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After years of teaching Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, I
remembered a long-ago car trip my mom, my younger sister Jan, and mom's
parents took to Florida in 1965, just before I started kindergarten. My
grandfather drove an olive green Rambler with no air conditioning. Even
if he'd had it, I rather doubt he would have used it, though it was
August. He made grandma sit on the hump in the middle of the
backseat because she was too fat, and he was afraid she would redistribute
the weight of the car if she got an actual seat on either side and perhaps
tip us over. In fact, he would call over his shoulder, careful never to
take his eyes off the highway, "Mom, have you shifted to the left? I feel
the car pulling that direction," and haughtily, my grandmother would realign
herself in the center of the backseat, on the hump. My sister and I were
pressed tight against her (but her skin was always cool somehow), our outer
sides pressed against the inside of the back doors.
Grandpa made a raw wooden "sandbox" that fit on the top of that Rambler
with all of our suitcases piled in it. Then he tied a yellow rope around
and around it, over the sandbox full of duct-taped-secure Samsonites, and
then under it by way of opening the car windows and looping it through
several times. Can you picture this? I can, because the knot of the yellow
rope kept hitting me in the head!
Also, my grandfather wouldn't let anyone else drive, and he thought it best
to stay below the 75 mph speed limit common at the time and instead creep to
his brother's house in Miami at about 52 mph. We were, all of us, sweaty and
fussy and dusty. Yet, we got there eventually and I remember playing in the
white sand of Miami Beach. But then, a week or so later, we had to get back
into the Rambler and resume our crawl to Illinois. We were the Judds in
Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, trying to outrun the dust bowl,
the famine, and the Great Depression that we were all in at the time. I
remember waving good-bye to my father and my mother asking him through the
passenger window if he was SURE he didn't want to join us. He laughed and
said, "Yes, he was quite sure he would simply hold down the house and await
our return."
I suppose I remember that trip so vividly because my blankie I had loved
and rubbed on my cheek and lips to fall asleep at night had, in my almost-five
years, become just five beloved strips of faded blue softness (because my mother
thought it unsanitary unless she washed it four or five days a week) prior to
that "vacation." At each seedy roadside motel where we five slept, I would say
to my mom the next morning, "Did you pack my blankie?" She would say yes, it
was in her purse, and then we'd climb over each other but dodge the rope knot
getting back into the sandbox-topped Rambler.
About an hour or so down the road, I would get sleepy and ask mom for my
blanket. She would make a lengthy, deliberate search of her purse and say,
from her designated passenger seat up front, "Oh honey, I'm so sorry. I
think I forgot it and left it back at the motel."
I would get frantic and say to my grandpa, "Turn this Rambler around and
take me back to the motel" wo that I could go get my threadbare strips. But
he wouldn't budge. He was determined and just kept inch-worming us toward
Florida. I said, "Then we have to stay at the same motels on the way back
so I can get my blankie strips." Mom was quite certain the maids would have
thrown them away, not realizing how valuable they truly were.
I was crushed. By the time we got home, I had one measly strip left of my
blanket. Mom left my blankie(s) intentionally because I was to start school
that summer and she decided it was high time I parted with my security
blanket.
You are probably wondering about that last strip by now, aren't you? Well,
I hung onto it doggedly and did not let mom launder nor come near it. She
broke my trust. Maybe forgetting just one strip was forgivable. But she
forgot FOUR TIMES.
Here comes the finale: Just before Christmas, Mom convinced me to wrap
my swaddling cloth in gift paper and place it beneath our artificial silver
tree with the four-colored light fan that turned the tree red, yellow, green,
and blue. Her idea was for Santa to take my precious blankie to a poor child
who didn't have one. Hello! Who was I the next morning? We were preacher's
kids who lived in a parsonage. Our grandparents' drove a used green Rambler.
I had no blankie.
I have laughingly teased my mother in the ensuing years that the loss of
my blanket may have contributed to my drug problem years later. I hope I
have overcome that loss by now, 36 years later. But there are days when
I'm not so sure.
Judith Ann Hillard
21 May 2002
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