Remembrances from the other earthquake zone

Published in The Fauquier Times-Democrat Weekend, Aug. 26, 2011

I have recently met more readers than I dared to suspect I had. Thank you for stopping me. I love meeting you, because our dialogue is so often one-sided. When you stop me at the post office, pool, grocery store, school, or even at the polling station, it leaves me ebullient. The only time I ask that you don’t stop me is if you are an officer of the law - in the line of duty.

Who can forget our earthquake last week? We lived in Northern California for nine years, and I don’t recall one. But when I was sent on a weeklong business trip from Long Island, New York, to Los Angeles, we experienced one then.


My husband, being a creature of higher intelligence, always accompanied me on business trips. We had a single toddler in tow. When he had business trips to exquisite destinations, I was always the idiot who felt compelled to stay at work. Then, I would suffer pangs of jealousy and regret as he described sunken tubs of black marble in posh hotels. I know. You didn’t think they let scientists out of the lab, right? He was serving as an expert DNA witness in court.


When I started my life of stay-at-home-dom (which equates to martyrdom for some), I longed for another such opportunity to escape, but it never seemed to appear. Or perhaps, my husband, being the creature of higher intelligence, never let on to such opportunities.


There was the one trip to Santa Barbara when the three kids and I tagged along. It was a gorgeous holiday, despite my being newly pregnant, and the youngest, a two-year-old boy, insisting on wearing a girl’s bathing suit to the beach. He was having none of this trunk exposure stuff. We acquiesced, realizing we couldn’t get to the beach otherwise. We coached our girls, then five and seven, not to hint as to gender of their sibling. We didn’t know anyone there. What would it matter?


It is the same liberating anonymity as when you go camping, know no one, and feel fine walking around with Einstein’s hairdo. Who will know? Who will care? Perhaps this is also the danger with out interactions online. It is easy to become too friendly with people we have never met – “e-quaintances,” I believe they are called. Who will know? Who will care? Trust me, someone or Someone knows and cares.


We had barely set foot on the beach, when our second daughter squealed, “Hey! Why is he wearing a girl’s bathing suit? He’s a boy!” She then dashed about, delightedly repeating this to random, arbitrary strangers. It was the nineties’ version of sending out a public tweet. She’s in college now, and surprisingly, she isn’t pursuing journalism.


When we went to rent the quadricycle, the girls were thrilled. Each child had to be helmeted, which seemed a simple enough business. The two girls donned their headgear. The man went through his entire inventory of children’s helmets, but our little XY shrieked the moment any helmet approached his head. We couldn’t get that thing near him. It was like an invisible force field around his body that inflicted pain or an electric shock every time the helmet approached him. So, he retaliated by inflicting pain on us, in the form of piercing screams and embarrassing public tantrums.


This is why I avoid any joining in of eye rolling at stores when someone’s child is having a fit. I realize that we all think we are smarter and more astute than the inept parent who doesn’t understand proper parenting techniques the way we do or did, whether we have children or not. But some kids are just different. Way different, and we need to be as thankful for them as we are for the ones who help us believe we are sane and competent.


The shrieking and body writhing never stopped until I walked, defeated, back to the hotel room with the creature still struggling, and got out his sister’s bright pink bike helmet (odd, why HAD we packed that for the trip?), and put it on him. Putting that helmet on him was like the tranquilizer dart hitting home on a charging rogue elephant. Ah, peace. All was well with the world. I trudged back to the quadricycle, fatigued and annoyed. If this was peace, it was a disgusted sort of peace.


If I recall, my husband had to do all the pedaling for the whole family. He fixed me with accusatory glares. Me, the mother of the contented boy who could finally be calmed by that glaring pink helmet. The girls were oblivious to our tension. (It’s so nice when they are young.) They gleefully enjoyed the fruits of their father’s labor and delighted in everything the beach had to offer.

Maybe that’s why this was the only business trip I was invited on as a stay-at-home mom. And maybe that’s why we never experienced earthquakes as Californians. We always seemed to have our own built-in version, right at home.

V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N at the end of summertime

Published in the Fauquier Times-Democrat Weekend on August 19, 2011

Who said summer could be over? I’ve barely nicked our list of summer projects. True, we can walk through the garage now, and there have been sightings of our basement floor, but where did the time go?

Sunday night we returned from a quick, three-day getaway into the mountains. We’ve barely begun our summer fun. How can it be time for school?


We had relatives visit for eleven days, made a single day trip to New Jersey for my nephew’s graduation and my cousin’s 50th birthday, took the kids to the swimming pool at the WARF several times, drove into DC to the Natural History Museum, and saw Luray Caverns again, but did I ever play a game of chess with my sons? Did I get around to a simple sewing project with my youngest daughter? Have I read a book?

This year, I did things backwards. Since I normally do things so slowly or late that it may as well be backwards, this should have approached the domain of the double negative and set me straight, but it hasn’t. I took the children school supply shopping early. (Of course, you read that column.) With that out of the way, I could start thinking about planning a vacation.

With the threat of summer ebbing and school washing in, we had only one weekend available. Unfortunately, our eldest daughter had signed up for the GRE on that one magical weekend, so it was going to be a lonely trip: just the seven of us and our shelter dog.

