Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Tuesday, April 22, 2003 Don’t Make Me Come Back There You know how when you become an adult you find it easier to do things that seemed really hard as a kid? Like reach tall shelves, or pay rent, or refrain from putting your head through the drywall when no dessert is forthcoming? This past weekend, I did something I’d never done before. Something I couldn’t imagine doing when I saw my parents do it. I drove from the Twin Cities to Nevada, Missouri in one day. My parents used to do this several times a year, with the three of us kids in the car. Now they do it several times a year without us. Something tells me we’re all happier that way. My dad comes from the area around Nevada (it’s pronounced “Ne-VAY-da” in this context). My mom comes from the greater Pittsburg, Kansas area, just across the state line. Most of the members of my extended family are still there. Ergo, most of our summers and significant school breaks during the seventies and eighties included at least one twelve-plus-hour odyssey to what my junior-high self waggishly called “Central America.” Imagine two adults and three ill-behaved children crammed into a Delta 88 or an Oldsmobile Starfire hatchback for six hundred-odd miles. These days, people insist they need an H2 just to get one kid to soccer practice three blocks away, but it was a different time then. On the other hand, if my dad hadn’t gotten a promotion that came with the use of a new Suburban before we hit puberty, some of us wouldn’t have lived to see an H2. So, yeah, part of the reason it seems easier for me is because it is easier now. Some of those factors are external. My parents had to contend with a national 55 mph speed limit back in the day. And when I say “had to contend with,” I really mean “obeyed.” With today’s speed limits of 65 and 70 (depending on the state), the difference really adds up over several hundred miles. Especially with my radar detector, which handily alerts me when I need to drop back behind the sound barrier. Also, I-35 wasn’t the unbroken corridor it is now, which meant they had to get off the freeway at Bethany and bumble around on one-lane wheelruts for the last couple hundred miles or so. Now that the interstate is an unbroken corridor from Lake Superior to the Rio Grande, I can just hit the cruise control in Burnsville and settle back for a nap. And some factors are internal. For instance, Trash and I have become seasoned road-trippers who can do more in one five-minute gas station stop than most people can do in a weekend. We travel light, which means no distracting spells of groping around in the backseat for the crimping iron. Trash can just reach back and grab whatever either one of us needs, because it’s sure to be on top. And, most of all, that backseat is unoccupied by three small, shrill-voiced news anchors giving us up-to-the-minute bulletins on who exactly is touching whom. Seriously, I don’t know how my parents did it. Over the years, conditioning played a part—my sisters could fall asleep before we were out of the driveway, and I got into the habit of peeing every time we stopped whether I had to or not (sometimes I even got out of the car)—but it still couldn’t have been easy. Between the constant whining, fighting, stopping, throwing up into the food cooler, stopping, disputes over whose turn it was to sit in the front seat, disputes over which of the vehicle’s two cassette tapes* we were going to listen to, stopping, disputes over whether it had really been necessary to throw up into the food cooler, crying fits over fast food, and the time I held my younger sister’s head out the window until her tongue dried out, I can’t believe how many of those trips they survived. Because somehow, they survived every one of them. And kept doing it. I figured that when I grew up, I wouldn’t be doing that to myself on a regular basis. And I don’t. Trash and I have only been down a few times since we got married—and two of those times, we rode with my parents. The issue of unauthorized touching takes on a completely different meaning in those circumstances, let me tell you. But this weekend, I learned something kind of shocking: a drive that took a family of five over twelve hours in 1978, can now be done in less than eight hours by a determined childless couple with a fuzzbuster. We could have done it faster if we hadn’t timed things so we landed in a few Kansas-City-holiday-Friday-afternoon-road-construction traffic jams and gotten stuck behind people who stopped in the middle of the road to retrieve mattresses that had flown out of their pickup beds. No, I’m not kidding about that last part. Back when the earth could do a one-eighty in the time it took to get from point A to point B, a trip had to be a week long to make the drive worth it. When Trash and I have a week, we go somewhere we’ve never been. When we have four days we go somewhere we’ve never been, because flying to Austin takes less time than driving halfway there (Unless you do it the way we do. Shut up). But we were able to get to southern Missouri and back in three days, with a visit to Kansas and a stopover in Iowa on the way back. Now that I know it’s not as hard as I thought, maybe we’ll be making the trip more often. Or maybe I’ll just feel guiltier about not making the trip more often. * These two. posted by M. Giant 3:18 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:
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