A small, tan, Pen-Tab notebook. The cover reads: Vacation In California. September-October, 1988. By Paul Murphy Shirley.
I was ten years old when my family took a two-week vacation to the state where I was born. The trip featured my first-ever plane ride; I remember thinking, while in band class the day before we left, It’s weird that tomorrow night I’ll be in a whole different part of the country.
In a flash of inspiration, my parents had scheduled the trip to California for the fall. They knew that the crowds at Disneyland and in Yosemite would be smaller than they would have been in the summer. Plus, our nonstop Braniff flight was probably cheaper.
There was only one obstacle to their parental brainstorm: A little thing called the fifth grade. (Or, in the case of my brothers, the third and the first grade.)
But my parents had a secret ally in their quest to take us on a school year vacation.
They had Mrs. Mahoney.
Two years prior, Mrs. Mahoney had given up on teaching special ed. to try her hand at third grade. My class had been waiting for her. Her experiment proved itself a resounding success and to this day, she remains my favorite teacher, narrowly edging out the thermodynamics professor who rarely lectured for longer than 20 minutes.
Mrs. Mahoney’s secret: she adapted her methods to her students’ needs, instead of the other way around. She pushed those who needed pushing, and eased back on those who needed patience.
My parents, hoping for an encore performance, made sure that my brother Dan made it into her third grade homeroom. Their tenacity paid off.
Mrs. Mahoney was our golden ticket to the golden state. She told my mother that Dan would be forgiven the daily third grade grind, as long as he kept a written record of our trip to California. Pleased with the idea, my mother went quickly to my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Conaway, to see if she would agree to something similar. Mrs. Conaway assented, probably not because she recognized our prospective journaling as a formative experience, but most likely because she was old, and didn’t want to grade two weeks’ worth of completed worksheets
Whatever the reason, Dan and I celebrated gleefully when we learned that we’d been spared the drudgery of two weeks of phonics and long division.*
My mother unearthed my journal in a recent, frenzied basement cleanup. As I flipped through the yellowing pages, I couldn’t help but wish that I could return to those youthful days in California.
Today we went to the La Brea Tar Pits and the La Brea Tar Pits Discovery Center. They had whole skeletons of mammoths, mastodons, a lion, saber toothed cats, horse, a bison, birds, dire wolves, a sloth and bears.
My favorite of these was the Imperial Mammoth which stood 13 feet tall!
Today we rented our car, a Chevrolet Berretta, a two door car, at Alamo Rentals.
Before supper, my uncle Tom gave us a tour of the Good Samaritan Hospital where he works as a cardiologist (heart doctor). He showed us a small film of a heart operation. They used a tiny balloon on the end of a very small, flexible wire to clear the blockage of the artery.
We went up 8 stories to the top of the hospital to see the helicopter landing pad.
Tom drove us around downtown L.A. We saw some tall buildings.
I liked this day a lot.
I read a little more. I found the section about our stay in Yosemite National Park.
When we finally got to Yosemite, we checked in and got our “cabin tent” we had reserved. I thought it was a wimp tent. It had electricity. Now that’s stupid!
We can see Half Dome, a large mountain that’s rounded on one side and then straight down on the other. Yosemite is pretty!
My distaste for the pussification of camping notwithstanding, the above is just another happy entry in a 10-year-old boy’s diary.
Except that now, when I think about it, I wasn’t all that happy in Yosemite. In fact, I wasn’t very happy for much of the vacation. I spent several evenings in a depressed haze, perhaps because the night before our trip to Disneyland was also the night I realized that my parents would someday die.
When we find tokens from our pasts – whether from a childhood vacation, a college party, or a 20-year high school reunion – we tend to remember only the positive aspects of those events; the cameraman is rarely around when we’re alone, crying under a sequoia tree.
At first blush, our predilection to accentuate the positive is slightly depressing. We are forced to understand how flawed our memories really are.
But upon further review, that understanding is actually helpful; it eliminates our desire to go back in time. As I toured California with my ten year-old self, I remembered that life had obstacles then, just as now. Those obstacles may seem petty to the 32-year-old version of me, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t suffer through them then.
When we recall that life wasn’t nearly as rosy as our pictures, our journals – even our own memories – would lead us to believe, we grow more content with the present. We remember that life is never all good or all bad.
Take Mrs. Mahoney, for example. My brain has lionized her as “favorite teacher.” But she had flaws, just like any human being. When I think hard enough, I can remember the occasional teacherly misstep – a bungled handling of a new student or an angry flare-up after a long day of dealing with twenty-five ten year-olds.
But this is how our brains work. Our favorite books weren’t perfect from start to finish. Our first crushes sometimes had smelly armpits.
Our memories take shortcuts, especially when given evidence as damning as a journal from two decades before.
I’m glad that my mother found my vacation journal. I’m even more glad that Mrs. Mahoney was still teaching someone in my family when we went to California; there’s no way a worksheet on subjects and predicates would have survived 22 years in a box.
But more than that, I’m glad that I can remember that my journal doesn’t tell the whole story.
—
* Our brother Matt wasn’t so lucky. His first-grade teacher, the school-marmy Mrs. Bush, sent home every worksheet and reading assignment that Matt would miss. And then, when he turned them in when we got home, she peered down at my brother over her black glasses and said, “You know I can only give you half credit. These are still late.”
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