The next day, we met with the minister to talk about the memorial service, and Mom asked if I wanted to go with her to the Cremation Society.
I absolutely did not want to go, and neither did Laurel, but it seemed like a thing we should do to support our mother, so we went.
“This parking lot is hilariously oversized,” Laurel observed as we pulled into it, and she was not wrong. It was huge, maybe as big as a football field.
Just so you know I'm not joking.
Trying to crack her up, I parked as far away from the door as I could, our lone car huddled near the edge of the vast, empty lot. It worked, and we were still trying to suppress giggles when we sat down around a table while a woman from the Cremation Society took information about Dad.
It turns out that being a card carrying member of the Cremation Society of Minnesota doesn’t get you very much at all. There were no tan robes, no support group, nothing much of anything to warrant such a robust and important looking card.
I also thought that being a member of the Cremation Society meant that my dad had registered with them, that all the questions and info were there, all the files, numbers, names, dates and places were in the system, waiting only the date and time of death, which Mike already had. Having given birth to two children, I can tell you that I had a mountain of pre-birth paperwork to do so that when I showed up to labor and delivery with fast contractions and ballet flats full of amniotic fluid we didn’t have to waste time digging out my insurance card.
Plus, my dad was a planner. It gave him things to worry over and he loved having things to worry over. He kept a “dead book” from his days in the military, and in it was everything his surviving relatives would need if he died—military records and birth certificates and passwords and financial information and the whereabouts of wills and other artifacts.
Sitting there in the Cremation Society, a woman named Allison asked us to start with Dad’s full name. That's how little this membership bought us.
Laurel and I looked at each other, then dug out our phones and sat there hunched over them like two sullen teenagers, looking up only to make snarky remarks about “modestly priced receptacles” to each other. Allison did her best to ignore us and doggedly asked my mother question after question. My mom had to give Dad’s parents names and places of birth, his social security number, dates of military service, his Army rank.
“This is a lot of personal information,” my mother remarked. “How secure are your servers?”
Allison brightened. “Oh! We just got bought out by a company in Florida, so they’re very secure.”
My mom raised her eyebrows and Laurel cocked her head and I, in mortal danger of exploding from laughter, I excused myself and found the restroom.
I mean, nothing bad ever happens in Florida, right?
:::
Dad’s cremains would come home in a cardboard box unless we wanted an urn, so we dutifully went to the urn room to check them out. They were mostly horrible, and we all carefully ignored the small ones meant for children. Mom had actually picked one out on Amazon that she liked, and went to find it in her phone as we examined the urns. There were marble ones, religious ones, simple ones made from wood. I picked one up and managed to poke at a knot in the wood with my thumb and the whole knot came apart from the box. Laurel and I wished we'd had a Ralph’s can and Mom realized that the urn she’d liked came from a place that sold pet supplies and she wondered if she could put Dad’s ashes in a dog urn if we got one big enough for like a bull mastiff and I think there was strictly too much laughter coming from the urn room at the Cremation Society for Allison’s liking.
“You can put the ashes in a Skippy jar if you want to,” she said crisply, swiping my mother’s credit card.
:::
When we finally left, stepping out the door into the gray October afternoon, free to laugh openly about the Skippy jar comment and away from Allison and the Cremation Society with it’s conspicuous lack of tan robes and support, I let myself, for a brief moment, think about my dad lying in there, perhaps still inside the black body bag. And I wished that this place was more like the one in my imagination, where his friends in the Society would gather round to witness the cremation of one of their own.
Actually, made that up just now. I didn’t wish that. I wished with all my heart that my father was still alive.
I thought I’d asked him all the questions I needed to ask him while I still could, but I was so wrong. I found that I had a burning one that came on all of a sudden in that too-big parking lot of the place that would turn his familiar face, his hands, his shoulders, his ears, into ash.
I wished I could ask him if he was proud of the way I’d helped him die.
My dad was a card carrying member of the Minnesota Cremation Society, and by card-carrying member, I mean that he had a card that he carried around in his wallet, along with his credit cards and pictures of his grandkids. The card was plastic like a credit card and looked very official.
I knew that he wanted to be cremated because he’d said so. Many times. This was a puzzle to me because he was also the family historian, and knew the locations of every burial plot for every deceased family member going back dozens if not hundreds of years. I brought this up to him a few years ago, long before he got sick, that he would leave us without a grave to visit. He said that he was aware of the irony, but it didn’t change his mind. He said that it was his wish that my brother, sister and I get together and spread his ashes at the top of Crested Butte in Colorado, maybe get a memorial bench up there if we needed to have something, some marker. I told him that by the time he died, we’d all be too old to hike up Crested Butte, but here we are.
I don’t know what I thought you did as a member of the Cremation Society, but I sort of thought that you got together with other like minded people and talked about how you wanted to be cremated. A support group, if you will. Maybe you talked about how to inform your family or sell a previously-purchased burial plot on Craig’s List. For some reason, I pictured the participants to be wearing tan hooded robes, like an order of monks. And if it sounds ridiculous that I thought about this at all—it might, especially when you get to the robe part—you should know that the Minnesota Cremation Society had a billboard up for a while near the running path by my parents’ condo along the Mississippi River. I think the only words were “Minnesota Cremation Society” with a picture of an urn, and running past it on several occasions, alone with one’s thoughts, one’s imagination can begin to take over.
:::
We sat with him for several hours after he died before we called the number on the back of that card. My mom talked to them. I don’t know what they said, what trigger the phone call had started when a member of the Society passes away, but when they showed up, Mom was in the room with Dad, so I answered the door.
A middle aged man stood in the doorway, flanked by a gurney with a body bag on it, and a blonde girl of about twenty-two.
The man introduced himself as Mike, in the hushed tones one associates with a funeral director, and he introduced his associate, Madison. I was completely distracted by Madison, who couldn’t have looked more out of place with her long, blonde hair, the spray of acne across her cheeks, her business-professional attire looking more like a costume than anything a girl her age would pick out, like she borrowed her plain black slacks (slacks!) and her rubber-soled shoes from her mom. I wondered what she was doing driving around St. Paul picking up bodies with this guy. She’d answered an ad, though, right? I mean, she applied for the job. She must be here of her own free will.
“I have a few questions for you,” Mike said.
With effort, I dragged my eyes off of Madison to meet Mike’s.
“My mom is in the other room, she’d probably do a better job,” I replied.
Mike smiled at me, “You’re going to do just fine,” he assured me, beginning to fill out a form with the date. The gurney was in the hallway. I wondered if the neighbors were like, omg there’s a gurney with a body bag on it in the hall.
“Time of death?” Mike asked.
“I’m not actually sure,” I said. “I had gone out for coffee and he died while I was gone and I remember the clock reading 8:37 when I got back, but then we weren’t a hundred per cent sure for a while because we thought he might still be breathing?”
“8:37,” Mike said as he wrote.
“I’m not sure of that, though,” I said. On all the medical shows it seems like the time of death was a big deal. Eriq LaSalle rips off his stethoscope and barks disgustedly, “Time of death, 9:42,” as the flatline drones.
Mike looked up at me with an expression of sympathy mixed with pity and I understood that the exact time of death didn’t matter one whit, that you could write anything down on that piece of paper.
I was digesting the hard, unfeeling reality of that when Madison spoke up. “Wow," she said, her gaze up at the ceiling. “I didn’t realize this place had two stories.”
Mike and I stared at her for a long moment. Her eyes found Mike and she seemed to come back to us, realizing her break in hushed funereal demeanor and straightening her posture a little. I fought the urge to laugh. Mike turned back to me, the apology written all over his horrified expression. I shook my head and smiled. “It’s fine,” I said.
Mike continued with his questions. Did my dad have a pacemaker? Yes. What kind was it? I didn’t know.
My mom came out then, and Mike introduced himself. Madison, who was leaning against the kitchen island, was biting her nails.
“And this is Madison,” Mike said.
