Pillows, for instance.
Jackson has, like, fourteen pillows on his bed. The other day I said
to him, "You know how many pillows I had on my bed when I was your age?
ONE."
He hugged me with pity. "I'm sorry, Mommy. Here." He let me hold the
fluffy pink heart pillow I gave him for Valentine's Day. It helped. A
little.
Of course, I'm the one who bought him all those pillows. He's an
only child, we let him co-sleep for a couple of years, and now the only way
to keep him in his bed at night is to throw fourteen pillows, nine
stuffed animals, and a dog in there with him. It's less lonely that
way, sort of, if you turn sideways and close one eye.
Occasionally, just for fun, I try to explain to him how when I grew
up we were middle-middle class, but as my father worked his way up we
became lower-upper-middle class. This got me into a better school, but
somehow it never translated into more pillows on my bed.
I think my parents taught us to be embarrassed by excess and luxury. The most
decadent thing they ever spent money on was airfare. After my father
retired from his career of selling office supplies, they went to Europe
a few times. Not first-class, but my father always trusted his own
taste, and his taste was for whatever was day-old, two-for-one, or
half-price after 5:00 p.m. So our family vacations usually revolved
around a sixteen-hour, straight-through, non-air-conditioned drive
(with me lying on my sleeping bag in our car's the back window, waving
at truckers) from Denver to grandma's house and back again ten days
later.
One year we were outside of Lincoln, Nebraska, when my mom fell
asleep at the wheel. I was nine, I was sitting on my dad's lap in the
front seat letting him read Farmer Boy
over my shoulder when all of a sudden we veered from the fast lane into
the grassy median that divided us from oncoming traffic, hit a small
rise, and were flying through the air. When we landed we burst all four
tires. We had to spend two nights in Lincoln while the car got fixed,
us kids happily swimming at the hotel pool. That's also how I ended up
seeing Funny Lady,
a movie I liked that I never would have been taken to otherwise, as our
family's taste in film ran more toward exploding car chases than
musical comedy. Maybe everyone had had enough excitedment with flying
cars that day.
Anyway, this summer, I'm thinking about introducing Jackson to the
exquisite torture of the long-ass car trip to Grandma's, Santa Barbara
to Denver via any number of desolate, 115°F landscapes. A torture
mitigated by the Nintendo DS, the portable DVD player, and the iPod.
And air conditioning. And the comforting presence of pillows, stuffed
animals, a dog, a cooler full of mildly caffeinated beverages, and me,
his mom, whose long-distance driving stamina was built on never, ever
experiencing another long moment of airborne disbelief.
