The negative part of travel in my family (for lack of a better word for a
single parent and single child; somehow the word 'family' conjures up
images of parents, two
siblings, and a
mangy dog) can be summed up with an
in-joke phrase coined on our trip to
CO/
NM/
AZ/
UT in 1988:
"Look at the goddamn scenery!"
There was quite a bit of treacherous driving to be done
in the Rocky Mountains, and my mother kept threatening, while we careened down a two-way snow-covered, cliff-and-rockface-hugging road seemingly narrower than the car, that if I didn't look at the (admittedly mind-blowingly
gorgeous) view, she would. (I, of course, was gripping the seat and
staring at the three feet of road visible in front of us in the falling
snow.)
It was humorous, but it's representative of the general tone of all my
trips with her -- an unspoken (or, often, explicit) accusation that I
wasn't properly appreciating whatever it was we were doing, seeing. I
wasn't taking it in enough. I wasn't reading the signs (I was; I just read
much faster than she does.) I wasn't sufficiently grateful for this
Educational Opportunity.
It's quite possible that she was right, at the time; I probably didn't
really grasp it fully, and I certainly wasn't aware of how privileged I was
to be going all these places. It boggles my mind that my mom was able to
budget a substitute teacher's salary with sufficient skill to allow for
these trips. But, then, we didn't have a big-screen TV, or cable, or season tickets to every sports team in a 100-mile radius, or new designer clothes
twice every season, or a new car every two years. Gee, what a let-down.
In retrospect, of course, those trips (CO, CA, ME, ON, VT, NC/SC...) made
me who I am today. I have a better idea of what this country looks like
than most of my peers, of just how big and varied it is. I was instilled
with a sense of geography; I know people who, given a large
map of the US, can't point out which half the Grand Canyon is in. She did good.