How I Spent My Summer Vacation

 

 

One of the more bothersome exercises of my childhood was the annual “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” essay we were required to write from about 4^th grade to 8^th grade.

Unfortunately, the only two times my family went on vacation during my childhood happened at the end of first and second grades, and we went to the same place both times.

“My family doesn’t take vacations,” doesn’t make for much of an essay. Hinting that we were too poor for vacations wasn’t something a not-very-popular child would willingly admit, although that’s what my mother would have me believe.

Years later, my brother and I were talking about our dearth of vacations, and he said it had little to do with money. My father simply didn’t like going on vacation.

I knew he hated going to the shore. As a result, I was 13 the first time I ever went to the shore, and it wasn’t with my family. A neighbor I used to babysit for invited me.

Days in the ocean and afternoons at the arcades on the boardwalk were payment for the one or two evenings of watching the kids while the grownups went out on the town without children in tow.

It was great, despite the worst case of sun poisoning I’ve ever had. Those were the days before sun blocks with SPF numbers.

Looking back, the grownups were taking a bit of a risk that probably wouldn’t happen now. In the late ‘60s a 13-year-old could babysit without question. But there were no mobile phones. In fact, I’m not sure there was a phone in the house they were renting. It wouldn’t have mattered. I had no idea where they were going, so there was no number for me to call in case of emergency except the police.

That’s a huge responsibility for a child barely into the teen years watching three children under the age of ten. But nothing happened, so I thought nothing of it.

I also had a good deal of responsibility for the two older children when we were at the beach (the youngest was an infant). I was in charge while they were in the water, although at least one adult was always nearby. I was more the entertainment so the adults could enjoy the beach.

At the time, what was being asked of me didn't seem like much, but  that responsibility now strikes me as too much for the child I was at the time. It’s what was expected then. I wouldn’t have traded in the chance to go to the shore for anything.

The only thing that marred the trip – aside from the pain of glow-in-the-dark, Santa-suit red skin – was a demand my mother had made of me. She didn’t know the neighbor all that well, since she hadn't been in the neighborhood a year. I’d spent that time babysitting for her once or twice a week. Still, my mother didn’t want to be beholden to someone she barely knew for my upkeep for two weeks. She gave me some money and told me not to let them pay for everything I did.

I tried paying for ice cream or amusement park rides, but they didn’t want me spending all my money when they had invited me. They didn’t understand. I thought my mother would be upset if I came home with all the money she gave me.

After being repeatedly refused the right to use my own money, I ended up one night crying in the bathroom. I was found out, and they thought I was homesick. Despite insisting I wasn’t, that’s what all the grownups believed. How humiliating! I was 13, after all, far too old to be homesick because of a two-week vacation. But I couldn’t tell them the real reason I was crying. That was a confidence between my mother and me.

Still, the following September, I finally had an essay to write. Of course, I left out the part about crying, and focused on the amusement park in Wildwood and jumping through waves in Cape May.

My childhood was pretty good, despite the fact that we didn’t go on vacations. We went to local state parks to swim and have picnics, and I had a few friends with swimming pools who sometimes invited me over. There was also one local creek (pronounced crick where I'm from) where we swam on weekends, and my brother sometimes took me with him to swim there during the week. (When I was older I went there on my own, another risky endeavor.)

There was always the hose in the back yard to cool off with on steamy days. On the not so hot summer days there were woods to explore and sometimes blackberries to pick.

I adored the days off from school from mid-June to Labor Day, days where there were no school requirements, when I could sit in my tree fort and read the books I wanted to read, or ride my bike all over the neighborhood.

There were days I accompanied my mother to the grocery store and learned about comparison shopping, and why some products were better to get as the brand name while others were just as good if you had the store brand. I learned estimating totals and reading labels, how to order lunchmeat at the deli counter – and my mother always wanted the American cheese sliced thin – and which aisles to find particular items.

In reality, those things would have been great to include in the summer vacation essay, so my teachers would know I hadn’t squandered my time in the summer. But I was looking for the glamorous vacation – or at least a week at camp – and came up empty. So I tried to glamorize days at friends’ pools and never mentioned the continuing education at the grocery store or the ecological education in the woods and state parks.

At 14 I had the ultimate summer vacation, not because of where I went, but because of how I went.

My aunt, who lived in a suburb of Chicago, was visiting some of our relatives in Philadelphia. During a family get-together, she invited me to come visit her family in Illinois.

As the youngest and only girl, whenever I wanted to do something, the answer was usually no. My parents wouldn’t be going, so the idea of my traveling alone halfway across the country was not likely. But parents can be surprising.

