Small Boy Sizes Up a Vacation

Me

   (In which a travel-weary father reluctantly writes a 10-year-old's version of a vacation)

By TOM GUTHRIE

(son of CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the Minneapolis Tribune editorial page staff)

published by the StarTribune

August 1, 1959

   MOM said we had to eat what was in the refrigerator as it would spoil before we got back.  I don't care for scraps.  Neither does Pop, but for four days before we went on our vacation he was choking down cottage cheese, olives, celery, carrots and beans.  You will look a long time before finding a fellow more willing to save a buck.

   The old man never had driven to the east coast before.  He says he is mainly a dirt-road driver and when you ride with him you know it.  We did fine until we hit strange country.  Then Pop began making wrong turns and cussing out the highway department for being so Scotch with road signs.  "You'd think they cost a thousand dollars apiece," he griped.

   THE ONLY evening we holed up early was at Norway, Mich.  We got there about 5 p.m. the first day, after a free lunch on my sister in Rhinelander, Wis.  Pop knew we could get a bargain rate on a cabin, with me sleeping on our cot.  Some sleep!

   Otherwise we kept driving until all the motels were filled up.  As long as Mom sees "vacancy" signs she figures we can drive on a little further, and Pop doesn't like to get reservations ahead.  He says it freezes  your schedule.

   OUR SCHEDULE was thawed out good the second day, when we pulled out of London, Ontario, and drove the wrong way for 25 miles.  Mom, who spent more time looking at road maps and tour books than scenery, said something was rotten in Denmark because we weren't coming to any of the towns we should.  But the old man said he knew what he was doing as the guy said the motel we stayed at was right on the route to Niagara Falls.

   "Maybe we're going in the wrong direction," said Mom.

   "We are not going in the wrong direction," Pop sneered, "but to make you happy I'll stop at the next gas station and inquire."

   WE HAD a late breakfast in London, Ontario.  After 50 miles of driving we had made no gain.  Some breakfast!  Mom and Pop were white with fury.

Me at Niagara Falls

   Niagara Falls made everybody happy again.  "It's a good thing we have the kid along," Pop cracked, "or they'd take us for a couple of honeymooners."  Mom smiled, giving the old man credit for a nice recovery, and everything was fine until we crossed the bridge back into the U.S. and began groping around for the New York thruway, which everybody said we couldn't miss if we followed the signs.

   They said we couldn't miss a lot of places but the old man missed them all.  Finally he said he would strangle the next guy who said "you can't miss it."  To follow the signs, he said, you needed the eyes of a falcon and the nose of a bloodhound and also should be a mind reader.  He would give his eye teeth, he said, to be driving down a country lane that was garnished with horse manure.

   ON THE turnpikes things were better.  There was only one way to go.  They were even simpler than Choteau, Mont., Pop said, and he often let Mom drive on them.  The only thing she didn't like was passing big trucks on curves, even though there was no chance of getting smeared if she kept in the passing lane, as the old man kept yapping at her.

Pop and me looking at the Mayflower

   We stopped at Boston before going to Cape Cod for a week and Pop said they should tear the place down and start over, sparing only the historic spots.  He said Boston obviously was laid out by a guy with delirium tremens and if he spent a week there he'd die of claustrophobia and frustration. 

   We took a sightseeing bus you could fry an egg on but it was worth the price to watch the driver thread the thing through dinky one-way streets and miss barber poles and store fronts by inches.  He also had to yack about Paul Revere and Bunker Hill.  The guy deserves a raise.

   IT RAINED most of the time on Cape Cod.  We spent one lively morning looking at old tombstones.  One inscription said "Death Is Gain."  Pop said the fellow must have driven in Boston.  We also saw Plymouth Rock, the Pilgrim monument in Provincetown and a hermit crab.

Me and Mom at Plymouth Rock

   In New York we took a boat ride around Manhattan and saw the Statue of Liberty and a lot of bridges and tall buildings and Pop bought me a hot dog in a burst of generosity.

