An angry little kid learns a lesson

I look angry in the picture. I’m certainly not amused. My mom asked me to slide next to a small lifelike statue of a Native American Girl. She was wearing a beaded dress and a feather in her long hair. I’m about six or seven-years-old in the picture. I wasn’t sure of girls my age in real life. I was pretty sure they had cooties. For the uninitiated, cooties were imaginary germs that boys in my school all claimed you got when you sat next to a girl. So real or fake, it didn’t matter, I wanted nothing to do with the statue.

I think about the picture now and I feel horrible for all kinds of reasons. We were at the beach and my brothers loved the water. They would body surf and play in the water to their hearts content. I don’t think they ever got out. I love the ocean now, but back then I felt left out by my brothers and hated everything about it. If that weren’t enough, I hated the hot, sticky sand on my feet and sun on my back. I couldn’t get comfortable. 

Change your outlook

One day on our trip, my mother took pity on me and took me to the roadside play area that we had seen on the way to the beach. I’ve long forgotten the name of the park, but I’m sure it had some kind of touristy, gimmicky name like Camp Pow Wow or Camp Friendly Feathers. In any event, the park was generally empty, but my mom paid for a ticket letting me ride the kiddie train and play a few games. God knows how much they charged, I suspect it was an arm and a leg. Try explaining the value of money to a little kid.

We were there for a while. Who knows? Fifteen minutes? An hour? Your guess is as good as mine. When my mom told me that we had to leave, I wanted no parts of that. I created a fuss when she asked to get my photo with the statue of the girl on our way out. Of course, I started to cry.

My mom would have had every right to yell and lecture me, but I don’t remember any of that. She was stern and told me a second time that we had to leave. She meant business and I was going to have to live with it. On the way back, I felt bad about what I had done. Even as a kid, I recognized what I had done was wrong. I tried to “use my words” to thank my mom for making our day together special.

From the depths of despair

Before we went back to where were staying, she had to make one more stop. We stopped at a five and dime store so she could pick up sun tan lotion and she allowed me use the money that I had saved up to buy two comic books. I spent the rest of the trip reading about Spiderman’s exploits and learning a life-long lesson from my mom: life will have its ups and downs, our challenge is to make the best of it.

I learned too that my mom was pretty special.

We didn’t have a lot of money for vacations as a kid, but I think about that trip every summer. I still have those comic books too. I’ll never get rid of them.