Madison took her hand out of her mouth and extended to my mother, who shook it. Mike looked like he wished he had a trap door through which he could export Madison from the room. I was loving her, though. I wondered if she was a relative of Mike’s. Perhaps he owed his brother a favor and hired his niece so she would learn the value of a dollar. She was certainly too young and too ditzy to put on a tan robe and talk with other members of the Society.
My mom took over Mike’s questions. She DID know what kind of pacemaker it was and where the box it came in was and where she wanted it sent.
My sister Laurel and I listened, still stunned, still numb, as forms were signed and Mike and Madison brought the gurney in from the hallway and Mom left, leaving us in charge.
“Would you like to be in the room when I take your father?” He asked me.
I didn’t. I knew it in my bones. I actually thought about our veterinarian, Dr. Diaz, when he put our cat JJ and our dog Elliott down, telling us we didn’t need to be there, that’d we’d given them great lives, that we didn’t want to have that be our lasting memory. But I was also aware that I was comparing my dad’s death to that of a cat, and wondered if I needed to find a way to be strong here? Hadn’t this week been about exactly that? Facing down the thing that scared me the most? Finding ways to help my dad keep the last scraps of humanity available to a dying man?
“Do I?” I asked.
Madison, bent over the gurney, stood up then, and turned to look me right in the eye.
“No, you don’t,” she said, with the surety of someone much, much older than twenty-two.
I smiled at her. Good girl, I thought.
“Thank you,” I said. “That was exactly the kind of guidance I was looking for.”
:::
Laurel and I stepped out on the balcony. She'd brought a beer she'd been saving for this purpose and some glasses, and we toasted our dad, who would have whole-heartedly approved of this action.
We were quiet for a while, processing, reflecting.
"You know who would have found that entire scene hilarious?" I asked Laurel. This would be a question I would ask her many times in the coming days, and the answer was always the same.
I stood at our usual pickup spot, which was the first bench at "Arrivals." This had been the designated place for airport pickups since I’d left for college so many years ago. I’ve stood here shivering in the December chill and sweltering in the July heat, always looking for the familiar car, my dad’s silhouette, the ancient green parka and the white sun-hat that he wore almost every time he went outside.
I realized with a pang that, in all likelihood, he would never pick me up again. It was my brother I was waiting for on this October morning, my eyes burning from lack of sleep and the tears that threatened.
How many times had I searched for my dad in a crowd? As many times as he’d come to get me, of course. Which was a lot. He’d be here on this morning, but he was waylaid by the only thing that would have ever kept him from being here.
He was dying.
I’d been to Minnesota the previous weekend on a planned trip with my children to see my dad, who had halted treatment of his cancer. During that long weekend we spent as much time together as we could doing everything and nothing: eating, talking, watching football. The Vikings looked good. He read books to my daughter.
He was having trouble with his balance and had gotten a walker, which he was not happy about, and I mean, who would be happy about that? He’d found some tennis balls and asked me to put them on the feet of the walker. I didn’t know if he really needed or if this was something that people did because everyone else has tennis balls on their walker, but I did it. With each part of the task I was hyper aware of his increasingly rapid decline: dragging out Dad’s heavy toolbox (that he could no longer lift) and using a box cutter (which he was no longer steady enough to control) to cut Xs into the balls (I googled this) and fitting them on the walker. I pictured him putting training wheels on my lavender banana-seat Schwinn a million years ago and tried really hard not to cry in front of him.
Every night of that trip I drove the kids back to our hotel (in Dad’s car which he could no longer drive) so they could swim, and each night of that trip I cried the whole way, shoulders heaving and gasping for air while first merging first on to I-94, then to I-280, past the mall, exiting the expressway and into the parking lot, finally wiping my cheeks and taking a huge, shuddering breaths to collect myself before ushering the kids through the crisp October night to the whoosh of the automatic doors to the hotel lobby.
And if he seemed frail that weekend, he was still very much alive and I left most reluctantly to go back to Chicago. My mom urged me to go home, the kids needed to be in school.
“You’re a hour plane ride away,” she’d said. “I’ll call you and you’ll be here when the time comes.”
And now, five days later as I watched for my brother at the first bench at Arrivals it seemed the time had come.
:::
“I’m scared,” I said to my brother Evan as we pulled up in front of my parents’ condo building.
He looked at me, the older sister. I wasn’t sure if it was surprise or sympathy in his expression, Maybe both. He’d told me on the drive from the airport that that morning he’d helped Dad go to the bathroom and get dressed. I couldn’t imagine this—not that he’d helped but that Dad needed this help, had allowed this help to happen. I was almost 100% sure that I wouldn’t be able to help in this way. Would I be able to?
“I need to warn you that he looks awful, especially when he’s asleep,” Evan said.
“Okay,” I whispered.
We sat there for another long second.
“We’ll go in together,” Evan said.
“Okay,” I said again.
And I took a deep breath and opened the car door.
:::
Dad was sleeping when I walked into my parents’ condo. I could see him through the open bedroom door, and he did indeed look awful. He was so thin, his skin a sour, sickly chartreuse, his mouth slack, his hair and eyebrows still missing from chemo. He looked like he could be dead.
My mom and sister were reading in the living room. My sister, Laurel, had been at the condo since the previous day, when my dad had fallen in the bathroom and been unable to get up. Mom didn’t want to be alone.
“We have wine,” my mother said by way of greeting.
:::
When he woke up from his nap, a flurry of activity began. Mom and Laurel rushed to gather up the walker and medicines and whatnot. I wandered into the bedroom.
He opened his eyes, his blue ones finding my green.
“Megan’s here,” he said, a note of suspicion (or resignation?) in his voice. “Don’t the kids have school?”
“Scott has them,” I said lightly. “I came to spend some time with you.”
My mother and Laurel helped him to the bathroom, a process that required both of them to help him lift himself upright, a strap placed around his chest allowed my mom to help him off the bed and into the walker. Laurel helped him to lower his pants and sit down on the toilet. I let all these things happen without helping, feeling a pang of guilt and shame that I didn’t want to, knowing that this is what I was here to do.
At least there was wine.
When Dad was finished in the bathroom and my mom and sister had helped him back in bed, he was alert, eyes open, settled back in bed.
I struggled to find something to say to this man I loved so much, but words failed me completely. I was there because he was dying. What could I say? What should I say? Do I act normally? Cry? Find some idle chitchat?
I let my gaze wander around my parents’ room, to familiar furniture and knickknacks, my mom’s antique dresser, the clay bowl I’d made in middle school that held buttons and change and safety pins. My eyes landed finally on a framed drawing hanging on the wall—a uniquely midwestern winter scene of snow drifts and a barbed wire fence, a lone scrubby tree to one side of center.
I turned back to my dad.
“That drawing,” I began, pointing at the wall.
His eyes followed my gesture and then looked the question: yes?
“Is that where you've buried the money?”
His eyes widened for a half of a second, but then his face broke in to a wide grin, his mouth opened in a silent laugh.
“Because I’ve always wondered where it is,” I finished.
His body shook with laughter and I was so glad I had come.
I went for a run today and was listening to a podcast that had been recommended to me by a teacher. It’s called Nice White Parents. It’s about some, well, nice white parents seeking to integrate their children into a public school in Brooklyn full of mostly brown and black children. It’s incredibly compelling listening (Sarah Koenig of Serial fame is an executive producer).
I had a knot of existential dread as I was running. It could have been the sheer number of people (masked and unmasked) on the trail. It could have been the morning spent reading about the Fyre Festival Republican Convention. It could have been all of the memories that popped up on Facebook of all the things I usually do this week, such as visit my mom and go to the Minnesota State Fair. It could have been the shame and discomfort listening to a story of classism and entitlement that I recognize in my own community.
All of that, yes. But I think it was mostly just the talk of school in general, which for us starts in a week. Listening to the stories of the (well-intentioned) parents and all of their passion and drive to make things better for their kids in the moment was actually reminding me that school was starting and I have done absolutely nothing to prepare for it.
As I wove past walkers and slower runners, I passed one woman who was standing off the path talking on her phone.
“It’s awful. I know,” she said into her phone.
I almost laughed. It doesn’t matter what they were talking about. Pick a topic.
