behindtheax

weekend

I laughed at this quote in The Catcher in the Rye.

“I gave her a good look. She didn’t look like any dope to me. She looked like she might have a pretty damn good idea what a bastard she was the mother of. But you can’t always tell - with somebody’s mother. I mean. Mothers are all slightly insane.”

Four more days and we leave for the East Coast. The countdown is on. Saturday we spent the day in rural Ontario, on a beach. A very popular and crowded beach but it was fun. Monica and I had walked a bit of a distance out into the surf and were waiting for the bigger waves to dive into or over when we heard this small, excited voice behind us. A little boy maybe six or seven had joined us and he was calling out, “Here one comes, here one comes, it’s going to be a big one! Get ready!” I looked over at him and there he was standing there with his hands clenched and his elbows pressed against his sides and he looked so excited as he waited for these waves to wash over him. Gosh he was a cute little guy. I was relieved however that his mother called for him from the shoreline and told him to come back in a little. Not that we were out that far but it scares me when I see smaller kids alone in the water. So, we spent a long leisurely day at the beach and then we hustled a little to see if we could find a camping spot so that we didn’t have to drive all the way back into the city but the only camp ground we found was this run down place that was crowded with an eclectic crowd of happy campers. Very happy campers -
Our friend and his daughter had joined us (they also spent the day at the beach) and I think about two in the morning I was beginning to fear for all of our lives. Some of the campfires people had going were the size of their tents and they were shooting off missile like fire works all over the place and as I laid there on the hard surface listening to the arguments and the boom boom of the music and waited for that misguided fire work to rip through our tent, it dawned on me. I don’t like camping anymore. I think I toasted my last marsh mellow over a campfire and slept my last night on the ground with small rocks poking into my back.

On the way home the next day we were all tired but the scenery was nice – farmland and the lake and people out whipper snipping their ditches in front of these huge yards and old homes. I mentioned to Greg that for some reason driving in a car always gives me a sense of well being and he said he knew that and he always thought it was a bit odd that when we first started dating that I would ignore him completely when we drove anywhere and instead just stare out the passenger side window for long stretches at a time.

That made me remember that when I was a kid, when we went on car trips, I use to pretend I was on a horse running beside the car. It was very important that I kept up with the car and therefore I had to leap mailboxes, weave in and out of trees, race along the ditches and through fields of cows and corn. It was how I tried to become a part of the scenery.

posted by mary j. @ 10:45 AM