Vacation Memory

So we leave for Disney next Saturday morning and we're getting psyched up.

My wife, child and self are going to be meeting my brother, his wife and their two kids there and my sister in law informed me she's already packing. I can't do that. It only brings on a bad childhood memory.

I grew up lower middle class I would say. While we had a warm home and food on the table I didn't always get the brand of sneakers I wanted and my parents didn't really have the money for athletic camps or "extras" that it seemed my friends had.

One thing my parents did spend money on, however, was vacations. We always went for two weeks and although things were budgeted, we rented nice houses on the shore, went to Disney or California or the like. My mom loved and still loves to travel so I've been to most parts of the country as well as across Canada and down into Mexico.

In her excitement for the trips, one thing was to pack early. Early as in two weeks in advance which left us with limited clothing to wear, let alone clothes we'd be caught dead in. When I was a lad of say 14 my mom called me at my buddy's house and asked me to come home because she wanted to wash and pack the tee shirt I was wearing. This was a Tuesday before a Saturday departure and I was at least 3/4 of a mile away and in a whiffle ball pennant race.

Well, I found this embarrassing in front of my friends and more or less unexplainable to them. Plus I could only imagine the shirt she selected as not "vacation worthy". I argued my point but went home where I argued my point more. I argued it to the point that I was grounded for the next two days. Its still unclear why she couldn't wait another two hours or so when I would be home for dinner.

But she won. She always won.

Since I was grounded, though, at least nobody saw me in my "Here Comes A (Bad Example) of a Genius" shirt that didn't make the vacation cut.