It’s awful. I know. It’s a hashtag. It’s a mantra. It’s the truth. 2020—It’s awful. I know™
:::
I have been ignoring the start of school. Or “school,” as it were—we are remote until further notice.
Remote for Kai last year wasn’t great, but at least Kai can come to the table for a one-on-one lesson after all those years of therapy. It wasn’t clear that he was getting his IEP accommodations met, but with Scott acting as his aide, he was at least getting his work done. He also doesn't mind the solitude of it all. Ryan was less able than Kai to learn over zoom. She would get off the call and I would ask her about it and she would tell me that she hadn’t paid any attention, thanks in no small part to her raging case of newly-diagnosed ADHD. For Ryan, everything that made school tolerable—friends, social interaction, breakfast for lunch on Wednesdays, was gone.
For me there was a moment last spring where, between the teacher strike and COVID, I just decided to flush 4th and 7th grade down the toilet. I will admit 100% to phoning it in. I figured they’d be back in school in the fall and we could just fix it all then. As Kai would say, “That’s a problem for future me.”
And here we are.
:::
I did talk to some parents of Ryan’s classmates about a pod. We’ve done nothing apart from one zoom call a few weeks ago, however. I’d thought about hiring someone to assist the kids, but I’ve done nothing about that either, and now I’m seeing that people (probably those same nice white parents in the podcast) are giving such assistants $25 an hour with a $1000 signing bonus. No one has invited Kai into a pod and this makes me so sad that I can’t think about it. I feel guilty, like I’m just letting school happen to us without trying to control any part of the process.
The truth of it is that I have no idea what to do. I know some people are moving to cities that are in-person or hybrid, but that seems like a lot of effort for an uncertain outcome. I know some people decided to go to private schools, but a private school won’t address Kai’s IEP or Ryan’s 504 and will probably switch to remote after a week anyway and at the cost of a new mini-van per year per kid. I’ve heard of places that run camps in the summer that are charging $500 per kid per week to help them through their remote classes, but that’s a non-starter for Kai, who does not do well in campsettings. I know one family that advertised for a teacher to come to their home, with an offer to pay $2 more an hour than I make in my own job. This seems like maybe the best worst option, but I just…I don’t know. I don’t know what any of this is even going to look like.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
:::
The other day, I did come up with one idea while I was driving to work, and when I got home I asked Ryan if we could talk about school.
She pulled off her headphones with a heavy sigh of tween angst.
“I have an idea,” I said.
She groaned, not wanting to talk about school at all.
“What if we made you lunches like you get at school?” Ryan had started exclusively eating school lunch last year.
She smiled a little.
“Like chicken patties, for example,” I offered.
“I also like the chicken nuggets they serve with breadsticks, the spaghetti and breakfast-for-lunch,” she said brightly.
“We can get some of those compartmentalized plates, maybe.”
Ryan put her headphones back on and went back to Roblox, only to take them back off again.
“That wasn’t the school discussion I was expecting,” she said. “That was much more fun.”
“Sometimes, lunch is the best part of the day,” I said, and put “sleeve of chicken patties” on the Costco list.
Chicken patties. This is the only thing I’ve done to prepare. It is the only thing I have in my bag of tricks.
Well, not the only thing.
:::
I wonder what our children will think of all of this in ten or twenty years. Or fifty. I have to think that they will somehow still be fine, that this, too, shall pass. All of them will miss some important thing and never circle back to it, like exponents or the definition of onomatopoeia, neither of which I use in my adult life anyway. Most children across history have faced far worse traumas than this particular one. My kids aren’t having nuclear weapons dropped on them, or the sun blocked by clouds of thick black dust and locusts, or the sea swallowing them up in a single devastating wave. It’s just a few zoom calls and a laundry list of things that break my heart.
Still determined to make camping a thing between Ryan and me, I decided that our sophomore attempt would be at a state park, which I’d been told would be way less gross than the private campground we’d stayed at before. I also sweetened the deal with a horseback ride, the promise of hamburgers at Jay’s Drive-In*, and the chance to bring a friend.
Additionally, Ryan and her friend Saskia planned the menu over FaceTime. They agreed on mac and cheese with corn on the cob for dinner, pancakes and fruit for breakfast, s’mores, chips and something exotic that Ryan had never heard of before: trail mix.
This time I remembered things like a pancake flipper, tongs, paper towels (though it would turn out that I forgot garbage bags and marshmallow roasting skewers). I decided that I would use Duraflame logs to ensure we could actually have a fire. Saskia’s mom lent us air mattresses and a giant battery-powered fan. We were good to go, at least until I saw the forecast.
I tried to look on the bright side.
“The chance of thunderstorms is only 50%,” I said to Scott.
“That means it’s going to rain,” he said.
Such a pessimist, Scott.
:::
It was hot that day. And the air was heavy. You could practically see the humidity. The haze diluted the vibrant green of the corn and soybean fields as we headed west. I kept scanning the sky, but it looked okay. It wasn’t dark, it wasn’t green, just so hot and humid as to be white.
Still, I was in a hurry to get there, to set up the tent, to feel established before the sky opened up and poured, if only to stem the urge to turn back.
White Pines State Park is outside of Oregon, Illinois. It’s about a two-hour drive from my house. Oregon itself is quite charming, with a lovely river that flows through it and some stately homes that overlook the water. To feel truly at peace, you have to ignore the “Trump/Pence” signs, though one house had a sign that read, “Any Competent Adult in 2020,” and I raised a fist in solidarity as we drove past.
When we turned off the main road into the park, I pulled up to the ranger station. It looked very closed. There was a sign that read, “Camping host will greet you at Cedar Ridge #17.”
I had no idea what that meant.
But, taking the sign at its word, I drove through the open gates. I drove through several open gates, in fact, including one that said, “Road Closed Due To High Water.” Since it was open, I drove through it and found that the road ahead was completely underwater.
I know it looks like nothing, but what if it was something?
I stopped the car. Aware of the time and the pending storms, I was very interested in just getting there, already. But this confused me.
I got out of the car to look at the body of water, a river that rushed over an elevated paved stretch of road. So did the girls.
“Can I take off my shoes and get in?” Ryan asked.
“There’s a sign that says ‘No Wading,’” I replied.
“What’s wading?” She asked.
“Taking off your shoes and getting in,” I replied absently.
I looked around. There was no one here.
There was no one at the playground, no one at the picnic tables, no one at the ranger station. No cars. No trucks.
I got back in the car and pondered what to do. Was I meant to drive across? I couldn’t gauge how deep it was. I kept picturing my car suddenly swinging sideways and into the little river. I pictured trying to explain what I’d done to my car to Scott.
I picked up the phone and dialed the number listed under a google search.
What I got was a recording, saying that the White Pines Resort was closed permanently due to COVID-19, and that all deposits were being refunded.
Now I was really confused. I backed my car up through the “high water” gate, which was open mind you. But was it open because no one was closing it? I was suddenly in some sort of Matrix-style dystopian camping nightmare.
I drove back to the entrance and started again, this time choosing the road toward the resort.
What I found at the top of the hill was the ghost town of a former resort complex, with log cabins and a restaurant, all shuttered.
I found another ranger station. That, too, was closed.
I will tell you that at this point I almost found us a Best Western, but ultimately what I did find was a map of the camp ground, which was different from the resort area.
I drove back toward the entrance and the first ranger station, re-reading the sign about Cedar Ridge #17, and decided to try to find it.
Driving back toward the weird river of doom, I finally saw another car.
Rolling down my window, I put out my hand and waved.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said, “but am I supposed to drive over the, uh, that, you know, the water?”
The man driving looked at me like I had two heads.
“You can to go over it,” he said.
“Okay, thank you. Just making sure I won’t get, like swept away,” I replied.
His wife burst out laughing, and weather it was with me or at me I didn’t care. I gave them a wave and started off and made Ryan film us going through the river in my minivan:
:::
We found Cedar Ridge, but there was no ranger building, no office. There was almost no one there at all. I circled through the entire place. There was only one set-up—an RV. I drove to the other camp ground (Sunny Crest, if you’re keeping track). This was also completely deserted.
