(no subject)
Vacations I Have Taken
When I was eight, my parents took my brother and me to Phoenix to visit my aunt and uncle.
Right before we left, my brother - who was in kindergarten - had an accident at the drinking fountain. Stooping down to get a drink at the same time, he and another kid knocked heads, leaving my brother with a piteous black eye.
This was around the time I first got my Nintendo, the old 8-bit Nintendo with the games that wouldn’t play without having first blown into the bottoms like how you’d play a harmonica. I only had Super Mario Bros., but my controller-hand dexterity had not yet developed to its current apex of talent; thus, I could not beat Level 1-4, the first castle, and I became obsessed with trying to do so. So much, in fact, that I would play for hours on end, never leaving my parents’ bedroom (where the console was), the tinny drone of the sinister fortress music echoing through the house until, in a fit of anger, I’d lose all my lives and have to start over.
My parents, eager to get me away from the Frankenstein’s monster of a game system (which, incidentally, they had bought me to play when it was too late to go outside), were glad to make the trip. I was decidedly less glad to go, as I did not want to leave my Nintendo without first beating the castle level. As we walked through the airport to board the plane, people grinned nervously at my parents, a child with a conspicuous black eye on their right and another, bawling and crying out “I HATE YOU” with no apparent regard for the attention he was drawing, on the left.
For most of the vacation I sat sullenly, a fan of neither heat nor the desert, waiting until I could go home and play Mario again. My mother would try to cheer me up, and suggest that I try to have fun, scheduling trips to outdoor parks, until she heard from my aunt that scorpions would hide out in shoes. “Because they like the dark, enclosed space,” she said, “they would remain there, placidly curled up in the toe of a shoe,” until, having been jarringly assaulted by a rapidly-interloping set of toes, awaken and sting with all the fury of a ham-fisted toddler trying to stab a bug with a pencil. The rest of the trip, before going anywhere, she’d check every one of her shoes, hitting the soles of each alertly against the ground, ready to leap away should a scorpion tumble free from the sneaker’s recesses.
Eventually, she opted not to go out, saying that, “she was too tired,” her shoes noticeably absent from her feet as she walked around the house.
We went to dinner at a country-western-themed restaurant in a tourist town, ‘Rawhide,’ one night. I ate rattlesnake, which tasted vaguely of chicken, and wondered suspiciously, with a perspicacity beyond my years, how often the snakes’ poison sacs accidentally got blended up into the food. Meanwhile, this twangy, terrible-sounding local band performed on stage, and I complained to my aunt that I hated the music and wanted them to stop. A few minutes later, when the band left the platform, I thanked her and she smiled. Later that night, I reminded her of how nice it was that she did me that favor, of telling them to leave, and she scolded me - “I didn’t tell them anything, their set had ended, and you need to learn to have more appreciation,” she said.
My father, who stayed mostly around my uncle for the trip, would occasionally try to get us - me, my brother, and my mother, avoidant of anything for which she had to wear something on her feet - to be adventurous, outside. We drove several hours to visit a ghost town one day, the ruins of dusty, ramshackle saloons and stores standing forlornly, neglected and sun-beaten. Then we drove another hour to another ghost town, which looked remarkably similar to the first. By the time arrived at the third ghost town, not all that different than the second and first, my mother was skittish of any movement from alongside the paths, my brother tired from walking around in the heat, and I irritated by the dust and the dryness. We drove home, each short of temper, and left the ghost towns to the ghosts.
It was particularly hot the day the vacation was almost over, and I was trying my best to stave off heat exhaustion. The morning before we left the house for the airport, my brother fell from a stepladder in the kitchen onto the floor, smacking his face hard against the linoleum and incurring, amazingly, a second black eye. And, as if Lady Luck were smiling down on us, my mother, as she packed up the last of her belongings, saw a scorpion skitter guiltily from the closet, confirming the reality of her otherwise psychosomatic worst fears.
This time, in the terminal, people were not so furtive with their stares, nor were they grinning: my brother, like a shamed raccoon, skidded about with two black eyes, my mother, jumpy, watched the ground with a dogged intensity, and I dragged along defeatedly, parched and whining that I was too tired to go on, and they should just leave me here to die.
We got home, eventually. My mom lay my brother down with ice over his eye(s), unpacked her shoes very deliberately, and just as she and my dad went to take a nap themselves, I started to play Mario.
I still didn’t beat Level 1-4, but I did try for three hours, the music accompanying my efforts all the while.
The following summer, for our vacation, we went to Disneyland for a day.
