Between Us

Every day is Kid’s Day
It’s startling to realize that you’re a grown-up. It’s not the
mortgage or the nine-to-five gig that makes you aware of it. It’s
the lack of the long-awaited, much-anticipated summer vacation. Not
to mention spring break, winter break and Presidents’ Week.
When I was a kid, and Mother’s Day was around the corner, I
would wonder aloud,
”
When is Kid’s Day?
”
Every day is Kid’s Day

It’s startling to realize that you’re a grown-up. It’s not the mortgage or the nine-to-five gig that makes you aware of it. It’s the lack of the long-awaited, much-anticipated summer vacation. Not to mention spring break, winter break and Presidents’ Week.

When I was a kid, and Mother’s Day was around the corner, I would wonder aloud, “When is Kid’s Day?”

My first mistake was thinking it, my second was voicing it. My mother would remind me that “Every day is Kid’s Day,” and promptly find “something for me to do, since I seemed so bored.” It usually involved a large trash bag and me peering under my bed at all of the errant marbles and crayons, old school papers and scattered books that had somehow found their way under there.

I didn’t know what she meant by that. I didn’t remember getting presents made out of construction paper or a geranium in a hand painted pot, even once.

I chuckled when The Girl posed that same question a generation later. And like generations past, The Girl was on her hands and knees, peering under her bed, shortly after.

Why do kids think they have it so bad? What’s not to love? Warm evenings, catching pollywogs in the creek without a care in the world for bath or bedtime, Fourth of July block parties with long picnic tables festooned with red, white and blue bunting… the perfect place to hide when your next door neighbor comes to offer you a “healthy” scoopful of Ambrosia.  Bike riding so far it felt like you went for miles, though later in your adult life you realize that you only took the long way around the tract.

If your folks were really flush, you might even have taken a trip with the family. Mine weren’t so flush, but we managed the car trip up to Hayfork, our favorite small town in Northern California, for the annual Trinity County Fair.

Time seemed to have stood still in Hayfork. Pick your favorite era, and you’re there. That was the magical thing: it could be the 1950’s or the 1800’s, with Mom & Pop stores, a pink post office and thick forests just outside of town. The perfect place for pretend. I became Laura Ingalls; I had the same long brown braids and serious orthodontic issues.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, we had to get there. Mom would be cooking for days. Huge pans of lasagna, noodle pudding, porcupine meatballs and (my favorite) Quiche Lorraine to put into big coolers. We would bring them and share with all of our friends, who would be crashing with other friends lucky enough to get to live in Hayfork year round.

My sister and I would bring our neatly folded clothes in paper grocery bags, and by the time the long weekend was over, the bags would be nearly shredded and the clothes in a tangled mess that would ooze out and finally tip over.

Dad would make sure the big Suburban had a tankful of gas and we were all packed and ready to go at ten at night. He liked to drive at night. Maybe because he thought Suzie and I would be asleep. We wouldn’t be, at first. We were too excited. For the first hour and a half anyway. Then things got a lot less exciting which only led to trouble. We’d needle each other, until one of us finally broke.

“She’s touching me!”

Dad would glare at us in the rearview. A band of light from the cars behind, accentuating his lack of patience. That was our warning. We’d be good for a while, until one of us forgot we’d been warned.

And then came one of my favorite sentences ever spoken, from Dad.

“If you two don’t knock it off, I’ll make you put your seatbelts on.”

In his defense, it was the ’70s. They didn’t have those crash test dummy commercials on TV yet.

In retrospect, it makes me see that while Suzie and I were excited about summer vacation, The Folks were the ones who made sure that we had these memories into adulthood. For when we grew up.