An abortive travelogue

[What follows was written, as the start of a travelogue intended for my children, while Kasia and I were in West Virginia, having gone there to be with my parents for my father’s second knee replacement surgery. On the first one Pop very nearly died from a completely unexpected heart arrhythmia; so with my mother dreading the second go-round I wanted to be on the spot.

Besides, my sister and her family were all going to be there, and it’s been a long time since Kasia got to hang out with Cimarron and Caramia, among the three of whom there is mutual adoration. And I liked the idea of having several days more or less devoted to Kasia, since any one of our eight children never gets enough of me to him- or herself.

In short, Kasia and I were in West Virginia with my parents and with my sister’s family; and Dessie and the rest of the kids were at home. So this was addressed mostly to them, in order to catch them up on how things are going here. If you are friends of ours – especially of Kasia – and you want to go ahead and read about Kasia’s West Virginia expedition, you’re of course welcome to, which is why it's now on the blog. I'll add more recollections later because there was a lot about this trip I don't want to forget.]

Dess, Anya, Kinya, Sean, Kegan, Merry, Rusty, Sally:

So, you guys dropped us off at the airport, and after a little while we got on the plane. We sat down in our two seats – Kasia got the “A” seat at the window and I had the “B” seat in the middle and there was one more “C” seat next to me. After a couple of minutes a man came up and sat down, and then a little bit later here comes this woman. She stops at our row, and she looks at the numbers above the seats, and she looks at her boarding pass, and then she looks at the guy next to me, and then she looks at the numbers above the seat again, and then she says very politely, “I think I have seat 21 C.”

The guy looks at his own boarding pass. “Well, my pass says C 21, too.”

The lady says, “Whoops. Well, don’t get up; I’ll go talk to the flight attendant.”

Next thing you know here comes the flight attendant, and she looks at the lady’s boarding pass, and then she looks at the guy’s boarding pass, and then she says very politely, “Um, sir, your pass does say C-21 – but that’s not your seat, that’s the gate. Your seat is 8 A.”

He is very embarrassed, and he gets up and leaves, while Kasia and I are very careful not to laugh; but I’m thinking, “Well, our aisle just upgraded its average IQ pretty significantly.”

Then twenty seconds later the lady pulls a bottle of Sprite out of her purse, twists the lid – and sprays Sprite all over me and the book I was reading. So I decided maybe we hadn’t upgraded so much after all.

But after that nothing interesting happened – it was a boring flight, no turbulence at all. So we landed in Pittsburgh, and Granddaddy and Cimi and Cara met us there.

The drive down to Clarksburg flashed by in conversation and in my staring out at the rolling green mountains rolling by and asking myself – as I have been doing every half hour or so since I landed – “Why, again, do I live in Katy?” Kasia wants to know that, too. [Note to non-family-members: The answer, of course, is that I have to feed eight children and pay off the debts with which I was saddled by a welching home insurance company, and the money I need can be made in Houston and can’t be made in West Virginia.]

Besides the mountains, I might add, there was the sign that advertised a “24-hour ATM.” As opposed, one presumes, to all those twelve-hour ATM’s one so often encounters.

I don’t know if I ever thought to mention it to you guys, but a few years ago one of the other ministers in the Clarksburg area died, and Granddaddy and Grandmother were surprised to learn that Granddaddy was mentioned in the will. The legacy? Two bottles of French wine. Now, you know that Granddaddy and Grandmother are not big drinkers and certainly not big drinkers of wine and they would freely admit that they wouldn’t know the difference between Laffite, Penfolds and for that matter Perrier. So Grandmother promptly called me up to find out what “Châteauneuf-du-Pape” might be. I was very gratified to inform her that Pop had, in my opinion, scored indeed, as Châteauneuf-du-Pape happens to be one of my favorite French appellations contrôlées (granted, I have idiosyncratic tastes, but still it was a very nice parting gift by any non-Baptist standard). Furthermore, that nice, capacious cellar of theirs is very well suited for holding a couple of bottles of nice French wine while waiting for the perfect occasion.

