The end of the summer is a mess.
* With two weeks left before he flies back to college, Gavin knocked his face off the bottom of a swimming pool and broke a chunk of his front tooth. Emergency dentistry counts as summer adventure, if you subscribe to my motto: you know you're having an adventure when you aren't having any fun. Sitting on a curb outside a mechanic's shop in the middle of nowhere? Adventure! Flights grounded overnight in a city you've never been in? Adventure! When things go sideways, you just have to throw up your hands and go with it. Unless the adventure is a carnival ride with a bad seat belt, in which case you have to hang on to the bars for dear life. (This happened.)
* Mike changed the boy's return flight from Rochester to Newark, and is flying out with him to buy a car from his sister, then help the boy get it registered/insured and drive it up to RIT - forgetting it was the same week as the Spartan race he had been waiting 2 years to compete in. It's off for another year now, and now he's slopping around the house like a soggy wet towel of disappointment.
* One of our chickens died. She went missing right after the rooster was rehomed, and I was worried she might be sitting on fertilized eggs, but I couldn't find her anywhere. After a few days, the smell led us to her. Poor little hen. I wonder what happened.
* The after-school program raised their cost by 20%, but that doesn't matter because my kid didn't get a spot this year. Now she'll have to join a pack of street urchins and learn how to grift. Sorry, kid.
What was with that trip to Japan?
This was my fault. Folks, set the bar low on the first kid for every family tradition. When my oldest son lost a tooth at bedtime once, the tooth fairy only had a 5 dollar bill to leave under his pillow, and that became the going rate for every tooth for the next 15 years, because he told his little brother what to expect, and then they passed the word to their little sister. Keep quarters or dollars in your dresser from ages 5-10.
I, however, was an only child. We were poor, but what money we had didn't need to be split between other kids, so I always had food to eat and clothes that fit, and we could save up enough to travel from time to time.
When I was 15, we lived in a little house on Molokai. My mother is a storyteller with an entire peopled world living in her head, and we'd spend days laying around drinking tea while she told stories. In October of 1995 she was telling a story about an earthquake, the partial collapse of an underground city, and the survival of two people trapped in an opera theater - the main character and an opera singer. There was also a harrowing rescue of a chinchilla in an elevator shaft, and I have wanted a chinchilla ever since. Later on, over dinner, she asked me what I wanted for my birthday, which was a month away, and I joked that I wanted to go see an opera. I did want to see one, but that was ridiculous.
Well, she thought about it, made some phone calls, and decided we should do it. I was turning 16, tickets to San Francisco were less than $300, and there was a performance of Die Walküre that weekend. We could be impulsive and fancy for three days (my birthday always falls next to the long Thanksgiving weekend).
So we did it. We shopped for dresses, my mother bought a fake leopard fur coat she thought was funny, and we went to the opera in San Francisco. It was chilly, we ate some amazing dim sum, had our hair done, watched Valkyries scream in German for 3 hours, stayed in the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, got chased by a homeless man in Union Square, and made it back alive. On the flight home, I decided that someday I would do the same thing for my own kids when they turned 16. A fun little wildcard trip.
When Gavin was 15 I told him about my magical trip to San Francisco, and asked where he would choose to go. He said, "Harry Potter World!" Kind of disappointing, but okay, this could be more of a "goodbye childhood" kind of trip than a "coming of age" trip. Tickets to Los Angeles in December were terrible, but tickets to Japan were only $250. I didn't have a passport, and Zenny was too little, so the two boys went with their dad and had an amazing long weekend at Universal Studios in Japan.
It made an impact on Leif. When he turned 15 last summer, we asked him what he wanted to do for his 16th birthday trip, and he immediately said, "Universal Studios Japan!"
FINE. We don't poop on other people's yum-yums, and I know how core memories can feel, so I just nodded and told him to maybe think on it, to have a backup plan. We asked him a few more times throughout the year, but he was dead set on returning to the same hotel, the same amusement park - so his dad started making arrangements. This time all 3 kids had to go, because Gavin was home from college for the summer, and Zenny had missed out the first time. Then my mom wanted to go, too. Soon the trip went from a fun weekend jaunt to a tightly packed week with 6 people. The price of airfare had quadrupled in the last 5 years, so Mike had to be flexible with the dates in order to get a decent price, which bumped me out of the trip and saved even more money because I had to be at work that week. So I still haven't been to Japan, but at least I got to have rooftop adventures with an angry lychee tree.
Folks, we still have one entire kid left to do this with. She's already said something about New Zealand. How did a weekend trip to San Francisco turn into unlimited world travel? We still have to send them all to university after this. We're just government employees!
Oh well. The world is big, money is imaginary, and we should just try to do what we can in the short time we have together in this brief mortal life.
