Family matters

My dad’s summer with the Boy Scouts

Today’s Summertime Rewind guest writer is more of a guest speaker, because it’s the only way I could get my dad to share a summertime story with us. I dragged this one out of him while he made potstickers to go with our leftovers from Forbidden City last week.

“You could write about riding the bus all over town,” I suggest. My grandma was a city bus driver, and my dad and his siblings used her passes to traverse the town.

Dad doesn’t like that idea, though.

“That’s the highlight of my childhood?” he says. “Riding the bus?”

“It doesn’t have to be a highlight,” I say. “Just a memory. What about the time you hitchhiked to Florida?”

“That was Easter.”

“Didn’t you do anything during the summer?”

And then the big reveal: “I broke my leg one summer.”

“That’s a good story!” I say. And one I don’t think I’ve heard before.

“That’s not a good story,” he protests.

“But it’s a story,” I tell him, and he finally agrees to share it.

“I was in the Boy Scouts,” he says. “The Boy Scouts was a traumatic experience. I was a Boy Scout for one summer. Maybe a year. In the wintertime I went on a ‘polar bear’ …”

“What’s a ‘polar bear’?” I ask.

“I slept outside in the winter in a tent,” he says. “And then in the summertime we went on a canoe trip and I spent the rest of eternity selling cookies and working at pancake suppers and trying to raise money to go to camp for two weeks. And the week before I went to camp? I broke my leg riding my bicycle down the soapbox derby hill. So I couldn’t go to camp. And I spent my summer in a cast.”

“That’s a sad story,” I say.

“They’re all sad stories,” he says.

And then we sit down to a dinner of leftovers, pot stickers and corn nuggets. Which is a strange combination but not a sad story at all.

On the Road

To the best of my knowledge, I will not be spending time in an RV this July

I’m taking a break from blogging this month and sharing some words from friends, some posts from the past and other assorted bric-a-brac. This was originally published on July 29, 2011, as “Now I know where to find great T-shirts in central Alabama” during that time when I was traveling the Deep South with Jenna on her All Thrifty States tour.

We spent Monday night at the home of Jenna’s friend Cecelia and her husband, Ryan. Before we all crashed, we ordered pizza and watched the “Breaking Bad” pilot. I’ve only been on the road with Jenna for a few days, and it was so nice to return to “normal” life. Jenna has been on the road for 30-plus days; I can’t imagine how welcome these little in-home oases are for her!

I woke up Tuesday to the rain gently falling against the window, with a soft light streaming through the trees. I pulled myself out of bed and got ready to face the day, only to snuggle back into our hosts’ couch to finish my book. I’ll take that every morning, please. After finishing “The Selected Works of Whimsical cat is whimsical.T.S. Spivet” — which was weird but compelling, although I didn’t really find the end all that satisfying — I ate a few pieces of leftover cheese bread from Papa John’s and begged Jenna for some ibuprofen. Despite the day’s delightful beginnings, I’d woken up with a hoopendoodle of a headache.

The ibuprofen started to work its magic, and we headed out to visit the Goodwill store in Montgomery, Alabama. Goodwill is sponsoring Jenna’s trip, so she’s trying to visit as many of the shops as she can along her route. Like the Buckhead Goodwill, the Montgomery store was spacious, clean and well-organized. Many years ago I overheard a kid at a thrift store complaining to his mom that the shop smelled “like broccoli and old ladies.” Maybe Jenna just has a knack for choosing the best stores, but I’m thinking maybe thrift stores in general have cleaned up their act a bit. That is to say: I’ve been impressed at how tidy the stores we’ve visited have been.

The Montgomery Goodwill gets my vote for both Best T-Shirts and Most Wonderful Book Section so far this trip. They had a vast array of N’Sync t-shirts, as well as a host of goofy slogans such as “I (heart) hot moms” and I (cheeseburger) cows.” Their book section was actually its own room, which could have functioned as a small used book store. The lack of organization in there made me a little twitchy — the “Dune” books should all be together, for one, and I spied four copies of Robert James Waller’s “Puerto Vallarta Squeeze” and a variety of Paul Reiser tomes scatter wily-nily across the bookshelves — but they had an impressive selection. I bought a copy of Tom Wolfe’s “A Man in Full,” a circa-1964 cookbook from Brennan’s restaurant and a set of flip-through explorer cards for the kids.

