Because mom was a teacher back when you could still make a living by being a teacher, she had summers off just like me and wasn’t forced to work a second job. But we also didn’t have the financial (or emotional, if dad was included) resources for trips anywhere fancy or far. There was never talk of places like Disney or the Grand Canyon, and I somehow knew to never ask for or about it.
But we did still go places.
Every summer, from age 7 until maybe 12, Mom would pack me up in the car and take me to Altoona (her dead mother’s hometown) and Boswell (her dead father’s hometown) and the general area for her father’s school reunion and other various old people meet-ups. Just what every young girl wants to do with her summer vacation.
The drive was mostly toll roads, and a couple of places where you need to drive under mountains through long tunnels that went on for miles. (My mother was a bit claustrophobic and this was not her favorite part of the drive.) One year it rained so hard that my mom had to pull over and wait out a storm as we came out of one of the tunnels. That was maybe the most exciting thing I remember happening on these trips. That, and one time having to fetch someone who worked at a department store we went into because my mom had gotten sick. Every once in a while, mom would just get sick.
Once we arrived, we would stay in a cheap motel or on the couch of a distant relative. It was a small group of people who had gone to school together in the 1920s that dwindled to only 6 or 7 left by the time we stopped going. I don’t know if that meant they stopped meeting, they all died, or my mother just stopped wanting to go. I think there was a great aunt we stayed with at one point whose house was very pink inside and had a lot of stuffed animals and dolls and everything smelled old.
Had I been older, maybe I could have appreciated hanging out with people who had fought Nazis in WWII. But to me it was just grey, boring places filled with grey, boring faces that I had to be polite to. It was a lonely trip; not child-hostile places, but not child-friendly either. More like child-boring. And there was only so much money we could spend on batteries for my Gameboy.
The most exciting place in the area was Horseshoe Curve, a bit of railroad that curves around a bit of mountain. Some Nazis were planning to blow it up during WWII, and there’s a visitor’s center. I think I got a souvenir conductor hat.
It’s hard to work out what was real and what was a misheard story, or two stories remembered wrong. This one sounds like the subject of some kitschy documentary that’ll get remade into a film starring Steve Carell. I very clearly remember meeting an old man who painted rocks. I think his name started with S. Could have been a first name or a last name, I have no idea. But this old dude painted rocks. Like, small, fit-in-your-hand rocks that would be good for skipping on large ponds. And he painted various things on these rocks like landscapes or squirrels or whatever, and gave them to people. And if you just wrote his name (again, whatever that S name was) and the 5-digit zip code where he lived, the post office would deliver to him. So people would send him letters from all over the world and he would paint rocks for them. He had started doing this in the war or something. All of the old people we knew were part of “the war” one way or another.
I know there is some sort of story here. If someone in Somerset County (I think that’s where this was?) can figure this out, let me know. Because I’m pretty sure there was a dude, who must be 110 or dead by now, who would get letters from all around the world for painting on rocks. That’s cute. That’s a kitchy NPR podcast story.
When you are 8 years old and your friends are telling you about their trip to Disney or the Grand Canyon, you don’t want to tell them you spent part of your summer with your mom meeting old people and one of them painted rocks for pen-pals. Later in life it sounds interesting enough to put in a book. Perspective is weird.
I didn’t like being mom’s only companion on these old people tours. Being her only family meant I felt both idealized and oppressed. I was the reason she stayed with my dad, but staying with dad meant having to come on the trips anyway. I was the reason we endured abuse, and also I couldn’t be left alone with the abuser? I should have been the reason we left, not the reason we stayed and just took shitty road trips in the Alleghenies sometimes.
I would have been less annoyed by the cross-county excursions to visit old people if we weren’t fleeing and returning to my dad. I would have said let’s go twice a year if it meant we could have rid ourselves of him. But those types of negotiations never went anywhere. The most I could do was guilt a new toy out of my mom for the inconvenience, because I wasn’t emotionally mature enough to understand that she was hauling me across the state because she wanted to feel connected to her family that was all dead but for me. She was scared and alone, which also happened to be the reason she wouldn’t leave him.