Sting-Ray Afternoons

Somehow he makes it all fit, with just enough room for me or John or Amy—sometimes all three of us—to slot into the gaps as human packing peanuts. The man is a master of packing, a ninja of folding. He can fold a dress shirt as fast and fastidiously as a Marine triangle-folding the U.S. flag. Perhaps his semiannual two-week trips to Tokyo, for which he only ever packs a small valise, have given him a taste for origami. By the time he’s finished folding and packing, every trouser crease is sharp enough to shave on. With each new nose blow, he folds his handkerchief in such a way that it somehow launders itself, like Mom’s self-cleaning oven.

All of which is to say that Dad can fold a shirt and pack a suitcase, and pack that suitcase into the way back of a Ford LTD Country Squire, like no man before him. Watching him prepare for a trip, I imagine this is what it must be like to see Brooks Robinson oiling his glove or Clapton tuning his guitar: the undisputed master of his craft preparing to do what he was born to do. In Dad’s case, this is travel.

Through the Magic Doorgate, I have seen Houston, Texas, on a visit to Uncle Pat and Aunt Sandy’s. I toured NASA and the Astrodome—“The Eighth Wonder of the World.” I rode a horse, which stopped to make a prodigious BM while I sat in the saddle. (It is the last time I will ever ride a horse or watch Mister Ed without gagging.) I have been to Disney World in Orlando and to Tarpon Springs, Florida, where Dad held the smaller of us over an alligator pit for laughs and I cut my chin climbing into our station wagon, scarring me for life. The chin scar matches the scar I got on my forehead when I ran into a low pipe while playing tag in the Devitts’ basement. Between my chin and my forehead and my fake teeth, I have had a very short time to be factory new, a scant few years with my original parts. In that way I am not unlike the Country Squire, which Dad says—when pumping its sleepy brakes or watching steam rise from its hood on the litter-strewn shoulder of some interstate—is the worst car he’s ever owned. He swears he will never again buy a Ford. To pass the time on long drives, he begins composing alternative acronyms for LTD—“Less Than Dependent,” for instance, or, when it’s especially temperamental, “Lower Than Dogshit.” These new abbreviations pair nicely with his favorite reverse-engineered acronym for Ford: “Fix Or Replace Daily.”

Every other summer we drive to Chicago to visit old neighbors and then on to Cincinnati to visit our aunt and uncle and cousins and Grandma Boyle, occasionally stopping in Wisconsin Dells to top up our supply of rubber tomahawks and eat breakfast in the kind of roadside diners whose fork tines are webbed with congealed egg yolk.

And these summer vacations all start the same way. We leave home before dawn, under cover of darkness. I half expect Dad to silently push the car down the driveway in neutral, in the manner of Baron von Trapp fleeing the Nazis, so stealthy is our 4 a.m. escape and so strong his insistence on “making good time.”

One way to make good time is to ignore every billboard that advertises a tantalizing attraction only thirty-seven miles off the interstate. Every wondrous cavern and canyon, every glorious glade and garden, will go forever unexplored by the Rushin family. The terrible puns I hear every day on the school bus—“Hey, Rushin, why aren’t you rushin’ somewhere?”—are answered unequivocally on our drive. We are rushin’ somewhere, so that our only diverting roadside attractions are the billboards advertising roadside attractions, rather than the roadside attractions themselves. Their appearance every forty miles or so gives us five seconds of respite from the excruciating tedium, which is otherwise relieved by playing bruising games of Slug Bug, waiting for my bladder to pop like a water balloon, and staring glumly out the window at other children, in other cars, staring glumly out their windows at me.

The Country Squire, like the butterscotch rocket, is equipped with only an AM radio. The driver sells audiotape for a living but refuses to have a tape deck in his car, so we can’t even listen to the boredom-set-to-music that is Mom’s kitchen cassette collection—albums by John Denver and Anne Murray and Cat Stevens. Instead we get whichever station comes in clearest: country music, Dow Jones industrial averages, pork belly futures, and CBS News bulletins introduced by the urgent chattering of typewriter keys that turns every one of their stories—“Women admitted to Air Force Academy!” “Tension among white farmers in Rhodesia!” “Evonne Goolagong wins her Wimbledon quarterfinal!”—into a declaration of war.

We only stop for gas and at rest areas, piling out of the clown car of the Country Squire and sprinting for the picnic tables to eat the sandwiches Mom has lovingly prepared the night before departure. We are so hungry we barely bother to remove the Saran Wrap before sluicing them down with Shasta cola, which is how we know we’re on vacation.

It isn’t the only way we know, of course, because everything is different out the window. Illinois is exotic. We feel the gravitational pull of Chicago as we hit the rumble strips that signal a tollbooth ahead. Tossing a quarter into the collection basket is a novelty. So is the Lake Forest Oasis, where we drive under a Howard Johnson’s restaurant and Amoco station suspended over the rushing traffic on the Northwest Toll Road. If the Astrodome is the Eighth Wonder of the World, surely this is the Ninth.

Wrigley Field is a shocking expanse of green in the city. Michigan Avenue is familiar from the opening credits of The Bob Newhart Show. The Sun-Times and Tribune buildings excite me and me alone. And standing beneath the three-year-old Sears Tower, staring up at its immensity while wearing vertically striped pants from Sears, I feel a sense of ownership. This is The House That Mom Built.

Simply to be in the same zip code as the Spiegel catalogue—Chicago, Illinois, 60609—is a thrill. And as we pull into The Meadows subdivision of Lisle, to spend the night in sleeping bags at our former neighbors’, the Kmieciaks, and play with our former playmates, the Weber kids—there are ten of them—I envy these cosmopolitan children, growing up by the buzz and fizz of the East-West Tollway, with its rumble strips and Oases, and that great skyline rising in the distance like the Emerald City of Oz.



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