I would have to fly to Chicago alone. That kind of flight was expensive by my family’s standards. But we learned about a program the airline TWA had for teens up to age 21. It was called the 50/50 club (I still have my membership card, even though TWA no longer exists). A teen could fly for 50% off the ticket price. The ticket was stand-by, so I might have to wait for the next flight. But in 1969, especially midweek, mid-afternoon, it was generally expected that I could get on my chosen flight.

My mother took me to the airport, and my aunt would pick me up in Chicago. In those days before the first plane hijacking, family members could accompany the person flying right up to the boarding gate, no security or x-rays, and the traveler could be met at the arrival gate at the other end.

At 14, getting on the plane unaccompanied was exciting. I remember I had a window seat. I must have looked like a wide-eyed country bumpkin to the stewardesses – they all looked like my Barbie doll when she was wearing her stewardess uniform, only without the cotton ponytail – but at least I wasn’t a trouble maker. I don’t think I even took off my seat belt through the entire flight.

I arrived at O’Hare International Airport and started looking for my aunt. I had no idea where I was supposed to meet her. Since I didn’t see her, I began following the other passengers to baggage claim.

I had only gone a short distance when I heard my name called. I turned and came face-to-face not with my aunt, but with my uncle. He’d come in from a business trip and waited until my flight arrived to save my aunt the trip.

While the vacation itself wasn’t extraordinary, traveling solo sparked my love of travel. I spent a month with my relatives where five children – three boys and two girls – provided entertainment I didn’t normally have. At home, one brother was away attending university and the other was back from Vietnam, but still in the army.

Because we had always lived at least a state’s distance away from this set of relatives, I didn’t know these cousins as well as many of my other cousins. I did know that the oldest boy, who was a year younger than I was, hated me.

The girls were quite a bit younger than I, but we got along. I think most little girls enjoy it when an older cousin pays attention to them. We played games together and generally got to know one another. I didn’t have to worry about anyone making fun of me for playing with younger girls since they were cousins.

I also spent time playing with the two younger boys. The one who didn’t like me was away at scout camp or something through most of the time I was there.

The film Romeo and Juliette, with Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey came out that summer. I desperately wanted to see it. I imagine my aunt called my mother for permission – I’m fairly certain it was R rated, and I wasn’t old enough to go unless accompanied by an adult. She said she wanted to see if it was appropriate for her two eldest sons, and would I like to go with her to see it?

What an exciting afternoon! We had a great time, just the two of us, and I felt quite grown up because she thought I was mature enough to see the film. After seeing it, she decided the boys were too young.

As with most women I was either related to or otherwise close to at the time, I felt more comfortable talking with my aunt than I did with my mother. My aunt wasn’t the disciplinarian or the one who usually said no. She was also 10 years younger than my mother, and shared with me the distinction of being the youngest in the family and the only girl (and left-handed) – although she had four older brothers (one being my father), and I had two.

We talked about a lot of different things, and I felt comfortable around her, despite the fact that we had so seldom seen each other. She even recommended me as a babysitter to one of her friends whose regular babysitters were all busy one night. So, I even had the chance to make some money on my vacation.

My aunt went back east for a wedding one weekend, and my uncle took us all to the Milwaukee Zoo. He couldn’t believe that, at 14, I’d never been to the zoo, especially since I lived so close to the Philadelphia Zoo, the oldest one in the country. I told him my father always said if the zoo wanted me badly enough, they could come get me.

The real reason was that my mother was allergic to animal dander, although I don’t think dogs and cats bothered her. But never let the facts stand in the way of a good story.

I also saw the moon landing while I was at my aunt’s, as well as Prince Charles’ investiture as Prince of Wales. By the end of that day, I had his investiture speech memorized – I was quite the monarchist at the time.

After a month at my aunt’s, I returned home, a seasoned traveler. I had taken my first trip ever on a plane, and I’d done it alone.

Unfortunately, after such a monumental achievement, I was about to start high school, where the focus was on the writing of authors like Shakespeare, Ibsen, Dickens and Dostoyevsky, so having finally been armed with the fuel for the summer vacation essay, I didn’t get to write it.

My next plane trip wasn’t until seven years later, when I flew to England for a semester abroad. While I was technically with classmates then, once there I had to navigate life on my own.

The experience of solo travel and my parents’ trust in me to take such a trip by myself set me up to fearlessly travel abroad after college, and if I had no one to travel with, I would simply go alone. Probably because of my lack of going somewhere for vacation as a child, I took every opportunity to go places as an adult.

My mother was never comfortable enough to travel alone. Her biggest solo adventure was flying to Florida to visit my brother, where I took her to the airport and pointed her in the right direction in Philadelphia, and my brother collected her in Florida. She was a nervous wreck the whole flight.

My father grudgingly – probably due to ill health – went with us to Colorado twice to visit the same brother when he lived there, but my dad never really cared to travel. Since I have relatives scattered all over the U.S., his dislike of travel meant that I never met a fair few of my cousins until I was an adult -- and a couple I've never met.