I realized then that planning a vacation actually takes a little time, effort, and of course, planning. I’ve even heard about businesses that do this for you! You’d have to wonder about our sense of family vacations. We have a few preferences: It needs to be within driving distance. Please don’t make it too physically taxing. I’m in no shape to be hiking up some mountain, and I’m a little nervous of water, so don’t expect me to be snorkeling around somewhere. It should have some educational value beyond learning that I’m in no shape to be hiking or snorkeling. It should include museum and/or zoo visits. If I get to be the driver to our lovely, life-long learning vacation resort, we will also intensify the experience by listening to an audio book in the car.

Think of normal life as the ant that is outdoors enjoying the sunshine, and vacation as being the ant enjoying the sunshine under a magnifying glass. Perhaps there is a reason we keep our vacations short. Maybe standardized testing is less painful than a vacation with the Ribeiro Family.

I’m thinking that our vacations worked better when the children were closer to one age group, instead of being sprawled across the decades from entering elementary school to legal adults. Isn’t it irritating how children insist upon growing up? The true beauty of childhood is that it takes so very little to please a child. A young child can be happy with the smallest things: kicking pebbles together, rolling around and laughing on the carpet, or trying to catch toads and butterflies. These things can delight the heart of a small child.

We traveled with three teenagers.

These teens had wanted to go to the beach. Or was it everyone that was in a rebellious mood? They had already seen and remembered, in excruciating detail, our visit several years ago to the Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton, Virginia. I tried to remind them about our compressed, 40-hour vacation to Virginia Beach last year, which, incidentally, is perhaps the best vacation we’ve taken. If we applied the same logic, they had already “been there, done that” with the sand and the waves. Why should they want to go again (and again)? Apparently, the flavor of the beach does not wear out the way the flavor of a museum does. The older, more sophisticated, and more jaded hearts are a little harder to delight.

Some of the more mutinous of our group awoke late on the morning of departure, and hadn’t packed a single thing for themselves. By contrast, the two youngest had been packed up for a week. (We will not hold it against the six-year-old that he forgot to pack any shirts. After all, he had packed everything else that mattered: a toothbrush, underwear, shorts, pajamas, and his stuffed dinosaur and a pocket-sized fighter jet.)

The older children approached my amazing vacation plans with the enthusiasm of criminals heading to the gallows. Come to think of it, they were acting like criminals that should have been heading to the gallows. One thoughtful soul helpfully offered, an hour before departure, to stay at home and finish summer assignments. This new plan could lighten the load on the car, open up more space for baggage, alleviate concerns about pet care, and reduce our carbon footprint.

I offered my carbon footprint.

Remind me on our next vacation to the mountains to bring along a bucket of sand and a pail of water for those who are missing the beach.

Camping is like trekking to England – Part II

Last week’s column (of course, you read it), was about how we needed every gadget under the sun to take our family tent camping in Luray last summer. Our eldest was leaving for college in a couple of weeks, and this trip was supposed to be like the “going abroad experience,” just cheaper and with more family members hanging around.

To understand the trip, you first have to analyze how we end the trip. Most people come home from an activity and unpack or just relax. Not my husband. He is one of those painfully organized people who, all the way home, is dictating the list of things that would really have improved the current experience. Don’t think that by driving separate, stuffed vehicles, you are going to escape this discussion. No. That’s why we have cell phones, or even worse, those handheld walkie-talkies that are the bane of every outing.

We have to do this on the way home, because otherwise he might forget. Never mind that our next camping trip won’t be for another four years. When it finally does happen, at least it will be more efficient.

His comments begin streaming, “We should buy a bigger shower bag. You can get them with double the insulation. We need better bungee cords to strap stuff down to the top of the car.” Or, we need to stock up on extra propane tanks. Also, there is advice on how to pack next time. “Make sure you store those picnic table clamps with the cover next time.” That was silly, how we had to waste eight minutes looking for the clamps with the tablecloth flapping our plates off. Or, he might say, “We should really buy the little shaker that combines the salt and the pepper, because that could cut down on the amount of stuff we are carrying by eliminating one shaker entirely.” There are eight of us, our dog, loads of food, tents, sleeping bags, and every gadget known to man crammed into two cars. We needed to drive both in order to haul all the specialized camping stuff. Now we need the combo shaker?

The only thing worse than getting these lists dictated to you along the way, is, God forbid, if you happen to be driving anywhere within view of a Wal-Mart or a sporting goods store. Then, we will have to stop on the way home and shop for the next, improved trip right there on the way back while the memory of what needs improvement is still raw in our minds.

The last time we had been camping, our family had had just six of us, and no dog. Immediately after that trip, we bought a ten-man tent to better accommodate us. By the time we actually opened the tent, our family had grown by 33%, not including the canine.

