Traveling with the family can be an adventure.
Um hum, good times! Or how ‘bout the 16 hour ride home from Alabama with my youngest daughter knocking out gas bombs that my fraternity brothers would have been proud of.
If we hadn’t made a joke of it and laughed as hard as we did, I might have one less tax deduction and natural gas might be the fuel of choice in the Southern State. We never determined what set that fuse alight but it hasn’t happened to her again, thank god.
Some of my personally darkest parenting hours were spent being upset at my oldest when she was only 4 or so and needed to stop every hour to go pee pee. Only later would we learn she had a bladder condition and something about car travel triggered almost constant action. Poor kid- I was an ass at times.
GAMEBOY TO THE RESCUE or the Lost Art of the Backseat Slap Down
I remember so well the days before Gameboy, PSP and other handheld video games.
I fear our youth and our girls in particular may be in danger of loosing the value of a good backseat slapdown.
I was got more than my share from my sisters growing up.
Confined, nowhere to run and not enough room to use my gender’s few advantages, a slap in the backseat had a way of quietly putting a brother in his place.
That was a long time ago.
More recently, but still in the years prior to my own parenthood, I would sometimes admonish the parents that let electronics doing their job when traveling. I was a little mystified by the kids I saw rolling down the highway hypnotically staring into their laps like some scene from “Children of the Corn”.
As a kid, my family never flew anywhere. We did the classic Midwestern driving vacations. Mine was a family of six. I had two older sisters and a younger brother sharing a Pontiac with our parents.
My brother would ride in the little shelf behind the backseat. You know, that little cove right under the glass tapering to the trunk- real safe! I envied him for that.
So I was often pinned between my sisters in back- on the transmission hump. Pinching, hair pulling and eye poking was the rule of the day on any given journey of more than an hour.
My folks gave up smoking about the time they lowered the speed limit to 55mph.
Gone were the days of the two hour trip to our cousins- that now took 2 1/2 but it felt like five as dad cussed and moaned about our intrusive government. He didn’t like the idea of someone telling him to put wear seatbelt and now this.
At least he was no longer flipping butts out his window that liked to come back in ours.
Hey, this new car had Air Conditioning and we occasionally used it and drove with the windows up. That meant no more 110 decibel buzz from the wind and road but it also meant I had to listen to my sisters.
I don’t remember the day I got my Mattel Football game but I do remember no longer dreading a ride in the car. I could drift away to fantasy world of little LEDs.
I asked my dad, an electrician by trade, what the heck an LED was. “Light Emitting Diode” he replied with an uncharacteristically wise tone. He was never one to put on airs but he always seemed to take on a different tone when one of us kids seemed interested in anything electronic.
So, I was pressed on with my curiosity- “what’s a Light Emitting Diode”?
“Well, that’s a Diode that emits light, of course.” And he offered no more. It would be a few years before I realized that he mastered electronics long before diodes were mainstream and it was past the point that he wanted to learn more. He was a more of a capacitor guy.
So, for me, the Mattel Football game held a mystery that was beyond my old man and that made it all the more appealing.
With its six buttons, three-position switch and a sprawling 2 square inches of screen real estate, I was transported onto the field of my heroes; Len Dawson, Otis Taylor, Buck Buchanan, Willie Lanier, Bobby Bell and Mike Garret.
Oops, strike Mike Garret. As I remember it, he wanted to renegotiate his deal or try this new “free agency” thing and that was enough for my dad to declare him “ungrateful”
There, in the back of the Pontiac, humming along at 53 to 57 miles an hour (dad didn’t opt for the new fangled cruise control- noting it was “just something else to break”) it was there that the computer bug bit me.
Thanks to Google, I found photos of the Mattel Electronic Football game and learned it came out in 1977- my freshman year in high school. God- was I that old.
Looking back now, I can’t believe it held my attention but it did. Dad tried to give me a peak behind the curtain by explaining that computers were simply an arrangement of 1s and 0s. Like a light switch, either on or off.
This binary arrangement manifested itself on the electronic gridiron for me, there in my hands. It wasn’t merely a matter of computational luck whether my team scored that long field goal. Surely, it was teamwork, practice and skill.
Why else would the little speaker come to life with sounds of a stadium full of happy fans? Or was it the sound fingernails scratching a chalkboard as my mom insisted?
Today, you can still hear that happy sound if you listen to the band, Supertramp’s “Breakfast In America”. The little, “twirt-twirt” sound, that meant touchdown on Mattel Field.
So, I have kids now and I happily check them in the rearview mirror as we blaze along at a cruise controlled 73pmh. I can’t see their faces and their handhelds in the mirror at the same time but I know their fingers move much more quickly than mine and their smiles are even bigger.
Since introducing handhelds into my backseat, I can’t think of the last time one has slapped the other.
So, today, I hail the might handheld and its amazing powers of contentment. I hold in nearly equal regard the almighty power transformer that takes an antiquated cigarette lighter and magically eliminates the curse of dead batteries for said device. I relish the calm and quiet as I turn to my wife for adult conversation.
Damn, she’s listening to her ipod and blogging, that’s where they get.
Ah, alas, I remember, my Chiefs are on the trusty radio.
Another glance in the mirror and an unfamiliar fear grips me.
My two angels sit quietly smiling.
Their teenage years upon us, my fatherly instincts, like those hairs on the back of the neck, rise up.
I realize they might well have lost their slapping skills and at the very time they be needed most.
Their ability to slap someone in the backseat may well be gone. If so, I might have failed as a father.
I force my attention back to the road as it downs on me an entirely new generation of boys might well soon try a very old form of handheld games in the backseat of a car with my angels.
I am simply not ready for that but remind myself I wasn’t ready for the first Gameboy either.
Tagged as:
car travel,
gameboy,
traveling with kids
