Looks Like Heaven to Me

Cabin! Sunsets! Sunrises! Fishing! Pool! Restaurant! Restaurant! Restaurant! Fun, remember?

Before we left town I hit the bread store for three grocery sacks of reject bread, and the local bakery for sour dough. I returned home three (3!!!) times before Sandra, Tristan and I made it to the city limits. How could I forget the little phone, the antibiotics and the swimsuit…separately? We got turned around in the last-city-to-have-a-bathroom-before-the-resort-Tristan-had-to-potty-how-did-we-end-up-going-North-when-we-were-headed-South, and were so late we had to stop to eat fried fish that had been sitting under warming lights. On the road again, a little fawn ohmygod ran right in front of my big car, whamp, the car behind me swerved wildly to miss rear-ending us, we made it, at the campground there was no pool (wishful remembering), the swimming area was closed in hot, hot August because all the lifeguards had returned to school, there was a brown spider in the tiny bathroom, at the Restaurant! Restaurant! Restaurant! the gumbo was gray and lunch’s fried-fish-under-the-warming-lights had been better than hot-out-of-the-kitchen-fish here, when Tristan’s grand-daddy came for the night, the beds were ill arranged for sleeping three and one, Tristan’s grand-daddy forgot the fishing poles, the air-conditioners in the cabin almost didn’t work, nobody could really sleep, something bit me in the bed at night and left an angry red welt. This is a for-fun vacation? Thanks, Universe.

In lieu of swimming we hit three discount stores before we found the big plastic ball and bat, and in the process we managed to land a haul of bubbles and a miniature 18-wheeler and a package of five little super balls. We rolled the beautiful beach towels to block the space between the couch and the floor so we wouldn’t have to constantly bat the little super balls out with the broom handle. Wish you were there?

But we did have the pier and more old bread than the geese could eat. The little fish loved bread, too, so you could see them with their eerie blue fins silently gliding through the water, and did you know the sign for fish is your hand in front of you, little finger on bottom, thumb on top, fingers together and waving as you move your hand from right to left? Try it. Wave those fingers a bit faster. You’ll know immediately you’re signing fish, it’s intuitive. Have I told you Tristan is deaf?

The second day we got the big cabin with extra beds and good air-conditioning. We saw sunsets and sunrises, had pimento cheese on sour dough for breakfast, drank coffee, fed geese and fish, blew bubbles, pitched, hit, and caught balls, read books, practiced sign language, early to bed and early to rise. A grandma and a great-aunt seemed to be just about enough grown-ups for an active four-almost-five-year-old who can’t hear, and when he doesn’t like what you’re signing, has selective seeing.

After our last meal, Tristan tried to take the money we’d left on the table for the waitress. Though he had seen us pay for meals before, perhaps this was the first time we had left money so alluringly in the open. Sandra helped me sign, “That’s to pay for our food.” We could see him understanding that the money made the food possible. I’m the great-aunt, and I gave him a dollar just because, and when he wanted the quarter on the table, I gave him a quarter, too. He grinned and immediately began waving his money, trying to attract the interest of the waitress. “Ask him what he wants,” I told Sandra. She did. He was sparkling. "Ice cream!” he signed, “Candy!”

In the car he spread out both his arms, made little fists with his hands, the little finger and thumb extended. He waggled one hand toward Sandra and then toward himself, and toward me and himself with the other. The sign for together, the three of us.

That Universe. It’s intuitive.




© Donna Warner, August, 2007