Travels with my Family by Marie-Louise Gay & David Homel

Author:Marie-Louise Gay & David Homel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Groundwood Books Ltd
Published: 2013-07-26T04:00:00+00:00

SIX

Tumbling tumbleweeds nearly crush

us in an Arizona sandstorm

Our travels had taken us east and west, but now my parents were eager for something new. Something completely crazy, like going to the desert in the hottest part of the summer.

“Something off the beaten track,” my father said, spreading out a road map of North America on the living-room rug.

“A place with greater vistas,” my mother said, closing her eyes, as if she could see those vistas already, in her imagination.

Did we have a say in their plans, my brother and I? What if we wanted something on the beaten track? But, as usual, we were prisoners of our parents.

My father pointed at the map. “Let’s go to the Southwest,” he decided. “Down by the border.”

The border with Mexico, that is.

Then he began to sing. “In a little town, just the other side of the border…”

That’s another thing about my father. He loves to sing. He knows all the words to old songs nobody has ever heard of, the greatest hits from 1965, or something like that, but unfortunately for us, he has a voice like a rusty gate. We keep on telling him that all the time, but he just keeps on singing.

The places he wanted to go looked really small on the map. That meant only one thing. There would be no airports nearby, so we would have to drive there. Already, I imagined the long days in the hot car.

There are all kinds of ways of making the time go faster when you’re in a car — besides asking if we’re there yet. There are car snacks, for instance. You know, chips or Fritos or chocolate bars or red licorice twists. But in our family, all we get to munch on are carrot and celery sticks, with spring water to wash it down. That sure does fill you up when you’re hungry!

Then there’s fighting. My little brother and I can always find something to fight about. At first it was Twenty Questions or the Alphabet Game. But our mother wouldn’t let us play that any more. He and I figured out we could fight over what CD we would play in my Discman. But when the batteries died, we couldn’t even fight over that.

Then there’s the radio. My father wants to listen to baseball games, even if he doesn’t know the teams or the players. My mother wants classical music. My brother and I want real music, that my father calls “all that crashing and banging.”

So we have to compromise. We usually end up with some serious talk show, with people discussing how bad things are in other parts of the world. That sure makes the time go by more quickly!

Then we have to choose a motel. I hoped that, this time, since we were going to be in the desert, we’d get a motel with a swimming pool. A pool and an ice machine, and maybe a playground with monkey bars where my brother could go ape after our day in the car.

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