trip back. Oh, no!)

Lizzie (flying in, text msg, second day of our travels): “My flight was canceled. It seems that the airlines must have heard that someone related to you was planning to fly and panicked, canceling flights. I will try again tomorrow.”
Next day, Lizzie: “So where are you now?”
Me: “Enroute still. Where are you?”
She: “Made it; am staying with Cousin Shellie in Columbus.”
Whew!

Elizabeth (in response to an important meeting announcement to my assistant, who was not cc’d): “Are you planning to attend this meeting?”
He: “No.”
Me: “Huh?”
He: “I have a conflict.”
Me: “So?”
He: “Am sending my assistant in my place.”
Me: “OK.”
Whew!

Noelle: Mom! You are a bad driver!
Doah: “Ow! Yeah! Bad driver! Bad, bad driver!” (I had slammed on the breaks, and Doah had flown past Noelle’s wheelchair into the back of the front passenger seat, where Donnie was sitting.)
Me: “What happened to your seat belt?”
Doah: “Oh, yeah, seat belt!”
Me: “Yeah, seat belt! You okay?”
Noelle: “Yeah, he looks okay.”
Me: “Doah, answer me. Are you okay?”
Doah: “Can’t answer. I’m busy putting on my seat belt.”
Quick stop – Doah is fine. Whew! His seat belt is on, yes! He has not forgotten during the rest of the trip. Yes!
Doah (hungry and disappointed after miles of high chapparelle viewing through Wyoming and entering the planes of Nebraska without a pit stop in sight): “Cows, horses, and sheep; cows, horses, and sheep; cows, horses, and sheep!” (And your problem is?)

Me (text msg on Tuesday to friend we were meeting in Grand Island, Nebraska): “Miscalculated time; catheterization stops for Noelle are taking an hour, not a half hour. Will be arriving Thursday for brunch, not Wednesday for dinner.
She: “OK, but I will be in Lincoln on Thursday.”
Me: “Oh, well that is another two hours of driving, and we just lost an hour, crossing into the Mountain Time zone, so it will have to be dinner on Thursday, let’s shoot for 5:30.”
She: “OK.”
Me: “Road construction all across Nebraska; moving slowly. Let’s plan on 6:30.”
She: “OK.”
Me: “Ouch! I just noticed that somewhere we lost another hour to a time zone change – now on Central time. Let’s plan on 7:30.” (Note: We will be scooping up all those lost hours on the way back.)
She: “OK.”
Me: “We’re here….!”
She: “Wow! Really?”
It was exactly 7:30. Yes!

Donnie: “Our exit is coming up. Don’t miss it. There, right now: Indianapolis!” (I’m driving, and he thinks he is following a map, but thank goodness, I have the GPS.)
Me: “I can’t take it; it’s closed.”
Donnie: “Take the next one, then, and the GPS will re-route you.”
Me (as we approach the next one): “I cannot take this, either. It is closed, too.”
Donnie: Well, then, the next one; there must be several exits for Indianapolis from Route 74.” Me (approaching the third and final exit for Indy): This one is closed, too!
Doah: “Are we there yet?”
Donnie and me simultaneously: “Nooooo!”
Noelle (to Doah): “I don’t think this is a good time to ask that question.”
(We are still wondering why ALL the Route 74 exits for Indy were closed on Friday, just as we needed them. So, we headed south in order to go north. C’mon, that’s what the GPS told us to do, and when totally lost in unknown territory, one turns one’s life over to the GPS, whether its directions make sense or not.)
By some miracle, we made it to Ohio, losing only another hour along the way. So glad to be out of the car! So glad to have a different topic for conversation! Yes! I have been contemplating whether it is better to take that 2500-mile trip back on Monday or settle down here permanently.

Doah spent the shank of the evening at a campground party (in the rain?!) with his senior-year high-school teacher, Sue, and her two helpers, who just happened to have had a party plan when we announced our trip. The timing worked out perfectly. Afterward, Sue, her son Taylor, Doah, Donnie, and I had dinner at Bob Evans. (Noelle had to catheterize and preferred to be brought something back to eat in her hotel room.)

Then, my brother Rollie and sister Victoria showed up, swooped up Doah, and off they all went to spend the night at Rollie’s house. Doah saw lightning on the way back and wondered what was happening. Rollie reminded him about thunderstorms from the year that he lived with Rollie a decade ago, and then he remembered. (Donnie and I will never forget the string of lightning storms that plied their way up the Central Coast of California in 1999, beginning with dry lightning first without and then with accompanying thunder, followed by real thunderstorms. People who had not been outside the area were panicking. Many called the television station; someone asked if it were the end of the world. The television station stopped normal programming to allow the weatherman to explain thunderstorms to a fascinated audience. For us transplanted easterners, it was hysterically funny – and we were not worried about the world ending at all because we were busy watching a spectacular display of nature having one of her best tantrums.)

Last night, Donnie and I fell into bed with the lulling sound of fat raindrops plopping themselves onto the ground outside our window. Ah, rain! As I said, we don’t see much of that in San Ignatio, so we found the plopping delightful to hear.
This morning, we woke to a clap of thunder and flickering lights. The flicker lasted only a brief time. After that, large parts of town were in the dark. That was 10:30 this morning. Since then, we have vegged out in the hotel lobby, with others. Bob Evans, the restaurant across the parking lot, brought over food to feed us because with electricity out for hours, the food would have spoiled. We sat around the pool and had an unplanned feast. (Yes!)

Now, though, it is mid-afternoon. Hot and humid. No electricity. Therefore, also no air conditioning and no electricity. Last conversation as follows:
Lizzie: “Shellie is dropping me off at the hotel. Is 3:00 good?”
Me: “Sure!”
No way am I going to tell her that she is going to arrive to a bathroom with a glow-in-the-dark stick for lighting, no air conditioning, and no lights. She can change for the wedding in the same ambient light that we plan to use. The estimate is for the electricity to come back on some time after 3:30.

