I had been begging for an extra week ever since the news came. We were moving to Indiana to be closer to my Grandma Thelma. My Grandpa Fred had died a couple years prior, and with her getting older, living alone wasn’t getting any easier. Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t a problem. I love my Grandma dearly, and I would do anything for her. The problem was the timing.
Now, I’m typically a pretty mild mannered guy when it comes to family matters, but when my dad told me that we were moving out of our house and clear across the country from all my friends on, of all days, my birthday…my EIGHTEENTH birthday…I got a wee bit irritable. At this point, I, being the calm, cool, rational person that I am, raised holy hell. My dad, being the well-balanced, understanding fella he is, had no idea why I was so angry. Still, after a week of general unpleasantness from me, including the silent treatment and other punishments inflicted by prepubescent school girls, my dad relented and had the date changed. Instead of my birthday, June twenty-fifth, the closing date was the much improved June twenty-fourth. There have been precious few times in my life when I have regarded my father as a complete dumbass, but this was one of them. He really, truly didn’t get it, and I wasted no time in letting him know.
“Get out,” I remember telling him as I sat up on my bed. “Just…get out.” I was livid, to put it lightly. It didn’t matter how many times he apologized, it didn’t matter how many times he apologized, it didn’t matter how many times my mother said “Dan, he’s doing the best he can.” The plain and simple fact was that it was my eighteenth birthday, the big one eight, and I was therefore still well within my rights being an angsty teenager. So I spent the rest of the school year in a huff, counting down the days until my life would inevitably end, and not enjoying the atmosphere that surrounds graduation every year. I was in the center ring, I was the one being asked what life had in store for me, and I was too stupid to milk it for every damned second.
Graduation soared by far too quickly, and I don’t remember much of it. I remember chunks, like the idiot in the parking lot making barnyard animal noises. He got cut off in the middle of the ceremony without explanation. I smiled as I thought about him being carted away and given the barnyard animal treatment. Cruel, I know, but he was annoying. I remember Mr. Ferguson’s rambling speech to our graduating class. As he walked up the aisle to the podium, I could smell the pot on him from four or five seats in. His speech didn’t make a lick of sense, but just four years down the road, I remember it a lot better than Mr. Schultz’s speech. Ironically, all I remember about Mr. Schultz’s speech is him talking about how he couldn’t remember what the faculty speaker at his graduation had said, and that most people are in that same boat. Touché, Mr. Schultz. Touché. Mostly, though, I remember the carnage that followed graduation, as all the students struggled to get off those gowns and find their family. Through all the carnage, a hand found my shoulder. Pete’s. He had been one of my best friends since middle school. Pete led me through the teeming masses to a small corner of the field, where Sam and his family were waiting. Pete threw his arms around Sam and I and yelled something out that was lost in all the other yells. A flash from Sam’s father’s camera blinded me temporarily, and the next thing I knew, I was being tugged through the crowd again. I looked over to see my mother with her hand firmly around my arm. I haven’t seen Pete or Sam since.
The next two weeks are a blur. Party here, congratulatory phone calls there, and, of course, packing everywhere. Clothes, dishes, precious treasures wrapped in paper towels, all thrown into whatever boxes we could find. My room was slowly stripped of all that made it mine, until finally even the bed and dresser were gone. I had been so proud of my room. It was far away from everyone else, and it was the only bedroom in the house with carpeting. Of course, whenever I had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, it was a full-tilt run across the frigid concrete floors that made up the rest of the basement and up two flights of stairs to the nearest toilet. This was made infinitely more difficult by the two cats of ours who had made a habit since their kitten-days of taking naps on the stairs and letting out whatever bodily fluid seemed appropriate at the time on the basement floor. Despite it’s flaws, though, I was going to miss my dingy corner of the basement.
Moving day brought another unpleasant surprise. I was to be locked in a car with my Grandpa Wes for the entire two-day drive to my Grandma’s house in Hanover. This was the same grandfather who couldn’t make it to my graduation because of prior plans to go to Cancun or some such tropical paradise that week.