Since Grandmother considered that the Thursday night meal might possibly be Granddaddy’s very own Last Supper (hence her insistence on our discussing funeral arrangements over dessert), the Châteauneuf-du-Pape came up out of the basement. There it joined up with steaks personally selected and prepared by your Uncle Michael, whose attitude to steaks pretty much parallels my attitude to wine. (Grandmother had decided she had better not presume to buy the steaks herself, and her discretion was proved well-considered when she took Michael to the store, and he looked at every steak on display there, and then turned to her and said something like, “Okay, where in this town do they sell good steaks?”) If this was really to be Granddaddy’s farewell dinner, then he was going to go out well fed indeed.

The next morning we were all up by 5:30 – which Kasia’s and my Central-Time body-clocks considered to be 4:30 – in order to get Granddaddy to the hospital on schedule. The paperwork was signed, he was dolled up in the hospital gown, we had one last family prayer, and then they wheeled him off.

Almost three hours later, the doctor came out to tell us that all had gone well and that Granddaddy was in recovery, but that it would still be a few hours before we could see him. So I volunteered to take the girls out and amuse them – a tremendous sacrifice on my part because I am so at home in hospitals. [Note to persons outside of my intimate circle of family and friends: as my family knows very well, this is meant to be self-mocking sarcasm, as in point of fact my character has a very severe defect in that I am largely worthless at the side of any bed of sickness. I was probably happier to escape than were the girls, something of which I am heartily ashamed but about which I can apparently do very little.] Since I was genuinely very concerned about Granddaddy, I can’t even remember what it was the girls and I did; but we made it back to the hospital just a few minutes before he came up to his room.

Now, Granddaddy has a very high pain threshold, and he got into trouble last time because he wouldn’t notice that his leg was hurting until it was already too late for the morphine to help, and so he wouldn’t punch the button – they give you a little button that you can push whenever your leg starts hurting, you see, and when you punch the button it pumps a little morphine in to make you, um, happier. So Grandmother has spent the last year or so telling him that he ought not wait to punch that button until it hurts because it’ll be too late, and so he ought to punch the button whenever he wakes up.

You know the problem with that? When they’ve got you doped up for surgery, the medicine makes you go to sleep for thirty seconds or so, and then you drift back awake, and then you drift back to sleep – only, you’re drugged, right? So when you wake up you can’t remember how long it’s been since you went to sleep. So, what happened is Granddaddy was pushing that button a lot -- the doctor told us yesterday morning that in one half-hour stretch Granddaddy pushed the button twenty-eight times!

Well, we all – except for Uncle Mike, who had gone home and wasn’t back yet –piled into Granddaddy’s room, and he was very definitely loopy. He starts to talk, and we’re trying to figure out what he’s saying, and then it turns out that he was saying something that was very funny but also was really something you only ought to say in front of grown-ups. Cimi and Kasia and Cara all blushed and all the grown-ups started laughing and Grandmother said (when she could catch her breath from laughing), “Darrell, don’t forget you have three teenaged girls in here.” Then Granddaddy dozed off, and then he woke up, and he started telling another story – and sure enough, that one was also very funny, but it was also really a story only for grown-ups, and now Cimi and Kasia and Cara were very embarrassed.

About this time Uncle Mike came in, and he said hello to Granddaddy, and then he asked us, “How’s he doing?”

“He’s doing fine,” I told Uncle Mike, “except that he keeps telling your daughters dirty jokes.”

Uncle Mike laughed, and then Granddaddy said, “Michael, the trouble with telling your daughters dirty jokes...” But then his eyes closed and he went to sleep. We all sort of laughed and waited, and then about thirty seconds later Granddaddy’s eyes slowly rolled open again. “What was I saying?”

“You were explaining the trouble with telling the girls dirty jokes.”

“Oh, yes. Mike, the trouble with telling your girls dirty jokes...[he had to stop to catch his breath, and then...]...is that they’ve already heard them all.”