When I was eight, my parents took my brother and me to Phoenix to visit my aunt and uncle.
Right before we left, my brother - who was in kindergarten - had an accident at the drinking fountain. Stooping down to get a drink at the same time, he and another kid knocked heads, leaving my brother with a piteous black eye.
This was around the time I first got my Nintendo, the old 8-bit Nintendo with the games that wouldn’t play without having first blown into the bottoms like how you’d play a harmonica. I only had Super Mario Bros., but my controller-hand dexterity had not yet developed to its current apex of talent; thus, I could not beat Level 1-4, the first castle, and I became obsessed with trying to do so. So much, in fact, that I would play for hours on end, never leaving my parents’ bedroom (where the console was), the tinny drone of the sinister fortress music echoing through the house until, in a fit of anger, I’d lose all my lives and have to start over.
My parents, eager to get me away from the Frankenstein’s monster of a game system (which, incidentally, they had bought me to play when it was too late to go outside), were glad to make the trip. I was decidedly less glad to go, as I did not want to leave my Nintendo without first beating the castle level. As we walked through the airport to board the plane, people grinned nervously at my parents, a child with a conspicuous black eye on their right and another, bawling and crying out “I HATE YOU” with no apparent regard for the attention he was drawing, on the left.
For most of the vacation I sat sullenly, a fan of neither heat nor the desert, waiting until I could go home and play Mario again. My mother would try to cheer me up, and suggest that I try to have fun, scheduling trips to outdoor parks, until she heard from my aunt that scorpions would hide out in shoes. “Because they like the dark, enclosed space,” she said, “they would remain there, placidly curled up in the toe of a shoe,” until, having been jarringly assaulted by a rapidly-interloping set of toes, awaken and sting with all the fury of a ham-fisted toddler trying to stab a bug with a pencil. The rest of the trip, before going anywhere, she’d check every one of her shoes, hitting the soles of each alertly against the ground, ready to leap away should a scorpion tumble free from the sneaker’s recesses.
Eventually, she opted not to go out, saying that, “she was too tired,” her shoes noticeably absent from her feet as she walked around the house.
We went to dinner at a country-western-themed restaurant in a tourist town, ‘Rawhide,’ one night. I ate rattlesnake, which tasted vaguely of chicken, and wondered suspiciously, with a perspicacity beyond my years, how often the snakes’ poison sacs accidentally got blended up into the food. Meanwhile, this twangy, terrible-sounding local band performed on stage, and I complained to my aunt that I hated the music and wanted them to stop. A few minutes later, when the band left the platform, I thanked her and she smiled. Later that night, I reminded her of how nice it was that she did me that favor, of telling them to leave, and she scolded me - “I didn’t tell them anything, their set had ended, and you need to learn to have more appreciation,” she said.
My father, who stayed mostly around my uncle for the trip, would occasionally try to get us - me, my brother, and my mother, avoidant of anything for which she had to wear something on her feet - to be adventurous, outside. We drove several hours to visit a ghost town one day, the ruins of dusty, ramshackle saloons and stores standing forlornly, neglected and sun-beaten. Then we drove another hour to another ghost town, which looked remarkably similar to the first. By the time arrived at the third ghost town, not all that different than the second and first, my mother was skittish of any movement from alongside the paths, my brother tired from walking around in the heat, and I irritated by the dust and the dryness. We drove home, each short of temper, and left the ghost towns to the ghosts.
It was particularly hot the day the vacation was almost over, and I was trying my best to stave off heat exhaustion. The morning before we left the house for the airport, my brother fell from a stepladder in the kitchen onto the floor, smacking his face hard against the linoleum and incurring, amazingly, a second black eye. And, as if Lady Luck were smiling down on us, my mother, as she packed up the last of her belongings, saw a scorpion skitter guiltily from the closet, confirming the reality of her otherwise psychosomatic worst fears.
This time, in the terminal, people were not so furtive with their stares, nor were they grinning: my brother, like a shamed raccoon, skidded about with two black eyes, my mother, jumpy, watched the ground with a dogged intensity, and I dragged along defeatedly, parched and whining that I was too tired to go on, and they should just leave me here to die.
We got home, eventually. My mom lay my brother down with ice over his eye(s), unpacked her shoes very deliberately, and just as she and my dad went to take a nap themselves, I started to play Mario.
I still didn’t beat Level 1-4, but I did try for three hours, the music accompanying my efforts all the while.
The following summer, for our vacation, we went to Disneyland for a day.