To give you some insight into the twisted clockwork mind of Wes Bishop, I remember when he and my Grandma Betty (both my Dad’s parents. Take that as you will.) were babysitting my sister and me years ago. We were talking about our favorite foods; favorite veggies, favorite pork product, what have you. Anyways, we got around to favorite fruit. I said apples, Jessica said ketchup (which was also her favorite veggie and pork product. Yeah, she was that kind of kid.) my grandma said orange, and my good ol’ Wes said Elton John. He was kidding, of course. He didn’t like THAT kind of fruit, even if they could play the piano. This was who I was forced to be locked in a car with for two solid days.
As my dad and Wes loaded the last knick knacks into the back of the moving van, I was making my last calls on dad’s cell phone. Goodbye to Matt, Dave, Danielle, and any other friends who’s numbers I could remember at the time. I finished the last of my calls shortly after the back shutter on the van came crashing down. We all piled into our vehicles; Grandpa and me in the big black Blazer, Mom and Jessica in the red PT Cruiser with the two stair-dwelling cats, and dad all alone in the big moving van. We rolled out of Sanford in what I imagined must have looked like a weird, twisted funeral procession. “I should be wearing black,” I thought. Then I realized this is how goth kids come to be, and I pushed all related thoughts out of my mind.
Interstates are the bane of long distance traveling. I know they speed things up, but when I’m trying to keep my mind of the fact that I’m moving further and further away from friendships that took a decade to forge, like a finely tuned butt-groove in your favorite couch, I need more scenery than walls of trees and the occasional billboard. Hell, when one of those obligatory billboards for an adult bookstore popped up on the horizon, it made me painfully aware of how horribly close I was to Wes and how terribly far away all the people were who would help me achieve the most sacred ritual of the first ever trek to the porn store. It was right up there with first communion as far as importance goes, and I’d be damned if I was going to share it with my creepy racist homophobic grandpa. Wes was quiet, for the most part. This was expected. He’d always been indifferent in as many ways as I can imagine, to the point of being downright stoic at times. When he smiles, it’s small, unnoticeable to the untrained eye. When he laughs, he can’t be heard across the room. This didn’t keep him from chiming in with enough regularity that I couldn’t listen to my music at the preferred level. This was during the phase in my life that I felt Journey should always be cranked up all the way. With Wes’s preferred speaking level, I couldn’t listen to my music at much above a whisper. Since Journey at a whisper is Journey not worth listening to, I quickly gave up on that small comfort. Dropping my CD player back in my backpack, I slouched down into my seat and tried to lose myself in thought. I can’t remember where exactly my mind went off to, but it was far too nice for me to be happy when I was dragged back to reality by Wes’s latest attempt at a discussion.
“What do you know about the Civil War, Dan?” I sighed, rolled my eyes, and listed off only the facts that didn’t require me to break a mental sweat to recall. Union, Confederacy, slavery, Appomattox, et cetera. He scoffed at how little we’d been taught in high school and I resisted the temptation to tell him that we didn’t all have the luxury of having been there. The car ride was too long to be at each others throats in New Hampshire, so I just stared at my lap and let out the occasional “yep,” “uh huh” and “oh really?” as he rambled on about what he deemed to be the more interesting aspects of that particular topic.
There were more questions throughout the day, each more inane than the last. He wanted to know what I thought Heaven was like. I waxed lyrical on a few bullshit ideas that I’d just come up with. Whatever I said must’ve been satisfactory, because nothing more was said on the topic. When it all came down to it, neither of us were very good at starting a conversation. At least he was giving it a shot, and he kept on trying clear through lunch, when we met up with the rest of the family in some shitty little café right off the exit to God-knows-where. It was here that we decided that we would forge on to Buffalo, New York, where we’d spend the night and finish the rest of the drive the next day. The rest of the conversation revolved around the chances of the Boston Red Sox in the 2004 season which, even though I don’t pay much attention to sports, I wisely placed at slim to nil for the World Series.
