The days and weeks of my childhood were marked and measured by one standard: "How many weeks 'til vacation?" Every Spring I would take out the big Rand-McNally--our Holy Grail--and plan a cross-country trip, my only parameters being my dad's dictate to try to keep it around 500 miles per day. I would pour over the historic sites and natural features, looking for the destinations that would become our next memories, searching for the subjects of yet to be taken photographs. And I would peruse motel listings in those chosen spots to find a Holiday Inn with a full-service restaurant and an elevator, or a Best Western close to the highway exit. Once the phone calls were made and the confirmation numbers recorded, we would wait and talk and dream like yogis laboring through all the inhalations until that recooperative and blessed out-breath, the belly-emptying exhale, arrived.
Then came the actual travel and the time-erasing mental olympics. My dad and I would see how many license plate numbers we could commit to memory every day. We would have who-can-recall-all-the-hotel-room-numbers competitions at various points along the way. I used the kid's secret weapon of song to try to best him: "Two floors and the outside doors...Lord, take me to Lowell." There were lots of 214s and 101s. Every so often there would be a 738 and even more rarely, a four-digit number, but not in the old days. Not in the days when we would lunch on "blue plate special" or that new invention, the tossed green salad: a crunchy concoction of iceberg lettuce, a tomato wedge, croutons, and Thousand Island dressing served in a sweaty, chilled turquoise-colored melamine bowl.
Sometimes dinner got downright civilized: Veal Cutlet Oscar at the Grand Canyon's El Tovar Lodge or a fine sup accompanied with iced water in pewter mugs at Christina Campbell's Tavern in Colonial Williamsburg, or a marvelous chicken or fish served with some velvety white sauce and wild rice at the Old Rice Planter's Restaurant on the north highway outside Myrtle Beach.
After a day's driving and dining came the final ritual, "the choosing of the beds". You see I was feng shui before feng shui was cool in the Western--or at least Southern--world, and it fell to me to read the room and feel which bed was mine and which was my parents'. I would consider the position of the window, the orientation of the room itself, then the placement of the heating or cooling system and with information in hand, I would assign everyone to their sleeping habitat.
Thinking back on it now--the trip planning, the choosing of the radio stations (constantly), the configuring of a night's rest--my parents really did indulge me, give me free reign on our vacations. They put themselves and our most special two weeks of the year entirely in my hands. Whether they enjoyed taking a break from having to think about our affairs for those other 50 weeks or whether they enjoyed the surprise of it all I cannot say. It was just the way we did things.
We always came home with great stories and funny occurrences. We built a years' worth of conversation from out annual sojourns to the point that we practically had our own secret language. More than the logging of miles or the recalling of numbers that came home with us as prizes and souvenirs, our great wealth came from the stories we lived and told.
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