The ten-man tent is a bit of false advertising. It might be great for ten men, provided each one is built like a matchstick. Matchstick-Man also needs to be comfortable sleeping in an alternating head-toe pattern with the rest of the Matchstick Gang. Don’t bother mentioning foot odor, because if the Matchstick Gang has had beans and processed meat for dinner, foot odor is going to be by far the more pleasant of odors that might be wafting his way. Other issues will be far more volatile, if you get my drift. (Hopefully, when you go camping, you will not get my drift - or anyone else’s, for that matter.)

For a family of eight people, most of whom have padded proportions, however, the accommodations of the ten-man tent are a little snug. Consider that we, the padded ones, have recently been dining nonstop on hot dogs, marshmallows, and chocolate, and you will understand why the tent gets snugger as the trip goes on. By the end of our camping trip, I was beginning to wonder if our tent was missing the second level.

To my husband’s credit, he had had the sense to do a practice run on the tent in a controlled, low-pressure environment the day before. He is one of those rare individuals: prompt and organized, he thinks details through. It’s wonderful to have people like this organize an activity, unless you also happen to live with them. He had completely set up the tent in our front yard the day before our camping trip. (Fortunately, it fit there.) The younger kids, too young to be impacted by the stress of packing and preparations, squealed with delight and dashed in and out of the big, billowing tent. They reveled in its cavernous space. (Wait till we add people and pillows, Guys.)

When we rolled into the campground the next evening, the older kids spied the gigantic Yogi Bear statue (how could they not?), and looked at me and rolled their eyes. For some odd reason, I suspected they weren’t looking heavenward and thanking their lucky stars for such wonderful, family-fun loving, parents. They were praying they wouldn’t encounter anyone they knew.

As we maneuvered to our tent-site, I was relieved that my husband had taken the precautionary measure of setting up the tent at home, because we positioned our cars into the campsite just as daylight was donning her running shoes and preparing to flee. With dusk encroaching, a light but insistent drizzle began, eventually leaving us chilled-to-the-bone, even for August.

I wondered if this is what England felt like. Didn’t I say camping was almost like going to Europe?

Camping in Luray or trekking to England – just add imagination

Most people think camping gets you close to nature and your loved ones, while allowing an escape from the daily rat race. Others see it as an expression of the pioneering American spirit. Whatever the reason, hordes of us are driven to temporarily trade hearth and home for the great, paved wilderness. We are guided by the intrinsic American urge to discover and conquer, as well as by the latest GPS navigational system. We gab away on our cell phones while the kids are surrounded by the glorious sights and sounds of nature, only it can’t penetrate their iPOD-stuffed ear canals or the latest animated “classic” DVD piped out in surround sound in the back.

Don’t be fooled by these superficially sublime reasons. The real reason anyone goes camping is to gorge on ridiculous “foods” that would never, under normal circumstances, pass for a meal. Think you can get away with serving canned pork-n-beans, roasted hot dogs, and toasted marshmallows for dinner at home? I thought not. Remove access to the refrigerator and kitchen, though, and food standards vanish. As chief cook, I love losing the standards.

Last summer, before our eldest left for college, we spent four nights camping. It was supposed to be a final all-of-us-as-a-family blast. It was somewhat like sending the new graduate to England for the summer, except you just needed to add a little imagination.

My husband, who always thinks with convenience, comfort, and security in mind, suggested we rent a cabin with a kitchenette, bathroom, and climate control. If he wanted to suffer, he points out, why did he emigrate from India to the States?

Just like yours, our children are immune to parental wisdom. They can deflect and reject any advice we give. If we were smart parents, we would say the opposite of what we want the kids to do, but we’re not that smart.

“Your father thinks we ought to rent a cabin with a kitchenette at Jellystone Park in Luray,” I told them. That sealed our fate. Immediately the children turned on us, and were convinced that the only way to go camping was in tents. I must admit, that I also defected from the parental camp. (They outnumber us, plus they’ve got the cuteness factor.)

“What good is camping if we’re just going to open up a suitcase inside of a cabin,” they queried. I agreed and added, “And what’s the point of having half of our garage clogged with camping material if we don’t use it?”

I have this weird psychology. I feel we are “losing” money if we don’t use everything we have ever purchased, and this makes de-junking very difficult. Not de-junking makes finding all of our glorious purchases a challenge, too. Tent camping, in which we could employ the maximum number of gadgets that were clogging our garage, seemed to be the morally superior choice.

Want to see gadgets? Walk the camping aisle sometime. You can effectively furnish an entire household off those gadgets alone. We have so much camping stuff that we could camp out of our own garage if we ever needed, provided we could actually find the stuff in there.

We have the camp coffee percolator and the hot shower bag, which is an oversized hot-water bottle, just tougher and blacker. You leave it in a sunny spot and suspend it from a tree before use. (I hope it’s not too much of a stretch that there might be a tree or two where you are camping.) I warn you that “hot” is a relative term. If you are Inuit (notice my ethnic sensitivity precludes the use of the offensive term “Eskimo”) and don’t mind swimming with ice cubes, good. Otherwise, this “hot” means when the water hits any part of your body that you are foolish enough to expose, you will not shriek, shrivel, and die instantly. You will just shriek and shrivel. You will gasp for air. You will be glad you chose a campsite that has hot public showers, and you will stuff the black bladder back into the garage for another day…just in case.