197? I don't know where it is. Maybe it's Buena Vista, Colorado, maybe it's Rapid City, South Dakota. It's Sunday morning, and my parents are getting up in the other bed. I feel fine, but I pretend I don't. If I'm sick, I won't have to go to church. Then, I only see it as making me do something I don't want to do. Now, I see it as part of something worse...intense rigidity of thought and inability to get outside of ritual and make the vacation about having fun with the family, instead of paying heed to an irrelevant repetitive formality that instead of making him a good person, makes him unbending, cold, strict and angry. I will never forgive him for this, but then, all I can do is just pretend to be sick so I don't have to go.

1987 Leaving Seattle. We have to make it as far down the coast as possible. We have to get away from Seattle as quickly as possible. We are terrified, yet we feel safe with eachother. He's like the boogeyman following us, an albatross, his spirit circles our car. Florence, Oregon is beautiful, and I want to live there on the beach forever, with the grey sky and the dunes and washed up jellyfish bodies. But we need to keep going. We need to put distance between ourselves and Seattle. Coos Bay, I want to stay there some day in the winter with a horrible storm raging outside, me safe in a hotel by the beach. But not now. We have to go as far as we can. We make up stories about the albatross, like ghost stories around a camp fire. Crescent City has a rustic cabin just for us, small bed, but we don't mind because we'll hold eachother all night from fear, glad to be in eachother's arms and not in his house anymore. We walk down to the beach in the evening...there is a large snail crawling on some plants near the water. I want to live here too.

1968 Before I really start to resent him, before he starts to get really rigid, he tells us goodbye and says he hopes the train doesn't go off the tracks. He leaves the traincar, and there I am with my mom. I've been on trains before, the Hiawatha, I believe, from South Bend through the depressing sooty factories of Gary through Chicago to Racine. The Hiawatha was maroon inside. I definitely remember maroon and fuzzy velvet, and a vent where I cut my finger. And I would sing a drinking song my mom taught me much to her embarrassment. But this was a different train. It had a door on the compartment that you could close so you could use the odd steel toilet. And you could fold the chairs down to make the lower berth, and then pull down the upper berth. That's where I slept because I could climb up there. Except there were no windows up high, so I came down to my mom's bed, and we watched the country go by in the middle of the night.

Labels: Vacation