“Mom, we should just set up our tent anywhere,” Ryan suggested, and she wasn’t wrong, except that I still wasn’t convinced that this place was even open. I needed someone—anyone—to tell me that this was going to be okay.
What if the river swells and we can’t leave? What if some park ranger makes me pack up all my crap and vamoose at 10 pm?
I drove back to Cedar Ridge.
That one lone set-up was at site 17.
I put the car in park and got out.
“Can we come?” Ryan asked.
“No,” I said. I had no idea whose door I was about to knock on, and in what way they would defend themselves.
“Hello?” I called, approaching the RV.
Nothing.
“Helloooo?” I called again.
Suddenly I heard a thunk, and a series of thunking steps, and slowly, so slowly and with such a squeaking noise as to be a radio sound effect, the RV door swung open. I was standing door-side, not opening-side, so all I saw was the door. There was more thunking.
You guys, I had no idea what was about to emerge. A banjo playing redneck? A guy with a chainsaw?
But what finally emerged was an old woman wearing cowboy boots. Shad long, wild gray hair and a fluffy calico cat.
“Are you the camping host?” I asked.
“I sure am,” she replied.
:::
She told me where the flush toilets were and where the water stations could be found. She asked if I’d seen the weather forecast.
I told her I had. The sky was starting to look menacing. She told me to shelter in the shower building if the sirens went off.
I asked her if anyone else was here, and she said that their was another guy near me whose camper looked like a UFO. Later I would discover that there was no one near me, not least a guy with a camper that looked like a UFO. Feel free to draw your own conclusion about the nature of this lonely old woman and UFOs. Regardless, there was literally no one else here.
And while this may seem like an improvement over last time, it was actually quite unnerving.
I got back into the car and told the girls it was going to rain.
“Then we’d better get set up before the rain starts,” Saskia said, like this was any other day, like it was no big thing, like we could do this.
“Right,” I said, so grateful.
:::
It turns out that we had plenty of time before the rain. We went to the playground, we ate dinner, we had a campfire and made some s’mores. We did eventually see another camp set up, which was a little encouraging.
Henlo I'm Butterfly, you make mac and cheese for me?
When the rain finally hit, we were watching Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom in the car, as you do. It rained heavily for a long while, creating vast puddles and punishing our little tent. The winds never kicked up, though, and after the movie ended and there was a little break in the rain, we made our way to the tent.
I woke up in pitch dark, well before dawn. I reached for my phone, which read 3:22. I wasn’t sure what had woken me. I had to pee, which might have been a contributing factor, but the rain was still beating a sharp tattoo against our tent, of which I was sleeping in the back. There was no way of not waking up the girls if I left, plus the drama of trying to get tho the bathroom in the rain seemed like too much.
I tried to find a better place to lay, tried to go back to sleep, tried to relax. I heard a train, though this one was much farther away than the last campground.
And then I thought I heard a growl.
I froze.
My thoughts began to race. Are there bears in Illinois? I mean, probably.
I thought about laying there, and imagined hearing their wet snuffles as they tore apart the campsite and eventually turning their attention to whatever delicious things might be inside the tent.
At that moment Saskia snored.
Was that what I’d heard?
Then suddenly I heard music blaring and looked outside of the tent to see a house with its garage door rolling up. Several older kids came out of it and began shooting whiffle balls from some sort of whiffle ball canon at my tent, yelling for me to go home. I thought about calling the cops, but ultimately decided not to because some of the kids were people of color, and then a blonde woman showed up and started yelling and pointing her ballpoint pen at me and when I opened my eyes again it was dawn and the thing with the kids had been a dream—the most 2020 dream you can possibly have.
Anyhoo.
When I emerged from the tent, the first thing I saw was that our garbage bag had been ripped open (or blown open?) and garbage was strewn around the camp site. We had left two ears of corn wrapped in foil on the picnic table, and they were both gone.
Bears? Coyotes? Had that been a growl or a snore?
My eyelids felt like sandpaper. I needed coffee.
I collected the bits of paper plates and paper towels and sparkling rose cans. Some of the plates looked chewed on.
Scott texted me to see if we were okay, and I sent him this back:
The girls wanted to go back to the playground, so I let them go, telling them I’d be by in a while, and when I got there, we explored a little down by the river. You’re not allowed to wade, but there are bridges all over the river, and on one of them I found piles of scat and some animal tracks.
Later, I left the girls at the campsite watching a movie and went back down to the river to photograph the tracks.
Tracks, with my giant feet for comparison.
Bears? Someone’s rottweiler?
Then I used the supercomputer in my hand to google “bear tracks” and was slightly disappointed to learn that bears have five pads, not four.
We can call probably them coyote tracks, though. They must just shit on the bridge to be dicks.
Walking back up the hill to the campground, I saw a pickup truck turn up the ridge toward our campsite. Ryan and Saskia were there alone.
While those are two independent facts, I definitely felt some unease as I walked up the hill. About halfway back to the site, the truck passed me going the opposite direction. The man in the cab waved to me. FWIW he had a bald head and a long salt-and-pepper beard. His license plate was either U5470 or U 5480, which I texted to myself in case he’d kidnapped the girls and I needed to call the cops.
:::
Many years ago I sat on the couch in my therapist’s office, talking with her about all of my fears for Kai. He was six months old at the time, and during that summer and I was in a special place.
“So you’re worried that he’s going to be on a crowded balcony that collapses during spring break?” She asked.
I was. There was one of those stories on the news at the time.
"Yes," I said, "and he could also drink too much and just fall off the balcony."
She looked at the baby sleeping on my lap. “That could happen," she said. "Anything can happen. But can you table that fear for now? That's not something you have to worry about at this particular moment.”
I told her I’d try (though I’d like to interject that he’s now only 5 years away from prime balcony-drinking time! Gah!).
“You know,” she said, “you are a creative person. You can dream up so many scenarios and your imagination makes them feel so real.”
The girls were in the car when I got back, just where I’d left them. We went to the burger place, we went horseback riding, we drove home. We did not get swept away in a river. We did not get eaten by a bear. We did not get kidnapped by a serial killer. We did not get abducted by a UFO. We survived a night in the rain.
And who knows? We may do it again.
*Jay's Drive-in was recommended by our guide the last time we went horseback riding, and Ryan loves these burgers so much she wanted to drive the two hours to go back. It's an honest-to-god drive in, like 50's style. Try the deep fried green beans.
For the whole of the summer of 2007, I felt like I was swimming though syrup. I had a new baby, and that baby was Kai. He was…not easy. He still isn’t. I was navigating a new normal that was not going well for me. I was sluggish, tired. I probably had a little post-partum. It was also the summer of Jenny McCarthy and of her incredibly idiotic yet terrifying bullshit, so on top of all the regular things that were difficult, I became terribly afraid that Kai would end up with autism. (Ha. HAHAHAHA!)
Scott, meanwhile was having an entirely different summer, having started a medication that was making him almost dangerously productive. He had so many ideas! And so quickly! It was somewhat like living with a coke boar, an otherwise ordinary being rendered suddenly fast and unpredictable.
One of his ideas was around what to do with a funny little outdoor space in our condo. The space was small, shaded, entirely concrete, good for exactly nothing. You couldn’t sit out there. It looked like you might get attacked by mosquitos. We both agreed that we should treat it less like a deck and more like a diorama.
We also agreed that we could do some sort of Japanese rock garden out there, and I even bought a book about Japanese rock gardening at Borders, because that’s how you did things back then.
It was into this scenario that the Buddha came into our lives. There is a bead store (like a store that sells beads, which I feel I need to clarify because it's a weird business to be in) in our neighborhood that had a giant Buddha head in the window. We both liked it, and Scott went in to inquire whether it was for sale. It was. For $450.
We were horrified. Well, I was horrified, because that seemed like way too much to pay for a Buddha head. I mean. We’re not even Buddhists.
Bummer, I thought, and moved on with my life.
But Scott, once he had that vision, would not be deterred.
A few weeks later, I was at my parents’ place in Minnesota, and I got a call from Scott.