The drive continued in silence, random interjections of stupid questions from the driver’s seat sprinkled in every now and then, but it was largely an uneventful rest of the day. That is, it was, until we got to New York. Wes and I were trucking along just fine, with no sign of the PT Cruiser or the moving van in the rear view mirror. We didn’t think much of this, him because he’s Wes Bishop, me because I wasn’t aware. As we were hitting the home stretch to Buffalo, the cell phone lit up and started rattling around the cup cozy we’d put it in. Wes grabbed it. Apparently, I wasn’t to be trusted with it, which was fine by me. Anything to take responsibility off my shoulders was just hunky dory. Grandpa grunted into the phone a couple times, occasionally breaking into the smallest of small talk, never enough for me to tell what was really going on. Finally, he ended the call and put the phone down.
“There’s something wrong with the van. They’ll meet us for breakfast.” That was all the rundown I got from Wes that night, which made sense. He hadn’t really pressed for answers. I don’t think another word was said between us for the rest of the night. We pulled into the Days Inn, he went inside while I waited in the car, I followed him to the room, we prepared for bed and tucked ourselves in. Thankfully, he had sprung for a room with two separate beds, or else it might have been a long, sleepless night for me.
The next day started much like the first one had ended. We woke up to the cell phone ringing. The rest of the family were on their way and would be in the area soon. This is what I gathered from the fact that we soon met up with them. All Grandpa said to me was a garbled, mumbled something about a shower and Denny’s. I looked out the window, everything one big blur without my glasses on. It was a light blur, though, so I had no excuse to ask for another half hour. The sunlight coming through the window didn’t do much to wake me up. The same seemed to be true for Wes as he stared blearily out into the parking lot as he buttoned up his shirt, but really, that’s how he looked most of the time, so it was hard to tell.
Breakfast was entertaining, since I finally got to learn what all had happened the night before. Apparently, dad had been driving along in the big, loud, clunky moving van when, all of a sudden, all the lights went out. Being after dark, this was a bit of an inconvenience. Dad contacted the company, who got someone out to take care of the truck in the wee hours of the morning so they could get an early start. This surprised me, and still does, seeing as every instance of a busted vehicle I have come across has taken at least several days to fix. I guess people tend to respond more quickly when it’s their busted vehicle that needs to be fixed. There was some business with the guy at the hotel they stayed at who, upon learning that we were moving from Sanford, Maine, gave them all sorts of discounts on the room, simply because that was where he had his first lobster. Mom and dad took turns imitating the apparently very excitable New Yorker before my sister, as she tends to do, steered the conversation back to the Red Sox. Being a die hard fan, she spoke a bit louder about it than she usually does, simply because we were in the heart of Yankees territory. I was glad to get out of there without getting shot or smacking her, though the latter seemed like it would have been fun.
I napped until well through Pennsylvania, which meant a good couple hours for Wes to build up his first question, so it was sure to be a real humdinger. No sooner had I wiped those annoying crusties out of the corner of my eyes when he asked “Dan, why do you think they keep water in water towers?” I stared at him, still not fully awake, praying that he hadn’t just saved this topic for when I woke up. This was strictly a “ponder it for a moment, then let it go” sort of thing. When I looked around, however, there wasn’t a water tower in sight. Either he’d just randomly started thinking about water towers, or he had been mulling the topic over for more miles than it needed to be. I don’t know which I preferred. I looked back at him and, still waking up, grunted out an “Iunno.” My inability to form actual words didn’t slow him down, though. He launched into a long lecture about water pressure and all sorts of fun stuff. It was at this point I realized, he just wanted to show me up. He knew something I didn’t, and was either out to show how smart he was, or to make sure that my moving experience was as miserable as possible by throwing a lecture in on top of everything else. The lecture continued on, covering everything from cell phone towers on back to the Civil War, until that merciful cell phone started dancing around the cup cozy again. It was lunch time, and apparently through his grunts and single word sentences, he and dad had agreed to get off at the next exit for Bob Evans.
