‘You have no idea what you’re missing…’
Published 10:26 am Friday, May 20, 2011
Catching a television commercial for a new family minivan equipped with GPS and DVD players, I was struck by the peaceful harmony of the family within, loaded up for a trip and bathing deeply in the profound happiness of a family unit on an eight-hour drive to the beach, completely relieved of the desire of any sort of personal interaction.
The children’s eyes were glued to ‘Escape from Witch Mountain’ and the parents met each other’s eyes with the wan smile of prescribed mood elevators.
Wait, don’t jump to the conclusion that I’m going to begin to bluster, “When I was growing up” tales. Please realize I am not going to tell you my siblings and I read sweetly together, heads touching at the temple, and that my father never was able to cuff all four of us across the chops with one swinging back hand without turning around or taking his other hand off the wheel of the Chevrolet Caprice hurtling at 80 miles-per-hour down to Florida with broken lap belts and my mother, nervously beside him, desperately attempting to refold the map.
Oh, we had personal interaction alright.
Being the youngest and the skinniest, I was forced to sit in the middle of the back bench seat, over the hump, crammed against two brothers and a sister that persisted in sliding hands beneath my knees and pinching me until I yelped and was admonished again by my parents.
“Stop touching me!”
I would shriek to my brother’s delight who would then torture me by moving his finger within an eighth of an inch from my nose, eye and ear, all the while hissing,
“I’m not touching you…”
Once again cuffed across the top of his head, a new idea to lift the boredom arose.
“I spy with my little eye, something that begins with “R”!”
“Road, you idiot.”
“Shut up!”
“You shut up. Ow! MOM!”
“Listen, you bloody ingrates, if you don’t sit down and shut up I will turn this car around, and-”
“Really? We’re in Valdosta; that would be a long way to turn around and-”
Pow!
What followed was approximately 30 minutes of sullen silence, punctuated by the obligatory stop at Stuckey’s where we all simply had to have the pecan log, which we then gnawed upon in the back seat. We continued our trek, hair blowing into our mouths and sticking to our candy from rolled down windows as my father rarely turned on the air conditioner in a futile attempt to gain more economy from an engine that was averaging two exits to the gallon.
My eldest brother, Nick, generally won the “Whoever sees the first palm tree gets a quarter!” by sitting on my other brother’s head and denying his view.
But, somehow, we ended up tooling into Sarasota, in a time that, to my father’s delight, shaved 10 minutes from the previous year’s trip. All arguments and loathing were long forgotten by the sight of a beckoning beach until being sharply reminded that, “No, you will not run down there and swim, we’ve got to check in and unpack first and have dinner. Then perhaps we will walk to the beach.”
So, call it abnormal, but while passing these new family vehicles on the freeway, all containing modern conveniences and peaceful, smiling children buckled safely in air conditioned splendor, I can’t help for my immediate reaction to be anything else than, “You have no idea what you’re missing…”