“I FOUND A PLACE THAT SELLS BUDDHAS AND THEY ARE AWESOME AND I’M BUYING ONE RIGHT NOW.”
In the summer of 2007, Scott spoke in all caps.
“Slow down,” I said. “I don’t know that this is a great idea.”
“IT’S THE GREATEST IDEA. MY PARENTS ALWAYS SAID IF YOU FIND ART YOU LIKE YOU SHOULD BUY IT, AND I LOVE IT! I’VE ALWAYS WANTED A STATUE LIKE THIS!”
This, of course, was the first time I’d ever heard that he’s always wanted a Buddha statue.
“How much is it?” I asked.
“IT’S ONLY FIFTEEN HUNDRED DOLLARS! IT WEIGHS 800 POUNDS!”
“I feel like that’s a lot. Can we wait until I get home to discuss it?”
“I ALREADY BOUGHT IT!”
:::
The statue was being shipped from a seller in Colorado. Scott gave me a number to call and promptly lost all interest got busy at work and asked me to take care of it from there.
I dialed the number.
The woman on the other end gave me a date to expect the statue.
“Okay,” I said. “And they’ll carry it inside for us?” I asked.
“Oh, no ma’am,” she replied. “They will leave it in your driveway.”
“But I don’t have a driveway,” I protested.
“The sidewalk, then,” she countered.
“So, how am I going to get an 800 pound statue into my house?”
“800 pounds? The statue actually weighs 1,200 pounds. And you should hire movers.”
I reported all of this to Scott.
“I hadn’t thought about that,” he said.
:::
I called a moving company that had helped a neighbor move. They seemed like a good prospect since they had hoisted everything up to their unit from the roof, like maybe they'd be creative with ropes or whatever.
Glen, from Golden Eagle Moving and Storage picked up the phone and listened to me describe what we needed, which was for someone to move a 1200 pound Buddha statue from my sidewalk down into a garden-level outdoor space.
At first, there was silence. And then Glen laughed. Not a chuckle but a full-throated guffaw. He laughed so hard he started to cough.
“You’re gonna need a crane,” he said.
I reported all of this to Scott.
“I hadn’t thought about that,” he said.
Glen said that to do this job we needed to pay him $500. In cash.
I reported all of this to Scott.
“I hadn’t thought about that,” he said.
I told Scott that if he said that one more time I would murder him, and that he had to be home that day to deal with all of this, since it was all his big idea. He agreed to both of those things.
Glen gave me some instructions. I was to park my car in front of our building so that they could park the crane as close as possible. I was to hand over the cash before any work would take place. I was not to bother with permits, something about the fat cats at City Hall.
:::
Let me pause the narrative here and say that if this had been the end of the story, this would have been plenty. I can look back on that summer and still feel my anxiety, that of a new mother, a new me. I had always assumed that when I had kids I would still be the same person—me, just with a baby. But that wasn’t at all the case. My house was a mess. My body was a mess. I was a mess. Everything about me was different. And let's not forget that that baby was Kai, who is awesome but who is also an autistic person and a complicated child from day fucking one.
Scott had purchased the statue because he thought it was cool. Probably the old me would have thought that it was exciting. Glamorous, even. But there’s something about parenthood that turns your partner’s assets into liabilities. I didn’t not want it, but the Buddha made me incredibly anxious, a giant, permanent, expensive monolith that seemed to be moving so fast toward me, during a summer where I was so slow. That this statue kept changing in scope and size, that we kept having these weird conversations about it, all of that would have would have been enough.
And then…
:::
The day the statue arrived, I had my car parked outside of our building, per Glen’s instructions.
Scott was home from work, and when the truck pulled up, we both went out to see what was inside.
The truck driver opened the back of truck and there it was. One lone crate in the middle of a cavernous space, like something out of an Indiana Jones movie. The driver was attempting to get the statue onto a dolly.
I let him know that the movers would be here any minute to help, and I went inside, leaving Scott out there to wait.
I hadn’t been inside very long when it happened, the almighty crash, of crunching metal and shattering glass, of splitting wood and thump of stone on concrete.
I ran to the window to see Scott, his mouth in a rictus of horror, his hands on his head in shock and disbelief, the truck driver standing in his empty truck, the statue on the street, pieces of the smashed crate littered all around it.
The driver had gotten the statue onto his dolly and wheeled it to the edge, but the crate was not stable, no doubt due to the sheer weight of the Buddha. Scott watched in dawning horror as the whole crate leaned dangerously off of the platform and, in the slow-motion nature of such things, fell. It landed first on my car—still right there saving a space for the crane—and then crashed into the street.
The aftermath. The damage.
:::
I ran outside. A car drove by, slowing down to take in the carnage, like that scene from Fargo that leads to the snowy car chase. Whoever it was circled the block to get another look.
It was then that I saw the crane coming up the street. It pulled up to us and four guys got out. They were all about 60, wearing track suits. They looked like they had just come from filming an episode of the Sopranos.
Glen, who I recognized by his voice, without missing a beat or bothering to introduce himself to anyone started yelling at the truck driver in a thick over-by-dere Chicago accident.
“What the hell did you do? Why didn’t you wait for us? You knew we were coming!”
That's Glen In the yellow shirt. My memory made up the tracksuits, apparently.
Glen, in his tracksuit yellow t-shirt with his white hair and thick, muscular arms was still dressing down the truck driver as his guys made fast work of righting the Buddha statue, clearing away the crate, and deploying the supports for the crane.
Righting the statue.
Lift.
The crane.
Landed.
I went back inside to get Glen's $500.
:::
For insurance purposes, I had to go with the truck driver to the police station to file a report. He drove me in his truck.
“This is a little awkward,” I said to him. “Are you going to get in trouble with your job?”
“Ah, it’s okay,” he said brightly. “We get three accidents a year before we get reprimanded.”
I couldn’t think of what to say to that.
At the police station, we stood at the counter and asked to file a report.
“What happened?” asked the officer.
“A Buddha statue fell on my car,” I replied.
He looked up at me.
“What?” He asked.
:::
That night, Scott and I were supposed to have an appointment with our (wait for it....) marriage counselor. However, our then-only car had had a Buddha land on it and since been towed away, so we had no way to get there. I called to cancel. We still had a babysitter coming, though, so we left Kai with her and went out for a beer.
That evening is still crystal clear in my memory despite the fact that it was 13 years ago—the warm summer night, sitting on a patio sipping beer, Pabst for Scott and a Heineken for me. We stared into space.
“I can’t believe that happened,” Scott eventually said.
“We’re lucky no one got hurt,” I observed.
We spent the evening saying variations on those two sentences, alternatively laughing and staring into space. It was a lovely time. And probably way more productive than what we’d had planned, which was to have the same unresolved argument we’d already had a hundred times, only this time in a doctor’s office.
And looking back it was pretty good practice for all the times a statue smashed my car and crashed into the street, which happened only once in a literal sense, but over and over and over in a metaphorical one.
The metaphor in question on that day all those years ago. At least he's adorable.
:::
Six years later, I made a call.
“Golden Eagle Moving and Storage, Glen speaking.”
“Hey, Glen! It’s Megan Judy!”
“Megan Judy, Megan Judy. Why do I remember that name?”
“We’ve hired you before. Remember the Buddha statue?”
Glen started laughing, a full-throated scratchy laugh, in which you could hear every cigarette he'd ever smoked. He laughed until he started to cough. He took a long time to recover himself.
Hello and happy Monday! I am at home where there are exactly zero trains running next door to where I’m trying to sleep on the ground, which is an improvement over last week. And while Ryan would probably be happy to never camp again, we are going to camp again in a couple of weeks. This time we are going to a state park, which, in addition to NOT being in Indiana (sorry, not sorry, Indiana—it was definitely you and not us), it only costs $10 per night. And while there is no pool, there will also be no trailer park and this, my friends, is always a vast improvement. We will be taking a friend for Ryan. This friend is apparently a camping pro and while she will probably judge the shit out of me for everything I’m about to do wrong vis a vis camping, she will also be the reason Ryan gets in the car with me at all. #winning Hopefully she can light a fire.