My wanderlust is definitely not inherited from either parent, although both brothers have traveled to the limits of their purse strings. I sometimes wonder if the three of us are changelings left by the fairy folk, and somewhere three other sibling are living with a family that can’t understand their dislike of travel.

 

I Wish

 

 

Ancestry.com is a wonderful thing, something I never expected anything from except perhaps to discover a few ancestors. It delivered so much more than that.

My parents’ generation of our family all grew up in South Philadelphia, second generation Americans. They were city kids, a bit more streetwise than I ever was, but then, I was the protected female offspring who wasn’t allowed to do many of the things my brothers were.

When my parents’ generation grew up, they all moved out to the suburbs. Most of those relatives moved to Delaware County, PA. My parents moved to Bucks County, on the other side of Philadelphia, instead. Whenever he was asked why he didn’t move to Delaware County, my father would reply – with a bit of truth as well as irony – “Because it’s too damned close to the relatives.”

Granted my parents grew up a block away from each other, and their cousins – my dad had many – all lived a block or two from each other. You couldn’t walk to the corner store – or the corner bar – without bumping into a relative. Everyone knew what everyone else was doing.

When I grew up, the relatives barely knew my brothers and me, other than what we looked like from the annual Christmas card, where the three of us were posed in some scene (Santa’s elves, flying in spaceships over the city, delivering Christmas wreaths in the snow while a ceramic deer looked on).

We visited some of the relatives once or twice a year, and others a few times in my lifetime, but they seldom, if ever, came to our house. When they did, they looked at us and our surroundings as if they were visiting a strange planet and we were the resident aliens.

Even though they lived in the suburbs, as did we, their neighborhoods had sidewalks; ours did not. Our neighborhood had summer homes on stilts, and those houses had outhouses; they had weekly streetcleaners coming down the street. Even though we didn’t live on or near a farm, some neighbors had chickens and roosters, and one had ducks. Our area was really more rural than suburban.

All of my grandparents lived in the city. They were first generation Americans whose parents came from Irish stock. My mother’s parents had both died long before I came along, so my dad’s parents were the only grandparents I ever knew.

I’m sure if I’d asked my grandfather, he would have told me about his family. He was a good one for a story. But he had a stroke when I was about 9, and was difficult to understand after that, so by the time I was old enough to think of the questions, he couldn’t give the answers. He died when I was 10.

My grandmother never seemed to want to talk about anything to do with Ireland beyond saying her parents were born and raised in Ireland – especially if you mentioned that her maiden name was English. Since we only visited them on a few holidays a year, and my grandmother, after feeding us kids milk and some of her wonderful cake, got busy with making dinner and talking with my mother, there never seemed to be a chance to sit down with her and find out the family history. By the time I was old enough to want to delve into family history, she was living with my uncle’s family and later was in a nursing home, so I couldn’t really get information from her.

I heard that someone had had a family tree done – this was in the days before the internet – and I set about getting a copy. First I was told my father’s aunt – the only remaining one on his father’s side – had it. I wrote to her, and her reply was wonderful. 

She referred to me as her namesake – I wasn’t. We didn’t spell our first names the same way, and my mother was adamant that I had not been named for her, of all people. She was delighted that I had written, and knew all sorts of things about me, apparently from other relatives. She didn’t have the family tree. She said one of my uncles had it, so I wrote to him, and he sent a copy.

I wish I’d asked the aunt if I could come visit her. It didn’t matter to me that other people in the family didn’t like her – my mother said that although the woman was childless, she told everyone else how to raise their children. I would like to have spent an afternoon with her and learned what she knew of the family history. But I didn’t think of it until years later when I actually had a car, and by then she was dead.

I always knew my mother’s family better than my father’s because we visited them more often. My mother’s identical twin sister was a prolific producer of children, so we were at their house at least once a year, and her other sister lived near them. My mother’s brother lived in the outskirts of the city, not far from us. I knew the stories, but when it came to the people, my knowledge ended with my mother’s grandparents.

Armed with the family tree from my dad’s side, I had a bit more history, but without the stories. Our family had actually married into part of the family tree that went back several more generations to a Lord Someone-or-other.

I had always assumed my family came over because of the Great Hunger (what most people mistakenly call the Famine). I was wrong. They didn’t leave Ireland until the late 1880s.  Having survived two potato crop failures, I wondered why they left.

With the advent of the internet and Ancestry, I got some of my answers. They did not come from the website itself; they came from an email on Ancestry from someone who turned out to be a third cousin.

Because of that email, I had the opportunity to meet both the sender and many other third cousins who live in England and Northern Ireland. I am Facebook friends with many of them. I consider that knowledge and those friendships a gift.

I love discovering relatives I never knew I had. And when I have the opportunity to meet them, it’s thrilling to me.