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We started the drive to Mobile, Alabama, after Jenna finished a few interviews with the local media, and we made it about halfway there before HaRVey politely requested an oil change. His little dashboard notification system said, “Pardon me, miss, but I could use a spot of oil. Pip-pip, cheerio!” OK, well maybe it wasn’t that, verbatim, but it was along those lines. So we made a brief pitstop, then carried on our way.

The sky was ominously dark in the distance for the rest of the drive, but we forged ahead anyway, with a song in our hearts and Nutella-graham snacks in our hands. The skies were clear when we arrived at our campsite, and Jenna made us some Butternut Squash Ravioli for dinner. It was delicious, but it made me miss my Poppy something ferocious. The clear skies seemed to be giving way to more rain as I typed this, and there was enough thunder to make me a little nervous. Let’s hope it isn’t a night like the one Jenna experienced in Iowa!

Lessons learned on Day Four

  • Toasted almonds and garlic are a genius addition to butternut squash ravioli.
  • Getting the oil changed in an RV is expensive.
    • Family matters

    The best hotdog I ever ate

    1 Comment

    Today’s guest writer for the Summertime Rewind series is April. April lived in Missouri the same time that we did, but we didn’t become friends until after we’d moved away. Another reason I’m thankful for the internet!

    April is a scientist and the mom of one of the cutest little girls I’ve ever seen.

    When I was asked to write a guest post about a childhood memory of summer, all I could think of was heat. I’ve just moved back to the Midwest after a five-year stint in the Mediterranean climate of the San Francisco Bay Area. All those years of mild weather have turned me into a bit of a wimp, and I’ve been struggling with having actual seasons and with the very early summer we’ve been experiencing this year. So it seems fitting, at least to me, that the memory I’m sharing is one in which heat is a vital ingredient to the story.

    In the waning weeks of summer, I was a bored ten-year old, waiting for school to begin. The weather was sweltering, so I was mainly watching TV and pondering testing out the assertion grown-ups kept making about it being hot enough outside to fry an egg. One morning I happened to catch on of those kiddie science shows; it might have been Mr. Wizard. The project for the day was to make a solar cooker. I should probably mention that I pass for a scientist, in the modern world. My parents should have known, from the time my age hit the double digits, that this would be my fate, but they were probably too busy yelling at me for ruining all the shampoo by mixing it with my step-father’s shaving cream, hoping a cool and unexpected chemical reaction would occur. (It never did).

    A solar cooker, at least the one made on the show that day, was really quite easy to construct, and I happened to have all the necessary equipment. With no objections from my mother, I set to work. I collected the supplies: a shoebox, aluminum foil, a wire clothes hanger and a hotdog.

    photo courtesy April
    It was simple enough to line the bottom of the shoebox with aluminum foil and poke a hole in each end. The only really challenging part was straightening out the wire hanger, but somehow I managed. The wire hanger served as a skewer to suspend the hotdog in the middle of the foil-lined box. Hidden behind the garage, I carried out my clandestine project. I’m not sure why I was trying to maintain such stealth, but I didn’t want anyone to know of my experiment. I placed the newly fashioned solar cooker in the sun and waited, turning the wire-hanger a few times to ensure even cooking. And cook it did, that hotdog browned up nicely; it plumped up like it had come straight out of a Ball Park Franks commercial.

    Unceremoniously I devoured my experiment, no plates or buns; I ate it with my bare hands, the juice dripping down my chin. It was the best hotdog I have ever eaten. I don’t actually like hotdogs. I didn’t then, and I don’t now, but that day, eating that hotdog was rapture for me. I tried to repeat my initial success, but could never achieve transcendental quality of that first hotdog. I now realize it was not the hotdog that made the memory of the flavor so great, but it was the sense of accomplishment I gained from a project done entirely on my own.

    Now I have a three year old, and I hope one day she has her own hotdog moment. I doubt it will in anyway resemble mine, but I hope I can give her the resources and freedom she needs to experiment.