One thing I left out of the story last week due to extreme irrelevance was when Scott texted me to tell me he loved the pool! Lacking anything to do on Father’s Day, he got in it and floated around and declared it awesome. This is great because the pool is a lot of work. It is, however, the perfect work for him—if there’s anything Scott likes it’s a fiddly project, and this thing is most assuredly that. He’s out there with his water testing strips, adjusting the chlorine, running the filter. He even bought a skimmer and a pool vacuum, which he plans to use tonight. The cheerfulness with which he has greeted the pool is quite the relief, as I’m almost 100% sure if I was in charge the pool would look like this:
Refreshing!
1.) Speaking of which, enjoy these hauntingpictures of abandoned pools!
I would particularly like to call out the University of Rochester for this genius fucking idea, wherein they filled an unused swimming pool with old desks and chairs and then just...walked away. This is both bafflingly lazy and some how also very American.
If you went here, you should request your money back. Or a free chair.
2.) And speaking of Scott, he told me he doesn’t read my blog because he’s not on Facebook much anymore. My first instinct was, Oh! I can write about you! But! I have always had a hard and fast rule about that, which is that you can have a blog or you can have a marriage, but you can’t have a blog about your marriage. But I will share with you that of the two of us, Scott is the more fastidious about his possessions and keeping things in their places.
Scott's closet vs. mine, which isn't all that bad for me, tbh. That's a pile of moldering work out clothes, approximately 600 purses that are empty of everything but old receipts and half full packs of mints.
When he used to travel, I’d always have to spend a few hours making our place Scott-ready again, having left all the cabinet doors open and the dishes in the sink while he was gone. Anyway, I came across this list that came across my desk of bad roommate behavior. I will admit to being guilty of doing a few of these things, including leaving my clothes laying around everywhere,abandoning water bottles in various levels of consumption around the house, and just last week he had to fix the tin foil. I sent him the list with a note that said, “I do some of these things!” I did not, however, apologize.
3.) And speaking of nothing (squirrel!) , I was getting ready to leave for work the other day. Scott had the news on and they were talking about this ADHD app, named Endeavor, which is approved by the FDA to as a digital device to improve attention function in children. If there’s anything I learned during quarantine with my kids, it’s that one of them needs a lot of help with her executive function skills. She’d get off a zoom all and I would be like, what do you need to do now? And she’d be all, I forgot, and that was 4th grade. I downloaded it, and will report back.
4.) This week I’m looking forward to watching HBO’s documentary “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” about late author Michelle MacNamara and her hunt for the identity of the Golden State Killer. Piece of Human Garbage Joseph James DeAngelo is apparently going to plead guilty TODAY (June 29) to 13 counts of being an all around shitty human being who terrorized the citizens of California during the 70s and 80s, admittedly a very scary time to be a Californian. Or to be a contestant on the Dating Game.
Also: hot choccy wine.
5.) The other thing I’m excited about is that Furious Spoon has a new virtual cooking class out, and I made reservations. For our add-on alcohol enhancer, this time I chose Mystery Beer Pong, which is like six beers, some solo cups and some ping pong balls! I don’t know how to play beer pong, but here is yet another chance during 2020 to try something new.
beer·pong: noun 1. a drinking game played at house parties where someone always says “I’m usually way better than this.”
Beer pong doesn't seem very sanitary, which is how you know I'm living through a pandemic. Or how you know I'm old.
Have a good week, people. And for Heaven's sake wear a mask!
So I told you that I bought a tent with the idea of taking Ryan camping. This was deep into my COVID furlough recreational spending spree, and camping seemed like the perfect combination of social distance and something—anything!—to do this summer.
You may not think I'd be the camping type, but the truth is that despite looking like an indoorsy gal, I actually love to camp. I love the sheer nothingness of it—staring at a body of water or staring into a fire. I don’t camp much, however, because neither Scott nor Kai are particularly into it. I, unlike Scott, have a very high tolerance for being dirty and sweaty, and unlike Kai I have a data plan so I don't require wifi. Ryan also has a high tolerance for being dirty. Probably too much so, to be honest, but she’s still very much a child so she gets a pass.
I made reservations at Lakeshore Camp Resort in Portage Indiana. It was 45 minutes away, for one, it had a pool, for another. We would do one night and test it out. We’d see how we did, see what we needed to refine and, if all went well, we would do it again, maybe with friends.
Looks nice, right?
:::
I know that there are nice parts in Indiana because I’ve been to a couple of them dropping Ryan off at summer camp. For what it's worth I also know that it’s possible to land at Midway Airport here in Chicago and decide on your cab ride to the Loop that Chicago is a shitty wasteland of 1-hour motels and 1-story windowless “doctor’s” offices. So I don’t want to judge a state too harshly based on one strip of highway. But man, I always forget how gross it feels to drive east along the lake. On one side you have huge gray factories, or whatever sort of enterprise has a tower with a flame burning perpetually at the top of it. On the other side you have endless power lines and billboards for sketchy accident lawyers. It always feels gray and harsh and dystopian, as though by just driving through you’re risking cancer. Or sterility. Or both. I assumed that we would leave that grimy industrial feel behind once we turned off the highway, but sadly, we did not.
Turning down the road to the camp from the highway, I passed trailer parks on both sides, a police impound yard, several business full of random machine parts and industrial bric a brac. Ryan expressed skepticism, but I told her to hold off judging until we got there.
I’d chosen the camp site because of its proximity to Chicago, which was probably my first mistake. But in addition to the advertised pool, the pictures on the Web site showed inflatable slides in the lake, which seemed to me enough to recommend it. I mean, it’s camping. I did not expect anything more than a plot of dirt and a fire pit. This, of course, is exactly what I got, but the setting was far from bucolic. This was a trailer park. An actual trailer park with trailers, not campers.
“I’m judging this place,” Ryan said.
“You haven’t even seen it yet,” I replied. Besides, I had a few tricks up my sleeve—fairy lights, a packet of magical chemicals that would make our campfire turn fun colors. A bag of Ruffles potato chips. We didn’t have to be the trailer park. We could just camp there for one night.
:::
The staff were very friendly. They sold me a cord of firewood that had apparently been inspected by the State of Indiana and a fire starter kit. They told me we would be at site 92. On the map it looked very near a railroad track:
We drove the posted 5 1/2 mph speed limit through the park to our site, a corner lot nestled between several permanent-looking camps. We set up our tent, blew up our pool-raft air mattresses, unrolled our sleeping bags, set up our picnic table and chairs in time for the sky to rumble, then open up and pour all over everything.
I will tell you that at that moment, I considered putting it all back in the car and going home, but since everything was wet and would need to dry anyway, and since Ryan still had hopes of going to the pool, I did what my dad would have done in that situation and cracked open a beer and sat in the car to wait out the storm.
When it stopped raining, Ryan and I walked over to the pool. There was also an arcade, which was in the process of closing but to which I promised Ryan we could return the next day. The lifeguards said they would open the pool back up at 6 pm if there was no further lightning, so we went back to the campsite to wait.
Our little corner lot was a hive of activity. Teens in golf carts blasting music came and went down the gravel road, kicking up plumes of dust despite the rain. Deep bass tracks, traditional Mexican trumpets, and, memorably, a radio commercial blasted at volume 11, all provided the soundtrack to the afternoon. And also:
:::
The pool was empty of guests when we got there. The lifeguard and Ryan chatted about their favorite swimming strokes, and Ryan got in the water to stretch her limbs for the first time since early March.
“Look at her go,” the lifeguard said, herself a competitive swimmer at the University of Indiana.
Ryan did canon balls and pencil dives, but as the pool began to fill up, she said she felt a little nervous.
“Honey,” I said, “chlorine kills viruses and bacteria. Plus there’s not that many people here.”
Still, she said she wanted to go back to the camp site. She’d been swimming for about 25 minutes.
I ruminated on that during our walk back, past the kids in their golf carts, past the cordoned off playground. About how all our our children will be agoraphobic for a long time, after having been told for all these long months that they can’t be out because people are not safe to be around.