My family has a tradition of going out to eat on our birthdays. We also have a tradition of not mentioning that it’s our birthday to any of the employees so we don’t have to endure the little rituals that they tend to come up with, announcing it to the entire room and singing to you. Dad simply handed me a crisp twenty dollar bill to commemorate the occasion. “Sorry we couldn’t get you a cake or anything, son, but it’s a little tricky to do something like that on the road.” I grunted, not liking being reminded that I was spending my birthday far away from those who would have made the occasion memorable. Despite all my attempts to seem sullen and angry at the world, I couldn’t keep my eyes off of a little display on the table for a Reese’s parfait type deal. It’s no secret that I’m a peanut butter junkie. Even Wes knows this, and he noticed my googly eyes. Before I realized what he was doing, he flagged down a waitress. “Could we get a Reese’s thing for the birthday boy?” he said loudly. I could feel my face turning bright red as I shot a “shut up” look at him. The waitress just nodded and disappeared into the back. Sports conversations took over the table once again, until the sound of three people walking our way caused everyone to pipe down. I looked up from the mess that was once a very good chicken to see three women in Bob Evans uniforms, including our waitress, with a Reese’s parfait with a candle in it. They broke out into a loud chorus of the (thankfully) traditional “Happy Birthday” song, applauded, and disappeared as I blew the candle out. The conversation picked back up at the Red Sox pitching staff as I munched on the Reese’s dish, which was only alright.
We got back on the interstate easily, and Grandpa started in on it again. Water towers, Civil War facts, and other tirades quickly became background noise as I desperately tried to be hypnotized by the median lines on the road. I ran through the lines to Journey songs in my head, I imagined what Dave and the crew must be doing at that very moment. Inevitably, my mind turned to the impending doom that was college. I wasn’t looking forward to it. College meant growing up, or so I thought. I wasn’t sure if I’d be smart enough, I didn’t know if I’d make any friends. All I knew about college was from the Dean’s list students on the various college websites I’d looked through, and movies like “Animal House.” I didn’t know where I fit in the grand scheme of things, but I knew I was no straight A student, and I sure as hell wasn’t ready to go to parties of John Belushi standards. These are the thoughts that filled the state of Ohio for me.
Dinner was rushed and thoroughly unmemorable. I do remember remarking on how horrible of a birthday it had been, waking up in an uncomfortable motel bed, being stuck in a cramped car all day. Compared to all my prior birthdays, which had all been greeted with some sort of fanfare, this was several steps down on the ladder. My parents just got quiet for a bit before striking into some other area of conversation.
We passed the “Welcome to Indiana” sign with Wes yapping on about my great grandfather, whom I had never met, though he sounded like he was every bit as interesting as Wes was. It was dark, I was tired, and I was in a bad mood. Even the Mountain Dew’s that I had been treated to throughout the trip couldn’t perk me up. I just wanted to get to Thelma’s so I could at least get some alone time and relax without having to worry about being assaulted by questions. I wish I could say that on this whole two day drive, Wes and I had grown closer in some way, shape, or form, but if anything, it served to drive us apart. This was a horrible realization, but I think he had it, too. As we coasted into Madison, neither of us said a word.
Hanover used to fill me with wonder and excitement. Every Christmas I can remember was spent in this small town, with Grandma Thelma. Riding into town in late June has a very different feel than in mid to late December, though, and the absence of lawn decorations and Christmas lights only brought me down more. Grandma’s street felt a lot less magical. I usually felt an extreme surge of energy as we pulled into the driveway of that wonderful house. That night, I felt only tired. As I climbed out of the Blazer, she was already out the door. Grandma Thelma. Nothing could crush her spirit. I gave her a hug, wanting to get inside and lay down, my legs stretched out and splayed in whatever directions they happened to go in. I could hear the commotion behind me as the other two vehicles arrived, doors slamming, laughing, chattering. I seemed to be the only one who hadn’t had the time of his life.
“Dan,” I heard my dad call as I was edging towards the door. I looked at him, and he held something out towards me from half way down the driveway. I meandered in his general direction, still getting used to having my legs straight. “You know,” he said as I got closer, “when you turn eighteen, you’re kind of an adult. Now,” he said, rattling what looked to be one of those plastic containers from the baked goods section of the grocery store, “have a cupcake, Mr. Bishop.”
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