At a Good Clip

        I was packing my stuff back up at the end of winter break – my clothes, my pillow, and, most importantly, my coffee maker – when I came across a videotape titled, in black Sharpie, “Kung Fu.” I laughed and showed my brother. It was a homemade movie my siblings and I made during a vacation in New York, a vacation we had not taken in a while. We chuckled, remembering all the silly games we used to play during the road trip.
        “W, Wyoming,” my mom called out from the navigator seat, reading from the license plate of a passing Jeep Grand Cherokee. “Next is X!”
        The alphabet game, also known as the keep the kids busy game, was a regular on my family’s annual trip to visit the New York relatives. It was a friendly alternative to punching each other in the arm whenever a Volkswagen Beetle crawled by, or the family addition, “P.T. Cruiser Bruiser” (which followed the same logic).
         “X,” my dad would chime in excitedly, as we passed a railroad crossing sign. He did not beat the other six passengers of the Nissan Quest to any letters very often, despite having the advantage. New York was where he grew up. “X” was as far as we ever got.
        Before going to college in Virginia and meeting my mother, who he says is the best choice he ever made, as if there were others, my dad was a full-fledged Yankee. He grew up in Saratoga County, in western New York, with his sister, 13 years his elder, and his two older brothers. During our 14-15 hour car ride, depending on how much Pepsi any of the kids had downed at breakfast, dad would tell us stories of what could only be described as sibling abuse and adventures that he and his seemingly endless supply of “neighbors” would take. Most of these adventures ended with candy, or a spanking.
        My dad’s family, specifically his sister, Aunt Karen, owned a lake house on Hunt Lake, where we stayed. The cabin was pretty worn from old age, which just made picking fun at dad easier.
        “Why did you need a fireplace, if fire had not been invented yet, dad?” We would mockingly ask, before racing to the screen porch to incessantly swat at the wind-chimes. Brring. Brring.
        Unfortunately, the jokes were not as funny when applied to actual modernistic shortages: namely, the plumbing. Believe it or not, there are places on this fine Earth where there still does not exist reliable running water. Let’s just say, to avoid getting too personal or graphic, that after each visit to the powder room, you had to run out to the lake, fill up a bucket with lake water, and pour it, slowly, as not to slop, in order to flush…once.
        But, the one-week trip was a lot more than a few barefoot sneaks to the lake in a quest to flush the toilet. On the contrary, the cabin was filled with oodles of fun toys. The most fun ones, ironically, “were not toys.” There was an aged grand piano in the front room, with only a few working keys, that never ceased to be heard. Ding. Ding. The king of old toys was an Atari. Frogger was the only working game. Ding. Ding. We played chess, well, our rendition of chess, and when we were tired of the younger siblings changing the rules in their favor, we would go the porch and break open a deck of cards. “Spoons” was the name of the game, in which collecting four-of-a-kind drove all attentive players to grabbing at the silverware in the center of the table. Whoever was not scrappy enough to grab a spoon was out. Ding. Ding. The only reason the parents allowed us to partake in such a violent game, filled with annoyingly whining or even crying kids, was because at least we were “not playing the piano.” Ding. Ding.
        Swimming took place every day, though, coincidentally, it was always dampened by a slightly perturbed mother. We never did figure out why she was always so on edge when she stood watching us from the sand, though, it is possibly because we were only ever allowed to go swimming after nagging her ears off. But, at least we were not playing the piano!
        There was a dock about 50 feet from shore, anchored to the lake bottom. It was only about 20 feet deep where the dock floated, but the lake, at the dead center, lowered nearly twice that. My dad told me diving off of paddle boats to touch the very bottom was a weekly feat of his family. My older brother insists that he did it once. Yeah, right.
        A more believable story my dad likes to tell is that, when he was a kid he and one of his “neighbors” took a canoe all the way across Hunt Lake, walked northwest and paddled down Jenny River which feeds into Jenny Lake, canoe across it, walk east, row across Efner Lake, and then do it all again in reverse. All of this happened, allegedly, “before dinner time. Our moms never knew we did it.”
        After we had depleted our memory banks of all stories worth reminiscing about, we decided that we would play the found videotape. We wanted to see whether or not we should have majored in film in college. “You were a regular Spielberg,” my brother sarcastically said. We popped the videotape in, fumbled with the VCR (we had not used it in a while), and pressed play. We were slightly disappointed when all we saw was one of our sister’s ballet recitals. Thanks, dad.