We stopped at the lodge to get some water, and I looked out at the lake, thinking we might hit that up in the morning. There was no inflatable slide. Highway 94 was visible through the trees on the other side of the water, semi trucks whizzing by so close you could hear them.
We walked back to our campsite. The residents had all manor of set-ups: Tiny homes, campers on blocks, traditional trailers. Some of the little yards were full of decorations or flowers. Some looked like no one had been there in years. It was Sunday night, so presumably many of the owners had gone home after a weekend at the camp ground.
Back at our camp site, Ryan suggested we turn on the car and watch a movie, which we did until it was time to cook dinner. For this purpose, I had purchased a camp stove and some propane, which I successfully hooked up and used without a giant explosion:
I couldn't decide whether to boil them or saute them, so I did a little of both.
After dinner, we set about making a fire.
I had purchased a packet of fire-starting sticks for this purpose, and placed two of our three logs into the fire pit. The fire sticks burned merrily, but the logs stubbornly refused to do anything. I found a few sticks and tossed those into the pit. These also burned quickly, but then burned out.
“I think the fire needs more oxygen, not more fuel,” Ryan said.
Part of me was all, what do YOU know about it but Ryan is a Girl Scout and goes to Girl Scout overnight camp and had helped me set up the tent, so I decided she may have a point.
“What should I do?” I asked.
She shrugged. “The counselors at camp wave their clipboards at the fire,” she offered. “Do you have a clipboard?”
Obviously I did not. But I handed her a paper plate.
“Will this work?” I asked.
She waved the paper plate at the fire, causing a plume of smoke and not much else. Eventually we burned the plates. I snuck into a neighboring campsite that looked like no one had been there since 1986 and found some more dry twigs. For a few moments, we had what looked like a merry fire. Ryan successfully roasted several marshmallows and made a s’more. I stole more kindling from the place next door, but though the logs smoldered, they never caught fire. The State of Indiana’s firewood inspector will get a strongly worded letter of complaint.
:::
Giving up on the fire, we watched movies in the car. To get my buy-in, I made Ryan watch an episode of Scooby Doo, a show I’d been trying to get her to watch for years. (Mini review: “I mean, it’s fine.) Then we switched to Jurassic Park 2.
Around 10:30, We took flashlights and went to find the bathroom. Our feet crunched gravel as we walked through the quiet camp, flashlights playing on the rocks. I was telling her about the magical flashlights in the X-Files when we got to the bathroom. I reached for the handle and it was…locked.
Confused, I walked around to the back, where it said “Laundry” above the door. This was locked, as well. I knew there was another bathroom up the gravel road, so we trudged back up the gravel path. This one was locked, as well.
Ryan was glad, as she was concerned that there would be spiders in the bathrooms. And while I also don’t love a spidery campground bathroom, I also had to go to the bathroom. I dropped Ryan back at the car and locked her inside, then trudged back down the path to the ranger station. A few golf carts loaded with people swerved drunkenly around me and off into the night. The ranger station was closed.
I pulled out my phone to check the Web site to see if I’d missed something about the bathrooms being closed due to COVID, and indeed I saw a line that the campground would be open to “self-contained” units beginning in May. But certainly they would have told me if there would not be bathrooms available when I made a TENT camping reservation.
Right?
Ryan was watching for me to come back.
“I was getting a little worried,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “There are no bathrooms. Do you need to go?”
She said she didn’t. But I did, so I squatted behind the tent.
By this time it was 11:00 pm, quiet time, so we shut off the car and went to bed.
Ryan turned off the fairy lights and tried to go to sleep, while I read for a while on my iPhone.
“What are you reading?” She asked.
But I was reading a book about paranormal romance and didn’t want to get into it with her, so I turned my phone off and went to bed.
And that’s when a train came barreling past the camp ground, a loud, grinding, clanking mechanical whooshing sound that seemed to fill our tent, leaving little room for any other sensation.
Ryan and I both reached out in the darkness to link our hands together, and we stayed that way until long after the train passed.
I would like to say that it was the only train, but you know it wasn’t. They woke me up all night long, and in my twilight haze I began to name them old-timey names.
Ah, it’s 3:02 am. That’s the Screeching Hellcat out of New Haven right on time.
What’s that? Why it’s 4:44! Must be the Screaming Devil bound for Kansas City.
At some point, I woke to drops of water against the tent.
Once, I woke up sure something had rubbed against my toe through the tent canvas.
I also woke up every time I touched my face.
:::
The Shrieking Diablo between Columbus and Fairbanks woke us both around 7 am. I needed coffee. I needed to pee.
Ryan went back to watching movies in the car, and I tried to start some water boiling, but my lighter had died, probably as a result of being left out in the rain. I trudged to the ranger station, which wouldn't open until 9 am.
Stumbling back into the car, I slid against the cool leather seat. We would watch Jurassic Park for two hours until the ranger station opened, then we would eat breakfast. The little arcade near the pool would open at 11, the pool itself would open at 12. We could do this.
I tried to watch Jeff Goldblum and Julianne Moore catch a T-rex for a little while. Then I put the car in gear and did the only thing that made any sense:
Ryan wanted McDonald’s, and despite having big plans to make her pancakes, I caved without too much work on her part. I stopped at a gas station try to buy a lighter, and while I was there I used the bathroom.
Then we drove back to camp.
I asked the lady at the gate if there were any bathrooms open. She said that there were, just not the ones by my camp site. I have no idea why the woman who checked us in hadn’t mentioned that tiny little fact. I drove Ryan to one of the bathrooms, and scouted for spiders for her.
Really?
Then we went back to the camp site. I made myself breakfast out of sheer principle before I started breaking down our gear: Rolling sleeping bags, folding chairs, packing cooking equipment.
I took all of our trash to the ranger station, passing a family sitting outside of their trailer on the way. The mother and father were probably my age. A girl who looked to be about 13 sat with them. They all waved, the picture of a lovely family. They had this sticker on the back of their station wagon:
On the one hand, yet on the other...
At this point I really wanted to get out of here, but the WHOLE POINT was to fix summer for Ryan, so I made myself busy, taking all the poles out of the tent and laying it over the picnic table, planning to hang out and allow the tent to dry before folding it up and putting it into its stuff sack. But the clouds grew menacing and a few drops of water began to fall, so I opened the back of the minivan and just shoved the whole tent in, and abandoned the camp site.
It is impossible to drive 5 1/2 miles per hour, and also that’s a super annoying speed limit, so I drove at between 8 and 10 miles per hour back to the pool house. The arcade had garage doors that opened to the outside, so I didn’t feel that horrible letting her play, plus we had to wait for the pool to open at noon anyway.
At 11, there was no sign of movement inside, the doors were still firmly shut.
“Should we knock on the door?” Ryan asked.
“I don’t think there’s anyone in there,” I replied.
“But it’s 11:10,” she argued, as though that made any difference.
When at last the doors opened, Ryan rushed in. There were maybe 7 or 8 games inside, including a couple of crane games, a skee-ball and the like.
“We should play this,” she said excitedly, pointing to one of those water pistol race games.
I pointed to the sign: “Out of order.”
“We’ll do something else,” I said, looking around. Most of the games had out of order signs.
“We’re out of quarters,” the woman behind the counter informed me. “We should have more in about an hour.”
Ryan came up beside me.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“Can we just go home?” She asked.
:::
We walked back to the car.
“Are you sure you don’t want to stick around and swim?” I asked her.
“I just want to go home.”
I put my arm around her.
“I feel like crying,” I said, and squeezed her against me. And I really did. She’d been so excited for this whole trip and none of it went well. “I’ll find us a better place to camp next time.”
Before getting on the highway, I drove back through Starbucks for me, and through McDonald’s to get Ryan some ice cream.
“You know that these trips are supposed to be disasters, right?” I asked her.
“Ew, why?” She asked in return.
“Because that’s what makes them memorable. I remember a camping trip when I was like 14 or so that was SO miserable. We got to the campsite after dark and it was raining, and we had our giant Golden Retriever with us and everyone was wet and miserable.”
“The only thing I’ll remember is being disappointed,” Ryan said. But she didn’t say it like a sullen teen. She said it like every other kid this summer, where nothing is how you wish it would be.
