(With vacation season looming, here’s a case study for young families to consider. Keep a diary. And a sense of wonder. And some paper towels handy. Written 30 years ago, but seems like just the other day …)
It had all the elements of the classic child-ice cream blunder: beach, summertime, hot father, innocent 5-year-old boy, orange sherbert Push-Up, and a car.
Fortunately, the car was a rental.
And we were wearing the same clothes for the third straight day and we were 15 minutes away from being in the second-largest body of water on Earth. How big a threat could melting ice cream be?
None. Laugh and encourage a sweaty child to eat ice cream faster, and they likely will. Helps to have an old rag around.
Summertime crisis avoided.
This was just one of the many exciting things that happened on vacation in Myrtle Beach, S.C., a place 43 miles from my hometown down SC-9 South, where you can get anything from a tan to a gift-shop seashell dressed to look a lot like Elvis Presley.
Nothing spectacular happened. We ate more ice cream and went swimming and ate out a lot. We did the sandcastle thing and the rides-at-the-pavilion thing. We rode an airplane. We stayed in a hotel.
Tourists.
But as has happened since my vacations have included a child, the things I’ll remember are the things that happened around vacation. These times have reminded me that Thornton Wilder was right when he warned us in Our Town: Don’t miss the magic in the mundane, the tiny pieces in which the whole of your life is delivered.
That might be a fancy way of saying this: I wonder if my dad remembers ice cream dripping on my hand on that same stretch of beach in the mid-1960s?
I do.
My son had anticipated this trip. When a child is 5 and hits Vacation Countdown, time in Kid World moves with the speed of a jury trial.
Seven days. An eternity passed.
Six days. Glaciers were formed, moved, and melted.
Five days. The City Council decided something.
We’re talking slow movement. Imagine two weeks of watching Coke fizz settle.
Then suddenly, It Was Time.
He was told the trip would be 10 days long. I was packing only a few things when he walked in with nine pairs of pants, nine T-shirts, and one cloth bag, all piled in his arms like a ball. He would sleep in the outfit he had on, he said, minus the Power Ranger flip-flops.
He was ready. Overpacked, but ready.
You had to like his effort.
Early the next morning, he looked at the clouds out of the airplane and wondered why we were flying upside down. It took me a while to figure that one out: he’s used to seeing clouds above him through a car window.
Later in a rented beach house when his 10-year-old cousin said it was raining “cats and dogs,” he made him explain that, exactly.
He rode a play horse outside an A&P four times straight and nearly fell asleep on a dog on the merry-go-round at the same pavilion I used to go to with my cousins when I was little.
He played putt-putt one night until he nearly fell asleep standing, but the lemonade we bought woke him up.
“We need to remember to come back to this place,” he said in the car. “They’ve got good lemonade here.”
I told him I’d remember.
Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu
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