All aboard for Ithaca
At the end of our four-day visit to Ithaca, N.Y., for an extended family reunion, I congratulated my 10-year-old son and told him I was giving him the award for “Best Behaved Kid.”
We both knew my remarks were ironic, and to Max’s credit, he enjoyed the satiric undertone as I soberly shook his hand and we both burst into laughter.
For Max, who has autism, had not had an easy time on our first family road trip, reacting to changes in his environment in a way that — with respect to his privacy — saw us banned in four states as my normalsized headache turned into a full-fledged migraine.
It also provided cover for his opportunistic younger brother to stage the rebellion of a lifetime while older sister Meghan wrestled for control of the car stereo in an ongoing battle between The Monkees’ “Porpoise Song” and Fountains Of Wayne’s “Stacy’s Mom.”
The result: The kind of gross family dysfunction and mental anguish I haven’t experienced since my own road trips to Florida as a kid in the ’70s.
Ah, those were the good old days, barrelling down I-95 blasting “The Carpenters Greatest Hits” and “The Best of Captain & Tennille” as my dad swerved among aggressive tractor trailers while four boys kicked his seat and my now 50-year-old sister wailed for a bathroom break.
“It was hell on earth,” notes my dad today, not without some residual fondness. “You guys were fighting all the time.”
It’s telling that my dad, stricken with Alzheimer’s, forgets what he had for breakfast but remembers intimate details of long-ago car trips that included wrong turns into the hillbilly backwoods, eating cold Chef Boyardee from a can and navigating the razor-thin Seven Mile Bridge to the Florida Keys in heavy traffic with no rest stops.
“I still remember having to drive with one hand while trying to grab somebody by the throat,” he recalls, memory clear as a bell.
“It’s a miracle we got there and back. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”
Jump 40 years and it’s my turn, discordantly zooming along I-90 on an eight-
hour trek with three battling kids and a faulty GPS, convinced that as a self-proclaimed “cool dad” in an era of enlightened parenting, I could redirect any anti-social tendencies before they became full-fledged mutinies.
Ha ha. At least I can laugh about it now.
And while it was great to hang out with my wife’s American relatives in the bucolic Finger Lakes Region — while delicately avoiding any mention of the presidential Orange Blunder — I learned a number of valuable life lessons that won’t soon be forgotten.
One, Max does not travel well. It turns out that 10-year-olds with autism are not freewheeling, go-with-the-flow bon vivants when faced with upturned daily routines at large family gatherings with no control over their environment.
Yes, I know. I’m an idiot. This is Parenting 101 for kids on the spectrum, but what can I say? I figured he would be having so much fun he would just naturally adapt.
“It was too noisy, too loud, too many people and I didn’t like the food,” he told me a day after we arrived home, his outrage eased enough for rational conversation.
Lesson two: If a member of your travelling party is prone to throwing water bottles and shoes, seat that person in the back row, away from the driver, and confiscate potential weapons before turning the ignition.
And then there was the comical notion of two grade-school hellions mingling with dignified New Englanders wearing ascots, pouring martinis and shaking hands with a pleasant “How do you do?”
How do I do? While you guys are drinking aperitifs in the foyer of a historic 19th-century guest house with a grand piano and antique lamps, my kids are on the stately front lawn, attempting to strangle each other.
I’m drowning here, man. But as we sat down to dinner at a grand oak table, preparing to eulogize a beloved late aunt with impromptu, round-the-table speeches, something unusual happened.
Had it been an episode of “The Twilight Zone,” the camera would have panned to Rod Serling, soberly intoning “You’re travelling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination.”
How else to explain my Dennis the Menace eight-year-old addressing the table like a youthful David Niven — or maybe Cary Grant — as he delivered a masterful speech, filled with nuance and insight, about the ephemerality of human existence and the importance of family.
“When Aunt Judy died it changed everything,’’ he intoned like a pint-sized Walter Cronkite.
“It made us realize we should value the people closest to us, because you never know when your time will come.”
By the time he pronounced Aunt Judy “a great woman,” voice quavering with emotion, the entire table was in tears.
At which point Max stood up and — to my great surprise — delivered a humble dissertation that if not equal in magnitude, registered as thoughtful and sincere as he noted the symbolic importance of family reunions and the honour of being included in such prestigious company.
“What the bleep is going on?” I asked Alicia back at the hotel, as both kids hysterically swatted each other with pillows.
“It’s like they were temporarily possessed by aliens.”
She shrugged, less surprised than I. “Sam is emotionally precocious,” she noted matter-offactly. “I have conversations like this with him all the time. Max was just following his lead.”
“Who knew they had such hidden depths,” I marvelled as Max swan-dived off the couch. “My superior DNA is paying off in spades.”
I was still clapping myself on the back on the drive back to Canada when a shoe whizzed by my ear followed by the clank of a water bottle and the familiar blast of “Stacy’s Mom” from an iPod in the back seat.
“I wonder if I’ll remember this in 40 years?” I mused as I reached back, one hand on the steering wheel, trying to grab someone by the throat.
“If I do, I hope it will be with residual fondness.’’
Joel Rubinoff is at home, eagerly planning his next road trip. Email him at jrubinoff@therecord.com, Twitter: @JoelRubinoff