A little bit later I took the girls home for supper, and then the next morning it was time for your Granddaddy to try to walk for the first time. Now, on the other operation, the first time he tried to walk, he was doing very, very well, right up until his heart suddenly went kaput; so Grandmother was very nervous, because she was afraid his heart would stop again this time too. But this time he wasn’t even able to walk; he was too dizzy and nauseous. This was disappointing, but at least his heart was okay.

A little bit later Aunt Stephanie and the girls and I were up in his room (Grandmother had gone home to take a nap) and the doctor came in. He asked how Granddaddy was doing, and we explained that he was dizzy and sleepy and nauseous. And that’s when the doctor explained that Granddaddy was punching the morphine button way too often, and that he ought to wait until he actually started feeling at least a little pain before he punched the button – he was dizzy and sleepy and nauseous because he was keeping himself doped up.

So Granddaddy quit punching the button, and the next thing you know his eyes were open and he was sitting up and talking and making sense and not telling dirty jokes, and in about an hour he was doing great.

Aunt Stephanie wanted to stay with him until Grandmother came back; so I decided to take the girls on a drive through West Virginia. For one thing, I wanted to drive on narrow roads with lots of curves and lots of hills; for another thing, Kasia just wanted to drive, period. [Note to non-family-members: almost-sixteen-year-old Kasia got her learners’ permit about three days before we climbed on the plane.]

Well, we drove around for a couple of hours, and then I decided to let Kasia drive. I didn’t really want her to drive on the main West Virginia highways because they are narrow and curvy and go up and down steep hills and have no shoulder to pull off on, and also there’s lots of traffic. If you get off the main road, though, then you get onto roads that are even narrower and even more curvy and go even more steeply up and down hills and have no shoulder at all, only a straight drop-off down the mountainside – but there aren’t any cars on them. So that’s what I wanted Kasia to practice driving on.

Well, if I told you guys how much fun we were having in all those glorious West Virginia mountains with all those green trees and mountain views and lovely rich pastures and rocky little waterfalls, you’d be terribly envious; so I won’t. But I will tell you that we stopped at one point on this little dirt road with these lovely unfenced fields full of waist-high grass and yellow flowers on both sides, so that the girls could get out and “frolic” (they have decided that they like the word “frolic” so they say it whenever they can manage to work it into the conversation). They were very funny; they frolicked and I just sat in the car and did a few calculus problems to pass the time. And then a little bit later we were driving down a steep hill on a dirt road that I hoped very much wasn’t a dead-end because it was five miles or so back to where we’d turned onto the road – and suddenly we came around the corner and there was a big concrete bridge over a lovely little twenty-food-wide river with a three- or four-foot waterfall where a few local people were hanging out and swimming.

Well, we couldn’t just drive by that like it was a MacDonalds or something else you wouldn’t want to spend any time at; so we got out and rolled up our pant legs and started wading in the water – which was really cold – and then there was some splashing of water on each other (I won’t say who started the splashing because I don’t want you to know it was me), and, um, well, we all wound up sort of wet even though we didn’t have bathing suits. And we took some video of one kid who was standing at the edge of the waterfall and diving into the very deep and lovely swimming hole at the base of the fall. He and his friends asked, “Are you from the newspaper?” So we said, “No, but if you’ll tell us your name, we’ll put the video out on YouTube.com next week when we get back to Texas, and you’ll be on the web.” The kid’s older sister looks at him with her eyes wide and says in awe, “Brian, they’re gonna put you on a website.” So we made at least a few kids’ day.

Kasia drove very well, by the way.

Finally, we headed home, trying to pay attention to the little roads we were on so that we could hope to find the same place again – since we wanted to come back later and play some more. We found ourselves eventually coming into Grafton...

[Here, alas, the travelogue breaks off, because (a) my battery died and (b) my wife called to point out that I had put the wrong date into Travelocity and we were supposed to catch the Monday flight, not the Tuesday flight -- which since this was already Sunday night sort of threw things into disarray.]