Home Alone

My parents are planning another trip to Sweden in the fall. I told them I wouldn’t be able to go with unless they went in August–some of us have to work, hello! That’s when they told me I wasn’t invited. My parents crack me up.

“No, really,” Dad said. “You’re not invited. It’s just going to be your mother and I.”

Oh. OHHHHH! I didn’t know it was that kind of trip–where nine months later I have a new baby brother.

Mom tells me that they want to visit her cousins Bernt and Ulla, who they haven’t seen in years. “We probably won’t even do much sightseeing.”

I know my mother. She’s trying to make it sound like it won’t be much fun for me. It’s not working. I don’t get it! When do you stop bringing the family on family vacations? Hasn’t everyone by now, seen Home Alone?  That’s what happens when you go off to Europe and forget the favorite kid.

It was becoming more clear to me what was going on and why they weren’t including me in their vacation plans.

“When are you  going to forget about about Breezy Point?” I ask, but my parents act like they don’t know what I’m talking about. “That was a long time ago. Can’t we just forget about it and move on?”

It happened the summer my parents had booked a cabin at Breezy Point, a resort on Pelican Lake near Brainerd, Minnesota.  Dad readied our 1962 Dodge Dart by wedging a hacked-off crib mattress in the back seat between the front and rear bolsters. This was to make my sisters and I more comfortable for the long trip. He even invited his grandmother to go along; I guess he didn’t think we had enough people in the car already. Grandma sat in what was left of the back seat; where the crib mattress ended.(The advent of the mini van would eventually render this device obsolete.) Grandma went along to remind us that Girl Scouts didn’t fight–a mantra later proved ineffective.

Our car’s cooling system was rudimentary and relied on all four windows being rolled down. This worked about as well as Mom telling us to remember how cold we were in December. “We’re almost at the ski resort,” she said, pretending to put her jacket on.  Instead of getting into Mom’s wacko hallucination I decided to pick on my sister.

“Mom! Tell Dawn to leave me alone,” Nanci wailed.

Grandma gave my thigh a whack then said, “Your troop leader would be ashamed if she saw you behaving like this!” Since Mom was our troop leader, I wasn’t too worried. Besides, she was busy blowing into her cupped hands like they were freezing, then pointing at the barren landscape and telling us to look at all the snow.

Nanci started to sing from side-one of The Sound of Music album, so I took the soprano part. We were half-way through the song, How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria, when our  little sister, Julie joined in.

“Mom!” I cried. “Julie’s trying to sing–she’s ruining it!”

Mom turned around to comfort our now crying sister and told her that she would sing with her, and began the Julie song: “Down by the station, early in the morning. See the little puffer bellies, all in a row….”

Nanci and I waited as patiently as Pee Wee Herman on the Alamo tour, when he was told to hold all questions until the end. Finally, when it was our turn again, Grandma began drilling us with Girl Scout trivia.

“What is the Girl Scout motto?”

“Be prepared,” I answered flatly. I didn’t really want to play the game, since there only seemed to be one question.

“I was going to say that!” Julie said, then began poking me repeatedly with her index finger.

“Stop it!” I snarled and when she didn’t, I let out a scream that would have shattered a window, had any been rolled up.

Dad flung his arm over the seat and flailed it back and forth in a blind attempt to swat the screamer while keeping the other hand on the wheel. Julie would not stop touching me, so I grabbed Nanci’s shoe and flung it at her, but missed. The shoe grazed the side of Grandma’s head before soaring out the window.

“Christ-on-a-rubber-crutch!” Dad yelled, as he turned the car around. We drove the opposite direction until we saw the shoe lying on the side of the highway. Once it was recovered and placed firmly on Nanci’s other foot,  Mom passed out the sandwiches she’d made for the road.

“This is the last family vacation we ever go on,” Dad said. I didn’t know he’d wait 40 years before actually enacting it.

We were quiet for the rest of the trip until Dad pulled into the Breezy Point parking lot. “We’re here! We’re here!” I shouted, pointing at the pool with the slide and diving board.  Once Dad parked, my sister’s and I scrambled off that crib mattress and demanded our swim suits be taken  out of our bags from the trunk.

“You can’t swim yet,” Mom said,”You only finished your lunch twenty minutes ago.”

“WHAT!”

“No swimming for an hour after you’ve eaten! You’ve still got forty minutes.”

Was she kidding? She expected me to sit next to the pool for 40 minutes? Did she know I wasn’t old enough to drink beer yet? Christ-on-a-rubber-crutch! Who sits next to the pool that long without a beer?

You know what? Maybe I’m the one who doesn’t want to go on any more family vacations. Maybe I’ll just stay home alone and look at pictures of all the good times I had with Grandma.

It occurs to me, that if she hadn’t ducked, that shoe would not have flown out the window, and I’d be telling a whole different story.