Recently, I met another of the distant cousins with whom I’m Facebook friends.

On my last trip to the UK, I didn’t ask anyone over there if we could get together because, having done so before, and having been met with excuses from a few, I thought perhaps I was being a bother, and they weren’t as interested in our meeting as I was.

I was surprised when two of the cousins I’d met before wanted to get together. But even more surprising was that another that I hadn’t met before reached out to see if we could meet. It surprised me, then, toward the end of our afternoon together that she said, “Well, I guess you can cross me off your list now.” I hope she was joking. I am never quite sure, when people say things like that, whether or not they’re serious. I genuinely liked her, and would be happy to get together again, just as I was very happy to get together again with the other two cousins.

The thing I haven’t yet discovered is why everyone else from our family who left Ireland went to England, while my direct ancestors came to America. I wonder, if someone asked them why they didn’t go to England if they would’ve said, “Because it’s too damned close to the relatives!” But so far, I haven’t discovered a reason.

I would love to be able to afford to get the kind of in-depth family history that people who appear on Finding Your Roots get.  It’s possible, but I think I’d have to win the lottery to be able to do it. Of course, they wouldn’t be able to surprise me with a famous relative. I already know about and have met the Broadway actress in the family.

The Thrill of Pretty Things

The scene: Philadelphia in spring or summer. My mother, my aunt, my cousin and I were in the city for a day, but the reason escapes me. My cousin and I were 10 or 11.

We spent the day shopping, I suppose. I don’t recall going to the city for any other reason as a child before malls had been invented. I liked the idea of shopping, but the reality was headache-inducing, what with overheated stores, crowds and standing in line.

Then there was outside. A rural girl, I found cities gritty, and sidewalks tiring on the feet that, in those days, had to be in dress shoes for any excursion. I had yet to own my first pair of sneakers.

Despite the negatives, I found department stores magical; the window displays a thing of beauty.

But whereas I felt the internal wonder of it all – an emotion inexpressible in words but easily seen on my face – my cousin was exuberant. Experience had taught me that verbal expression of my joy led only to ridicule, from cousins as well as peers.

“You like that?”

“You still believe in that?”

“You’re stupid.”

“You’re a baby.”

“You’re weird.”

My cousin had, apparently, never met with those experiences, so she didn’t hesitate to say, “Oh, that’s beautiful! I love that! How pretty!”

I would nod, enjoying my internal experience, but apparently not showing it enough on my face. My cousin had, at every turn, beaten me to the punch.

The intersection of, “I’m tired and my feet hurt,” and the thrill of pretty things was face-in-neutral.

Face-in-neutral is apparently interpreted by extroverts as boredom.

Yes, I am an introvert. I can hold my own and more in a conversation if it’s something I’m interested in. But starting a conversation with a stranger or someone I don’t know well is something the other person needs to do. I can no more get beyond, “Hello. Nice weather,” than my non-artistic mind can find the horizon line on a blank canvas.

When someone isn’t having a conversation with me, but enthusing over the sights and sounds of the environment, what is there to do beyond nodding and saying, “Yes” ?

Perhaps the reason I don’t remember much about the day is the one memory of it that did stick out: my mother scolding me in the train station – in quiet but deadly “mom voice” – after my cousin and aunt had departed. “Why can’t you be like your cousin? She, at least, enjoyed this trip.”

Wait a minute. I enjoyed the day enormously. I got to ride the train, see the sights, and enjoy the wonder and beauty in my own way. We even ate lunch at Horn and Hardart’s automat, my absolute favorite restaurant at the time, where I put the coins in the slot and took out my favorite, beef pot pie, from behind the little glass door. My cousin hadn’t even liked hers. Why was I expected to repeat every rapturous thing she said? What’s the point of that?

My mother destroyed the day with her admonishment. Now I understood: my mother wanted a daughter, but I wasn’t the one she wanted.

I was well-mannered and smart and inventive, and did what I was told. But somehow I was lacking.

Admittedly, my social skills have always been in negative numbers. I spent my childhood waiting for friends to happen, and never quite understood the odd looks or social cues or whatever they were that were directed my way. Unfortunately, that is still the case.

I liked my cousins. I always liked the idea of visiting them, but the visits never met my expectations.  No, not expectations; my hopes and dreams of what it would be like to have someone to play with.

Any of my cousins my age or near it could run faster than I, climb trees better, and generally disappear so I couldn’t find them. They were good at grabbing my shoes so I’d have to chase after them in my bare feet, and when I wouldn’t, they’d toss the shoes into a nearby rose hedge where the thorns would tear at my skin as I retrieved the shoes.

They wouldn’t discuss books or invent stories or jump rope or anything I was good at. The trip to Philadelphia fit right into the same mold.

Which is why I travel alone. And wear sneakers.