Driving Day

Simply put, the day was long. It was long and spent in the car, as we had to drive nearly five hundred miles across NY to get to Niagara Falls. Now, most have not had the pleasure of being trapped with me for the majority of a day in an automobile, so I should let y'all know that it's an experience. It's not an experience in a carefree, fun sorta way, but rather experience in a "when will he shut up" or "dear God, we're all going to die" sorta way.

The boy was smart; I'll give him that. He napped for a few hours at the beginning of the day, but as soon as he woke up I gave him both barrels and hit him with the biggies. "Do you believe in God?"; "Because you want to, or because people tell you to, or because you feel like you should because your dad is a preacher?"; "What is God for you?"; "What about Jesus?"; "What was his message; what did he talk about?"; etc.

I wasn't about to let him off with his usual "uh-huh"s and "uh-uh"s on these. Shay's father is an obscenely intelligent Episcopal minister and his mother, cousin Elizabeth, while dopey in a fun sorta way, has her moments where she can string polysyllabic words together instead of giggling. Thus I was not going to let Shay, who's been to church and Sunday school more in his twelve years than me in my twenty six, tell me Jesus talked about "stuff" and "God's Word." It took a while of intense Socratic-ing to finally pull out "Do unto your friends, as …." before I put a kibosh on the give and take and just lectured him. I have to remember to write his parents a nice thank you note when this is all finished for giving me the opportunity to exercise my (not so) little god- complex.

I'll also give Shay this, he's an extremely good natured guy. Most people, let alone twelve-year- old boys, would be pulling out their hair being in a car for so long. Nope, he stayed buoyant and happy, pretty much the whole trip, even during the parts that terrify everyone else. I don't know why, but, apart from the rest of humanity, I feel extremely comfortable in a car. Driving itself is nothing to me; there's no challenge. I usually like to mix it up and see how many different things I can do while driving. Eating, changing out the CD changer, singing, or fiddling with things in the backseat are things that some other brave souls will attempt to do in the car. I like to go the extra mile by doing all of those things, usually at the same time, plus typing or reading. So, I read two-thirds of a book by my favorite contemporary author, Tibor Fischer, as we weaved back and forth over several lanes of rural northern New York; I also typed out the previous day's email (Hell, I'm typing this one in the Adirondacks during a horrific rain storm). Later, when I'd finished that, I started reading the comic book, Watchmen, I bought Shay, before I set it down and he and I played slap-fight in the traffic on the outskirts of Buffalo. When we got out of the car at the Niagara Falls national park, we wrestled a bit before I won conclusively by picking him up and putting him into a fifty-five gallon drum serving as a trash can.

Niagara Falls biggest impact on Shay was that, once we had seen it for four seconds, he really had to go to the bathroom. Besides being ready to go, he was ready to go. I asked to make sure that he didn't want to walk to another point to have a different perspective, but, nope, he was done. He wanted to hurry up and get moving back toward the King's Dominion roller coasters.

At supper that night, we stopped at a Bonanza restaurant, where we got the buffet. The meal was quite pleasant and the boy ate his two helpings of green beans without a problem. For fun, I fetched a piece of lettuce from the salad bar and made him eat it, to which he said, "See?! I didn't make the face!" thus accidentally revealing what I already knew, that all the retching yesterday had been a ploy. When he finished his meal and got ice cream, he took one bite, looked up dreamily, and said, "Ice cream is the food of the angels."