Vaccation

I wish that you, The panel of judges, or however the winner is picked for a scholarship, could see my family in action. You would give me the money as soon as possible and say, “ Oh you poor child, take the money and get as far away as possible.” They are crazy. Not in the, “Let’s rob a bank” crazy. Rather, the “ Let’s see if we can jump of the roof of the garage with the picnic umbrella crazy.” But I digress. This essay is to tell you about the time we attempted to take a family vacation , and got so much more.

This was the plan; Go to Michigan to visit Uncle Billy. From there we would go to Cedar Point. Then After we’d had enough gut wrenching roller coasters, we would travel to New Jersey to go to my mom’s best friend’s commitment ceremony. Seems pretty simple, right? Wrong. Not in this family. My father is an ex marine, My younger brother is severely autistic, and non verbal. My mom has a disease called Diverticulitis. Needless to say, Murphy’s Law came on strong the minute we were all in the car ready to go. Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong.

Diverticulitis is a digestive disease usually found in the large intestine. When one of the diverticula become inflamed, the person experiencing the the disease is in unimaginable pain. Of course, this would decide to flame up in my mom’s digestive track as soon as we were in the car.

So here we are, on the road to a wonderful vacation. My mother is in unbearable pain. My brother has seen to it to play with all knobs and buttons in the car, turning the heat on full and the music all the way up, and my father is having a visible conniption. I believe it was Bill Cosby , in one of his stand ups, that described his wife’s conniption. He couldn’t have put it better. You see, my father is a big guy. He has this vein in the middle of his forehead. It’s kind of like an oracle. When you see it pulsing, something bad is going to happen.

I will spare you of the “high decibel conversation” that my father had with my brother and I. He was a marine, and some of those things just couldn’t be repeated. I know your probably thing my dad is kinda crazy, and you’d be right, but he’s a good guy. Sometimes he forgets to separate being a dad from being at work. He’s a new york state trooper, so he deals with misbehavior for his pay check. It can get a bit jumbled.

It’s an eight hour drive from Waverly to Michigan. After the giant fight of getting on the road, we now had to find some way to entertain ourselves. My poor mother, she had to take some weird medicine that helped her intestines go back to normal, and that just put her out like a light. So began the next blow up. I am a seventeen year old young lady. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to listen to “ best of the fifties” for eight hours. My father is forty five year old man. He doesn’t want to put up with my “ crazy beat pop crap” for eight hours either. That fight, was thankfully solved in short by Sean turning of the radio and laughing.

That’s what did it for our family. Sean Mullen’s soft giggle. It kind of just hit us. Hey, were a family. If this boy, right here, who can’t even ask to use the bathroom when he needs to, can understand were all being ridiculous, we should be able to as well. Thanks to my pure, innocent brother, our vacation was saved from our stupidity, and we became even closer than before.