No amount of bargaining with tents and promises and campfires with fancy colorful flames will make any of this okay or bring back forth grade or the summer when she was 10.
One thing we learned in quarantine is that time is relative, so who cares if I publish my Friday post on Monday? The only problem is that Mondays tend to not spark a ton of joy.
But that’s okay! I am here to provide you with the proper edutainment tools for procrastination and time waisting.
First, some updates.
I told you about the virtual ramen cooking class Furious Spoon a few weeks ago, and it happened yesterday. The class included a beautiful ingredients kit, plus I added some sake bombs to make it extra fun. The only downside, if you could even call it a downside, is that we had to figure out how to do Instagram Live, as both of us are old and therefor unable to properly ‘Gram. We had to google it. But! We persevered and made some delicious ramen. Fun fact: I bought this for Scott for Father’s Day thinking that Father’s Day was yesterday. It is not, you guys. Father’s Day is next week. So I still need a gift.
I also told you about this tent I was into. I almost bought it and then didn’t know if I wanted to spend $589 on a tent. It's not like I'm going to Burning Man. So I bought this one instead and feel very confident in my decision. Ryan and I are going to try it out next week by spending one night at this campground in Indiana. What could go wrong?
Oh, and remember the inflatable hot tub? Yeah, we didn’t do that. But we did buy this above ground pool! Oh, this is a boondoggle, you guys. You see, it’s not just the pool. It has a filter and a pump, you have to put chlorine in it and test the water and do something called “shocking” it once a week. It’s a whole thing. Luckily, Scott is being much more supportive of this crazy endeavor than I thought he would be, and has been watching YouTube videos about how to shock one’s pool. We need to go to the pool supply store for chemicals, and will be attempting to put this whole thing together this week. I’ll keep you posted.
And now to the business at hand. In no particular order, here is your linkage:
1.) Scott mentioned the other day that he wanted to try cooking octopus. I gave him a rather unenthusiastic “Hmmm,” assuming that the plan wouldn’t go anywhere. But when he brought it up again, I had to say something. “I don’t want to eat octopus ever again,” I said. “They have souls.” Scott was like, what are you even talking about. I came across this fact when I linked to a review of a book about eels, and once I’d read it and I couldn't unread it. I also maybe want a pet octopus. If anyone wants to point out that pigs might also have souls, I would like to put my fingers in my hears and sing a hearty “La la la,” because bacon.
2.) If you are a kid right now, things pretty much suck. Ryan’s overnight camp was canceled. We decided not to put her in day camp. I’m almost certain that Kai hasn’t been outside in weeks, and even then it was to get his hair cut and then go back inside. I’ve been looking at virtual camps for both kids, and found this. You can buy the tinker kit and the class is free with it. I thought it looked cool, but Kai was unimpressed because he’s not sure it’s for, and I quote, “teens.” I thought we’d try it out anyway, at least for one day, because as God as my witness he’s not spending the summer laying in bed watching YouTube.
We all know that’s a lie.
3.) Years ago, like before kids, Scott and I had Cops Happy Hour on Saturday nights, in which we would have drinks and watch the show Cops. We would have fun predicting who would go to jail (hint: it’s always the guy with his shirt off) and making fun of the cops’ hair cuts and shitty sunglasses and feeling vaguely sorry for the cameramen who were always out of breath after a chase. We tried a few years ago to do another Cops Happy Hour and it was just so hard to watch. In the wake of Eric Garner and Michael Brown and Laquan McDonald it simply wasn’t funny or enjoyable in any way. Turns out I’m not the only one who felt that way. Good riddance to a bad narrative.
4.) Dave Chappelle dropped a special on YouTube last Friday called 8:46, in reference to the length of time Derek Chauvin had his knee on George Floyd’s neck. We watched it over the weekend. I was reminded about the time Dave Chappelle was on Saturday Night Live telling us uncomfortable truths in the wake of the 2016 election. For dessert, we enjoyed Charlie Murphytalking about Rick James, which never gets old.
5.) Did you know that foxes are domesticating themselves in England? They’re making themselves cuter in ways that appeal to humans, which isn’t working for American raccoons. Or is it? But hey, let’s see whatcha got, English foxes. There are a lot of ladies my age who would probably be into it.
Find someone who robs the rich to feed the poor, and then looks at you like this.
So some things happened over the last two weeks. I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting and feeling a lot of feelings, and you probably have, as well. It feels like sea change. I find myself wanting the protests to continue so that we don’t just…go back to the status quo. We can’t.
I'm not here to insert myself in the narrative. This post is not to show black folks how "woke" I am (though, welcome if you're here! Apologies in advance for all I'm about to get wrong.). Neither is it for the folks who have already done the work (please correct me when necessary--I'm listening.). I am far from any kind of expert and I don't need attention or congratulating. This post is about doing better. Being better. Helping. This is about the the work that needs to be done. Maybe you have some work to do, too. (You do.) There will be criticism from people who correctly point out that George Zimmerman was acquitted 7 years ago, where have you been? And those who question the value of sharing lists of reading. All I can say to that is that we must all start where we are.
So here we go.
0.5) I’m doing a lot of listening. I've shared this link before, but it bears repeating.
1.) On Monday, I relistened to a podcast called 1619. That year (401 years ago) a pirate ship sailed into Port Comfort with 20-30 human beings in the cargo hold. The captain needed food and supplies for his ship, so he sold stolen human beings ripped from their land and families to the people in Port Comfort. We learn all about enslaved workers and slavers in elementary school. We all agree that it’s horrifying. Every year some idiot does a pretend slave auction in her class and makes headlines, but we otherwise don’t have many opportunities to sit with and feel in a visceral way what it could possibly be like to be an enslaved worker, how this country was built entirely on the backs of enslaved workers, how white people took everything from black people including their culture, because we couldn’t come up with anything good on our own. You can take a deeper dive into the1619 Project here.
2.) In case you’re new here, this space started out as a mommy blog about my son, who is an autistic person. So I want to submit this letter to a parenting advice columnist (and her response) that I found very powerful. The parents suspect their child looted a pair of shoes, and they want to know how to punish him. Both the parents and the columnist are black. Her response is incredible, and a complete right turn from what I expected. I have chills even now just thinking about it. She is right and she is on fire. This illustrates the difference between parenting while white and parenting while black. Or even just being white or black. A couple letters down from the parents is a woman who wondered if she was karening. Turns out, she was.
3.) Speaking of, here is a piece about the long history of white women using the police to win power struggles with black men.
4.) At the Women’s March in 2018, I remember someone wore a sweatshirt that said, “Fuck your racist grandma.” I interpreted that to mean that we shouldn’t tiptoe around family racism or hide who we are or who we love because your grandma who lives in rural Missouri* or wherever doesn’t like black people. I was reminded of that sweatshirt this week when my daughter’s teacher recently posted an open letter to her cousin on Facebook, calling him out for his racist rhetoric on social media. It was so brave and so powerful. I think we easily become afraid to call people out because it’s messy work. Or we’re afraid. But, you know what? Fuck your racist cousin, you know? This is a resource for allies and witnesses to combat online harassment. It’s written for journalists but can apply to anyone. This is a guide to calling out your racist uncle at Thanksgiving.
5.) I don’t love just straight up lists of resources, because they are easy to share on social media and be like, “Look at me, I’m an activist” and then just go back to scrolling cat memes, but if you like lists of resources, these are two powerful ones. Here is the Black Lives Matter Syllabus and here’s Barack Obama’s Anguish and Action.
The mother of one of my daughter’s classmates posted a video of her son, who is black, reacting to the protests. “White people could use their power to help people,” he observes in the video. This child is sweet and funny. He and my daughter played together on the playground all the time (back when we did such things) and have been in touch during the remote learning. He is not a threat to anyone. He is, however, in grave danger from a society that treats him differently than it does my daughter.
We’re here now, and we have to use our power for good.
Let's get after it. -PDM
*Sorry Missouri. It's just that you had to google the recipe for a gin and tonic and I will never let you live that down.