Christmas 1986

Somewhere between the summer and Christmas, 1986 Brandon's mother and her boyfriend, Melvin The Toothless Twit, loaded a homemade trailer- which fell apart on the road before they got out of Florida- and moved to Edison, Ohio, just north of Cincinnati. In fact it was after they had gone that our divorce, written by Carmen and uncontested, went to court. It was a good divorce, as divorces go.

This was my year to have Brandon at Christmas. I thought it would be a treat for him to come to Florida by bus. He loved anything with wheels on it. My mother, of course, still thought bus travel was dangerous, so she offered to pay the difference between the price of bus tickets and air fare. Well, as luck would have it, our local radio station, WTTB (Where The Tropics Begin) in Vero Beach ran a Greyhound promotion called "Home For The Holidays," with a prize of two round trip tickets to anywhere in the US for the listener who wrote the winning sad tale about what schmaltzy thing could be accomplished if she/he had this grand prize. You know me and schmaltzy tales. Actually, I think I might have been the only one who entered. But I won in any case. So Mom and I negotiated a settlement. I took Greyhound to Cincinnati and had two plane tickets back, subsidized in the amount it would have been if the bus tickets had been full price. Melvin was going to haul Brandon back to Ohio.

I don't recall anything particularly interesting on the trip to Cincinnati. When I arrived I did what I usually do- I bought a map. I found the street where they lived in Edison, figured out the bus route that went that direction, and set out. So, the bus only went about half way. So I did what I always do. I set out walking with my suitcase.

I guess I walked about three miles before a kind soul stopped and offered me a lift. He took me right to their front door. I waited around for about an hour before Brandon was ready to go. Melvin called a cab company and asked how much the fare was to the airport. It was forty bucks. He drove us himself. Not only is the airport on the far side of the city, it's not even in Ohio! It's in Covington, Kentucky. I secreted a twenty dollar bill poking out of his ash tray while he was buying gas to get there.


Brandon was entranced at the airport. There were real airplanes everywhere! Then when we got on the plane, there were light switches and air jets to play with. The flight crew were charmed by his winning little six-year-old personality, too, so it was a fun flight. It was dark out, so we could see things that were lit up on the ground, cities and such. The coolest, though, was the approach into Orlando a few days before Christmas. The whole place was a blaze of colored lights.


Carmen picked us up at the airport and took us back to Vero Beach. We didn't explore Narcoossee this time. I guess it was 11:00 by the time we arrived at home and carried the sleeping boy inside.


Christmas was Christmas as usual, but it had a surprise lurking behind it. Carmen got a call from her mother that evening. Mum Mum, Carmen's grandmother who all but raised her, had had a heart attack and was in the hospital in Memphis, sixty miles from West Helena, Arkansas where Mum Mum lived. We made arrangements with Melvin to make the transfer in Memphis to get Brandon back in time for school in January. We quickly packed the car, and bundled ourselves in for the long drive.

Late the next morning we were in eastern Mississippi thinking about lunch. Carmen talked to her mom, who said that Mum Mum was in no immediate danger. We decided we wanted to cook out in a park somewhere. So we stopped at a little grocery store to buy ground beef and buns. Carmen thought we ought to make s'mores for dessert, so we bought graham crackers and Hershey bars. The store did not have any charcoal or marshmallows- in fact the proprietors gave us suspicious looks for even thinking about cooking out. It was below freezing. So we continued on, stopping at every convenience store looking for the missing items. Finally one had an old dusty bag of charcoal, and another had an old dusty bag of marshmallows and a can of lighter fluid.

We were seeing signs for Chewalla Lake Recreation Area in Holly Springs National Forest, so we turned off US 78 and followed a long and winding road to a totally human-free picnic area beside a beautiful lake surrounded by bare trees and evergreens. I got the charcoal going, then Brandon and I walked a portion of the ice-rimmed edge of the lake to see what we could see. Not much. We were there for about two and a half hours, another long siege while Brandon took forever to eat. The s'mores were yummy and worth all the effort it took to find the wherewithall.


Back on the road, we were on the home stretch. Before long Marc Cohn was running through my head as I was Walking in Memphis. We visited Mum Mum in Baptist Hospital, then drove back to West Helena, Carmen's home town, for some much-needed sleep.

We called The Toothless Twit and he declared that he would be in Memphis Sunday morning to pick up Brandon. We told him where the parking garage was where we had his luggage to haul back. We were dismayed when Melvin arrived after his 480 mile journey on his motorcycle, ready to haul Brandon and stuff 480 miles back to Cincinnati in below freezing weather. But...it wasn't our job to interfere, and they both survived it.

We returned to Vero Beach soon after, with a liesurely tour of the Greater Narcoossee area thrown in. We found a road that skirted the south side of East Lake Tohopekaliga and landed us on St. Cloud's lakefront, where sandhill cranes roamed like huge tall chickens and snail kites munched on big snails.

We moved there three months later.