As for that thought about staying here permanently to avoid the road trip back, I’ve re-thought. I do like to have electricity on a regular basis, and I hear that lightning frequently knocks out electricity around here for hours. So, back, it is!

Views from the trip...

Sharon, Near-Alter Ego

Sharon, the only remaining sibling about whom I have not yet blogged, could have been my carbon copy in many ways. (I deliberately chose the words "could have been" and not "could be" because we ultimately chose very different paths.)

Sharon was child #7, the first girl after a string of boys. It was almost like Ma was starting over again. Sharon looked exactly like me (child #1), and Victoria, child #8, looked much like Katrina (child #2). And then Dad died from a heart attack caused by a hospital error, and there were no more children. (He had wanted 12 although he certainly did not have the financial means to care for the eight he had already.)

Ma had mellowed by the time Sharon and Victoria came along. Nonetheless, they all did experience the same range of abuse that I did: physical, emotional, and sexual. The amount and severity may have been different, but one relative or another ensured that they had experience with all kinds.

Unlike us older girls, the two younger ones had the protection of Rollie. They also had the homes of their older sisters. Just as Victoria came to live with me in Virginia as a teenager, so did Sharon go to live with Katrina in New York. Getting there, however, was no typical or easy task. Sharon, a truly brilliant student, especially in physics, caught the attention of her math teacher, Sam, who mentored her. With time, mentoring and empathy turned into indiscreet love, which brought the wrath of the school board down onto Sam, who was summarily fired. Once Sharon became an embarrassment to Ma, she had an open path away from the burning house. Ma called Katrina, since my hands were full at the time with Victoria, and asked for asylum there, never telling Katrina about the school scandal. Neither did Sharon until Sam one day showed up, proposed, and a marriage was planned.

That marriage took place in Michigan the summer between her senior year, which she finished in New York, and her freshman year at Michigan State University. It was quite a surprise for all of us -- except Ma, of course. All is well that ends well, however. Sharon and Sam have been married for more than twenty years now.

Seventeen years younger than me, Sharon grew up in a very different society. Doors were open to her that were closed to me. She could explore some of the interests we had in common, like physics. I remember my high school physics teacher telling me that it was a shame that I was a girl because I would otherwise make a very good physicist. (One of only 5 girls in a class of 40 students, I had the highest grade: 99% maintained over the entire year. However, my physics teacher was right. In the 1960s, physics was not a girl's field. So, I chose a different field: linguistics, the science of language, which prepared me for my international experiences. I have not regretted the decision.) Sharon, though, was able to pursue her interest in physics. She received a full scholarship to Michigan State where she maintained a 4.0 average in nuclear physics and was heavily recruited by a number of graduate schools. However, she chose to work with her husband in the field of computer science instead of going to graduate school, earning money instead of spending it. It is not a choice I would have been made, but then Sharon is not really my alter-ego. She looks like me, sounds like me, has many of the same skills (and lack of skills), but her choices have always been far more pragmatic than anything I have chosen to do.

More to come...

Victory for Victoria, Finally

Like my brother, Rollie, my youngest sibling, Vick, came to stay with Donnie and me and our family. By that time, we had produced all four of our birth children and were living in Arlington, Virginia and working in Washington, D.C.

At the age of 16, Victoria was living alone with Ma, Sharon having married and moved out a few months earlier. All the rest of us had already moved out for various reasons—school, work, marriage. So, Vick was left to face Ma’s rage alone, a very dangerous position to be in. Fortunately, an amazing thing happened that resulted in Vick's rescue: Vick, a good student, started failing English and no one could figure out why she could not get her head wrapped around this subject when she had a great gift for language use. Out of frustration, Ma called me one day to wait about this. Failure, to Ma, was not an option. Imagining how difficult the beatings might get if Vick continued to fail, I offered, to Ma's relief, to take in Victoria, much the way Donnie and I had taken in Rollie in our Montana days.

With three bedrooms for the six of us, quarters were tight, but we found yet another bed for Victoria, who moved in with us and began attending high school with Lizzie, who was 14 at the time. They became the best of friends, and their friends insisted that they were really cousins. They would not believe that they were aunt and niece. Actually, they were more like sisters than anything else and remain so until this day although Vick is a massage therapist in Michigan and Lizzie a professor in South Carolina. They spend hours and hours on the phone each week.

Victoria lived with us until she graduated and left to attend college in Tennessee. In many ways, I became a second mother to her, rather than a sister, and to this day, when she has a seemingly insurmountable problem, I get a phone call, asking for advice.

Unfortunately, during her days on the farm with Ma, Victoria, unlike the rest of us, became co-dependent with Ma. She would accept the abuse as somehow meaning that she was to blame. She is the only one who retained regular contact with Ma. Relationships for Victoria have finally normalized, but only after two divorces, including from one abusive spouse who held a knife to her throat (fortunately, 911 help arrived in time and he was jailed), and the chance to move to Michigan. She lives not far over the state border from Rollie in Ohio. He has been a continuing source of support to her, starting from his return to Maine to protect her from her raping cousin through his constant contact during her days of living with an abusive spouse and continuing on to her current single-mother days.

Vick, like the rest of us albeit taking a more difficult path, survived her childhood abuse and went on to raise two happy sons. Initially inclined toward the child-rearing tendencies that she had known in her youth, she fought past that with the help of family, friends, education, and a deeply abiding faith that Almighty God would stand by her, and became a caring mother who independently raised two self-assured sons, pictured below.

Vick with Alton and Moss