Marian always makes us two dozen Tollhouse cookies. Every trip I eat my half and half of Gordon’s half. She eats almonds and prunes. Yakking away from too much sugar and chocolate, a “hell” or a “damn” falls out of my mouth and my brother tells me to quit swearing. Again. I try hard not to swear around him, but I forget.
Into the second week, he says do you HAVE to swear ALL the time, and I inform him that puke is not a swear word and that swearing MAYBE once a day is not ALL the time and that I’ll make him a deal: if he uses his turn signal, I’ll quit swearing.
My brother is unaware that turn signals are standard equipment on cars, and have been for years. He has this thing where he can’t decide if he’s turning left. The oncoming traffic also has no idea what he might be planning. He hesitates until they get close. Then he whips right out in front of them. I have this thing where I slide down my seat, throw my feet up to block the airbag, close my eyes, cross my heart, and mutter, “Oh, Sweet Jesus.”
He says, “I didn’t know you were religious.”
I say, “Only when you’re driving.”
I won’t mention the day in downtown Denver when I turn right onto a one-way street in rush hour and have to back up their shiny new SUV into screeching, honking traffic. Or the next day when I turn left off a one-way street into the left lane and drive a whole block on what is not a one-way street, unable to figure out what the hell the guy coming at me thinks he’s doing. Marian, who is reading a Denver map so big it blocks half the steering wheel and hangs two feet out the passenger window glances up and casually suggests pulling over a couple of lanes.
Thankfully, Gordon isn’t in the car either time. He fails to see the humor in these moments. Having played the sousaphone in high school and college, he’s in horn heaven at a four-day Tuba and Euphonium Conference (which is part of the reason we took this trip), hanging out with 500 tuba players, most of whom have the same body shape as the brass instrument they play. But I must say, 500 tubas a-tubaing is a magnificent sound. The three concerts we attended were wonderful.
We visit Bryce National Park, where wind, water, and magic cut the limestone into a landscape of bizarre shapes of mazes, slot canyons and elegant spires called hoodoos. We are equally stunned by Zion National Park, where the red and pink sandstone cliffs look like sandcastles built in desert canyons, their massive walls soaring to a vast blue sky. Rocky Mountain National Park also takes our breath away, and not just because of the altitude. We go through Montana, as my brother thinks it’s on the way home, and spend an afternoon at Custer’s Last Stand. Heart-wrenching—not for Custer, but for what this country did to the Indians.
At the Denver History Library, we are ecstatic with each discovery, whooping and clapping one another on the back. Gordon and I sit side-by-side, hunched over giant microfilm machines scrolling through reels of old newspapers—me going half-blind from the bad print and queasy from the movement. I get clammy and stagger to the ladies’ room to throw up, then wander over to the local history section to look up things in books where the pages don’t move. Marian returns from a morning spent buried in the archives, thrilled with her great find, and presents it to her husband. Gordon barely glances up, telling her he already has that record. She disappears for several hours. He finally notices she’s missing and asks where she is. I say she’s at the courthouse looking up records for her family and filing for divorce. He hadn’t seen the look on her face.
Marian and I spend much time together in restrooms laughing so hard we slide to the floor while Gordon waits in the hall, stiffly waiting on the opposite wall with tight lips and crossed arms. She gets a medal for spending hours searching for snippets about Hoys, Chatfields and Chamberlins. You couldn’t pay me to spend that much time looking for information about someone else’s family, even if I was married to them. Maybe that’s why I’m not married.
Its wonderful to read Cathy’s yarns about family and those events. Reminds me of an adult version of the yarns i used to hear from my parents when they were remembering their earlier lives speaking with their parents, my grandparents. Some stories get told over and over and the laughs come at about the same points.