YOUR Crazy Mother …

Vacation = Forced March for Jesus.

My sister and I were the lucky recipients of many a great family vacation when we were children. Seriously, we had some over-​​the-​​top family getaways, several well above our collective socio-​​economic pay grade. These super-​​trips were all thanks to a small inheritance from my paternal grandfather, Roach. Yes, his name actually (tragically) was Roach.

All of these trips were meticulously planned by Beehive Travel, a company specializing in Myrna’s kind of a vacation. These extended, elaborate itineraries required rising at the crack of dawn, walking three hundred miles a day and being lovingly guided to and through every single possible attraction a particular region had to offer, no matter if it had any significance whatsoever or not. Any sort of spontaneity would, apparently, anger the travel gods, and as such, the page upon page of details left no time for relaxing or just “experiencing” a place. This was a company ethos Myrna could firmly stand behind — most of the time.

My father, I think, both loved and hated this sort of vacation. He loved them because they spoke to his frugality. He knew he was getting his money’s worth from a Beehive Travel trip. The slide shows resulting from them were the envy and bane of everyone. The level of detail was both intriguing and as exhausting as the trip itself. He hated them because, he actually wanted to relax on his vacations, something our two parents just could not reconcile. On one of “his” trips, an extended houseboat trip on the exquisite Lake Powell, I thought we were all going to melt into delicious, sluggish pools. The pace was wonderfully slow, the time to do whatever we wanted inexhaustible. Let’s just say Myrna did not enjoy that trip. I guess the choir of voices in her head, the ones that keep her constantly scurrying about, became deafening.

Even Myrna must rebel from time to time, travel gods be damned. She had her own God, one that required bizarre, seemingly pointless pilgrimages. Wherever we had ventured, no matter how far or wide, if there was a Mormon temple within a hundred miles or so, we had to go look at it — not go in it (which we couldn’t anyway without a so-​​called ‘temple recommend’), just look at it, sometimes just from the parking lot, sometimes from across the street, sometimes from its gardens but never really up close and personal. To be blunt, aside from the temple in downtown Salt Lake City, Mormon temples are beautiful examples of architectural banality, blasé to say the least and not really worthy of “just having a look at”. As my friend Harry would say, “meh.” The travel gods, however, are not to be trifled with as we found out.

We were in Washington D.C., it was the mid-​​seventies. My father was very excited to see the multitude of historical sights there (he was a history teacher after all). Myrna was very excited because the itinerary was a great tome of things to do, each shrouded in prepackaged splendor. We were running ourselves ragged. It was kind of exciting for my sister and me as well, though we were both just biding our time as that trip included an open-​​jaw flight to Orlando on the return to Salt Lake City, with an all too brief stop at the childhood Mecca, Disney World. We knew “good things come to those who wait,” though the virtue of patience, truthfully, tried our patience.

After a particularly grueling day schlepping all over D.C., Myrna sprang a surprise on us, which was doubly a surprise coming from her. We were going to see the temple after we completed the day’s laundry list of sights! Yippee! [Insert sound of crickets chirping here.] She had it all worked out. She had a map, she had a timetable for the train (we hadn’t rented a car, because we didn’t need one with Beehive’s thorough planning), and she had a bus schedule. All we had to do was get our collective asses out to the ‘burbs of D.C. and walk a “little” bit. Dad tried, bless him, to explain the folly of this journey, but there was no changing her mind. She had another notch to etch in her temples-​​visited belt — a belt that, when filled, apparently gets you in the VIP line at the pearly gates, and who wants to wait (you only have eternity after all) with all the riff raff.

Here is the folly of the journey: we had no idea where we were going, despite the maps and timetables and schedules. A navigator Myrna is not. We were about to set off into terra incognito. And, quite frankly, dad was a little nervous about the local inhabitants — some of them were of a different color and behaved in strange and mysterious ways. In his defense, he was from a small town in Utah, insulated by a cultural grand canyon from the rest of the world. While we did live in the largest city in Utah, Salt Lake City, it was before the professional basketball team had moved from New Orleans (hence the name they still have, “The Jazz”), and so, there were about seven African-​​Americans in the entire state. My father wasn’t exactly a racist, but more a pragmatist. He knew he was out of his environment. He knew he was treading on other people’s territory. He knew we could not look more out of place if we had tried, and thus, we were an irresistible target. Nevertheless, we boarded the then new Metro and headed to the Promised Land. Hallelujah!

The Washington D.C. Mormon Temple.
You can almost feel the holiness oozing from it…

It was late by the time we exited the train, afternoon was turning quickly into dusk. We waited for the bus that would take us a little further along our unavoidable, but sacred path. The bus was everything that my father feared. It was a huge culture shock for me. There were not only people of “color” on it, but they were poor and smelly people of “color”. I had never seen such a collection of the “dregs” of humanity let alone been up close and personal with them. My father did his best to insulate and protect us (though we probably were in no real danger). One of the other passengers struck up a conversation with him, an aging, weathered black man. My father obliged, perhaps feeling that befriending one of the natives gave our survival potential a boost. The language was alien to both my father and me, but he did his best. Oh, here’s our stop. Our new friend could not believe we were getting off there and advised us to be careful. Great.

Myrna could smell the holy blood in the water, we pressed on. We had to walk about ten blocks to get to the gates of the roomy property the temple inhabited. As it turns out, Myrna’s planning of this operation had not quite been up to snuff. She left out one small, but crucial detail. When we arrived at the large ‘keep the rioting masses out’ gates, we found them locked. Jesus’ visiting hours were over for the day. In an amazing feat of rationalization and revisionism, she exclaimed, “there it is, isn’t it beautiful! I’m so glad we were able to see it.” I think she came unknowingly close to being murdered at that moment.

Well, it now was not dusk, but night. We trekked back to the bus stop only to be rudely informed by a graffiti encrusted sign that we had missed the last bus of the day. God, why hast thou forsaken us. After a heated discussion between the mommy and the daddy, it was decided that we would walk back to the Metro station; it was only ten or fifteen blocks after all. Hmm. While passing through this valley of the shadow of death, I actually saw a syringe on the sidewalk, nice. We were not exactly where we wanted to be. We made it without incident to the station, a bright, shining beacon guiding us back to our side of the tracks. We rejoiced. One of the station attendants reckoned our out-​​of-​​towner-​​ness and yelled for us to run, run like the wind. The last train of the day was about to depart, but at this point our stocks were turning up. After a mad dash to the platform, we saw the gently pulsing circles of lights embedded in the concrete that signaled our arriving train and our successful escape from the ‘hood. Thirty minutes later, whisked away through the dark catacombs of the Metro, we found ourselves in the familiar, bourgeois comfort of the Hyatt hotel and living to tell the tale.

Our forced march for Jesus was in my opinion a fantastic adventure (retrospectively), in my father’s opinion, an unnecessary flirtation with death and in my mother’s opinion, some sort of quasi-​​biblical trial worth completing at any price. I prefer my opinion over the others (or course) and for that adventure, I laugh a quiet laugh and thank Myrna silently.