The Aerie

Cold Drivel!

The vacation is well underway and things are starting to look a little desperate. We're all wearing our brave smiles, but inside we're like little kids looking at a bare tree at Christmas: is this what we get?

There's nothing about a July poolside vacation that recommends itself to the phrase "record low temperatures." Last night it was colder up here in Brainerd than at any time since I was born. Today I figured out how to light the furnace. "You can still have a good time," my wife says gamely, "it's just a different kind of vacation." Yes, indeed -- a vacation spent entertaining the kids, like every other week of summer break, rather than a vacation where the kids entertain themselves endlessly in the pool. Like we had at this time last year.

So we headed over to see Chicken Run but it turns out every tourist in the area had the same notion: the 3:15 was sold out. We bought tickets for the 5:15, and now we're sitting here at Burger King, letting the kids enjoy the PlayLand. I suppose I shouldn't complain: it won't be too many years before the twins are too old for such childish indulgences. Instead they'll sit moodily and stare at the PlayLand, wondering how many points off their personal cool-tally would be subtracted if they ventured inside. But for now they're happy to be here, and I suppose that's a blessing.

The perpetual overcast diffuses the sun into a blue-white glare that roars in the giant windows and makes it nearly impossible to see the screen. This is what I consider "headache weather:" the dimness of the sunlight dilates my eyes open, and then the ultraviolet roars unhindered through the cloud deck and gives me a migraine. And despite the fact that this is supposed to be a modern new computer, its screen is the dimmest of all laptops I've ever owned.

The forecast for tomorrow is a 40% chance of thunderstorms, high of seventy. I'd despair, but the forecast for our sunny day in June was a 40% chance of thunderstorms, too, so I'll just wait and see what happens. That's all I can do anyway.

Sunday we'd had another one of my wife's "family days." We went to Lakeview Cemetary to see the graves of two characters from her favorite book series. My wife is an unreconstructed romantic, and adores the "Betsy, Tacy and Tib" series of children's books. Set in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Mankato, Betsy, Tacy and Tib are fictionalized versions of the author and her childhood friends, whose adventures are followed until they all get married (when, presumably, their lives are over, subsumed into their husbands' ambitions). Two of the characters are the author's parents, portrayed as paragons of virtue and progressive thinking (Betsy's father encourages her to take a year off of college and travel to Europe -- in the days before the Great War).

So Sunday found Sapphire gathered around an anonymous pair of gravestones with a bunch of equally-romantic women, discussing the merits and natures of the characters based on the deceased persons underfoot. For well over an hour.

There's only so much entertaining that can be done with three little kids in a cemetery. They climbed on gravestones, trees and boulders, but eventually the amusement wore thin. Along the way I found an interesting plaque Coleen C Wylie Hauck, 1928-1996, whose tombstone read "To the end of infinity." Surrounded by pious platitudes beseeching God's mercy, this was a confident, headstrong declaration. Does it make any sense? No. But it takes a certain chutzpah to set sail for the great hereafter without even checking your grammar.

Then the group moved on to the gravestone of the stillborn-child of the author. We waited in the car, and they still took half an hour to fail to find with certainty the gravestone.

Posted by Albatross at July 18, 2000 12:00 AM