Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Scamp Season

It is Scamp Season once again. The beginning of the oppressive South Georgia summer season sends us scampering (pun intended) toward cooler, balmier locales: down to the Gulf Coast, up to New England, or, maybe this year, even up into the Canadian wilderness.


The Scamp is our 13 foot, fiberglass eggshell camper. It houses a dinette that converts to a bed, a couch which converts to bunk beds, a sink, some cabinets, and a two burner stove. It has an icebox which doesn’t always keep things cold enough, and an air conditioner that sometimes keeps things too cold.

We sometimes complain about the meager living space, the lack of privacy, and the tendency to bust your head on the door if you don’t duck; but, if you suggest to any of us the possibility of moving to a more spacious trailer, we protest loudly. We adore our Scamp.

While on the Gulf Coast this weekend, we bought a Jolly Roger flag for the Scamp: 3’ x 5’ black and white skull and crossbones. It flew high atop the Scamp, popping in the wind at our beachside campsite.

This is the latest and greatest decoration to adorn the Scamp. It also boasts three different strings of lights (flamingoes with palm trees, stars, and white twinkling ones), a Mickey Mouse garden gnome, and a pair of pink plastic lawn flamingoes. The effect is pretty cheesy, but we like it that way. The Scamp attracts attention wherever it goes, regardless. Strangers stop by, asking if they can have the Grand Tour of the place. “Stick your head in the door,” we say.

It’s our little play house, our little tree fort. We hide out in it away from the rest of the world, decorate it in whatever suits our fancy, and then use it as home base for our adventures. One week it’s a beach house on the shore of a white, sandy beach; then, it’s a cabin in the woods, surrounded by tall pine trees. Quite often, it is our hideaway in The Happiest Place on Earth, in the Old West Fantasyland of Ft. Wilderness at Walt Disney World. Spending the weekend there is probably the best bargain, and the most fun, in the entire resort.

We’ll be on the move again this summer. The work week will end, and we’ll have the Scamp ready to roll to… wherever. We have it down to a science: we pull into a campsite, and down go the supports, up go the awning and the lights and the Mickey gnome and the lawn flamingoes and the pirate flag and the chairs and the lanterns and the barbeque grill and the picnic table. We’re back in our clubhouse, ready for adventure.

We’ll send you postcards from the road. Stay tuned.

Sunday, May 9, 2010

If You Play Your Cards Right....

I decided not to do the flower thing this year. Flowers wilt eventually, and then you throw them away and they only live in your memory — unless you are my grandmother, and you take a picture of them, and then they live on for all eternity in a photo album, along with the pictures of you opening every single present at your wedding shower, and every birthday cake you ever had.


So, I’m here on the Internet to give you your Mother’s Day present—where everything, good or bad, exists here in perpetuity, like Grandma’s pictures ( I suggest that you don’t look too hard at my Facebook albums, because I think you’d probably rather not see what I was up to my senior year in high school). Nothing is private here on the Internet, which is fine; for Mother’s Day 2010 I am writing your present, and I will happy to share this post with the with everyone.

Welcome to my blog. The name’s a little weird, I know, and I have been thinking about changing it—I ate a lot more Chinese food when I started it, but, now that my figure getting a bit too… “womanly”, I’ve backed way off. Have a look around if you want—I don’t think that I’ve skewered our family too badly here (yet).

But enough introduction. On to your Mother’s Day present.

If You Play Your Cards Right….

“If you play your cards right….” Now that I am grown up, and have been to Las Vegas, I understand the meaning of this term: it means, when you play blackjack “if you stand on, like, a fifteen, or sixteen, you have a pretty good chance of beating the house, because they have to draw to at least seventeen and, because of this fact, they have a pretty good chance of busting.” Or something like that.

When I was a kid, “if you play your cards right….” had a completely different meaning. “If you play your cards right” meant “we are on our way to somewhere awesome unless World War III breaks out in the back seat and I can’t take this car ride anymore.” But, either Armageddon did not occur, or you were very tolerant of our sibling squabbles, because you never did turn the car around.

We were adventurers, you, me, Kate and Bill.

We loved our road trips. We took short jaunts to neighboring New Haven to The Yale Peabody Museum. We looked way up at the Brontosaurus skeleton in the Hall of Dinosaurs, years before it became an Apatosaurus skeleton. We climbed the huge stone stairs. I remember that the museum smelled as ancient as it looked. I love that smell (When Ben and Libby visited last year, they weren’t as impressed. “It smells weird in here,” they said. “But it’s the Peabody smell--don’t you get it?” I answered. You know what I mean. They didn’t get it).

Then there was the epic trip to New Orleans one summer, the one when we turned onto Bourbon Street, which was not the only slightly naughty tourist attraction that it became years later, and you realized that we may not have landed in a very “appropriate” part of town. Didn’t you try to cover my brother’s eyes when the strippers started swinging out of the windows on the second floor of the clubs?

But the best road trip of all was to The Magic Kingdom, in Walt Disney World. We would get up before dawn to make the drive to the park, so that we could be there when the gate opened. Over breakfast at the Crystal Palace Restaurant, on Main Street U.S.A., we pulled out the park map and planned our day like a military campaign. We marked the guidebook up with checks to mark our “must see” rides, and plotted our route through the park. We rationed the “E” tickets to make sure that we had enough to ride The Jungle Cruise; we reconnoitered possible parade-watching positions, and predetermined which horse we were going to ride on Cinderella’s Golden Carousel (mine will always be the circus pony with the red, white and blue headdress) . We stayed until the very last possible second when the park closed, and then you drove us home, in the middle of the night, down the deserted Florida Turnpike. I’m sure that you were exhausted, but you didn’t have the luxury of sharing the driving with any other adult back then.

I’ve come to realize a couple of things after all of these years:

We really didn’t have a lot of money. Our epic vacations were financed with a shoestring budget. We rationed those “E” tickets because extra “E” tickets cost a bundle, and we didn’t head to a hotel at night after leaving Disney because it was expensive. I never considered that thought when I was a kid: how difficult it must have been to find the money for even a single day at Walt Disney World. But, trust me, when I look at my credit card bill at the end of a trip down there, I am even more appreciative of what you had to do to get us there.

And, even more, you not only single handedly financed our epic adventures—you planned and executed them by yourself. Driving home in the dark after 18 hours at The Magic Kingdom couldn’t have been much fun by yourself—but you did it. And trying to keep your kids safe in a pretty rough part of the French Quarter, or after accidentally taking a wrong turn in New York City—that couldn’t have been much fun either. But you did it.

Nowadays, no matter what happens in the back seat, I don’t turn the car around, either. I don’t want to miss a thing. Sometimes, I think I get more excited than the kids about the adventures that are down the road.

As when I was a kid, my own family has its epic adventures: up to Long Island Sound, down to the Gulf of Mexico. We ride inner tubes, kayaks, surfboards, paddleboards and mountain bikes—always looking for somewhere to go, somewhere new to explore.

We still take those trips to the Magic Kingdom, and it’s the same as it always has been with us: the map, the plan. Ben likes to be in charge of the map now. Ben likes to be in charge of the map everywhere, actually. And, even though I have a partner to share the driving, and even though we can afford to sleep at a Disney hotel now, and even though we don’t have to worry about rationing “E” tickets anymore, those trips with the four of us- to Walt Disney World and beyond- will always be some of my favorite memories; memories made all the better by understanding what you did to make it all possible.

I know that “I’ve played my cards right….” For sure.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I love you.