   On the way home we stopped at Gettysburg and in a museum they had a map of the battlefield with blue and red lights that flashed on and off while a fellow explained how the Confederates got smeared.  Near Gettysburg we stopped at a place where cokes were only a nickel.  It was all quite historic.

   BACK ON the turnpike Mom looked at the map and said we were close to Wheeling and she'd like to slip down and see Helen Gregory.

   "For your information," Pop declared, "we are not slipping down anywhere to see anybody.  We already have slipped around for 3,500 miles.  I'm ready to slip home."

   That's what we did.

Copyright 2014 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.

Trials of a Parakeet Owner

Pierrot and Tom

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

Aug 3, 1957

   IF YOU'RE willing to overlook assorted turtles and goldfish--and to discount a couple of white mice which still may be loose in the garage--I can say without fear of contradiction that the family never has lost a pet save through natural death or by design.

Dad at the Great Falls Tribune

   Our Boston terrier was with us for 14 years and full of beans until her demise.  A bunny purchased for a long-ago Easter grew into giant maturity despite dogs, cats and finally owner indifference.  The kids "sold" it to a rabbit farmer for a dollar.  The dollar had been slipped to the man by my wife.

   A horned toad bought in early summer was turned loose weeks ago because of the feeding problem. Live insects, which seem plentiful enough, come suddenly into short supply when sought as feed.  But the toad hangs around.  We see it a couple of times a week in the flower beds.  It will hole up in the rock garden come winter, no doubt, and reappear, stolid and imperturbable, next May.

   BUT LATE last Saturday afternoon the roof fell in.  Pierrot, the parakeet, than which there is none cuter or smarter, swooped through the momentarily open porch door and into the blue.

   Six months ago I'd have said that any adult who mourned the loss of a parakeet wasn't quite grown up.  If this is true I admit adolescence.  We combed the neighborgood, scanned the trees with binoculars, whistled and called, put the cage outside with the door open, hoping that hunger would draw our wanderer home.  We all were sick deep inside.  Our son cried himself to sleep.  We felt like joining him.

   "But we haven't lost a pet yet," my wife said feebly, "and I think our luck will hold."

   She was whistling in the dark.  Next morning there was nothing near the cage but sparrows and nobody we contacted had seen a  parakeet.

   AFTER a solemn Sunday, I put and ad in the paper.  The move was a ten-strike.  The ad appeared Tuesday and the phone began ringing.  It seemed that the city was swarming with blue parakeets on the loose.  We heard that one had been rescued from Lake Calhoun.  We saw one that had been taken from Lake Harriet.

   Our hopes high, we began running down the leads.  But as bird after bird proved a stranger, I finally was ready to claim anything other than a bald eagle.  Succumbing at last to the urge to fetch home a parakeet, we bought a feathered vagabond from a woman and took it home.

   But it wasn't our perky, perpetual-motion chatterbox.  Plump, stodgy and silent, it would only eat and  roost.  To my son's objection, I dubbed it Pokey, the Blue Goose, and my wife vowed that if we didn't find our bird within 24 hours she'd roam the pet shops for his double.

Ricky and Snowy

Skeeter and Elvis

   BY WEDNESDAY but one parakeet finder remained to be contacted.  After work that day, with Brad Morison, a colleague, I started out.  Brad left instructions that if his wife called the office she should be told that he would be late for dinner, being engaged in a silly parakeet safari.

   I had small hopes.  The address was miles from our home, far out of parakeet range, I figured.  When we arrived I told Brad to wait in the car, I'd be right out.

   He waited for some time, while two other people and I tried to catch a bird flying around in a large room, a bird in no mood, after four days of adventures, to have another one.  Capture required 20 minutes.

   I DROVE home in wild elation, with Brad holding Pierrot in a cardboard box and making snide remarks about chaperoning a parakeet and wondering why I was so sure the bird was really mine.  Morison is a tropical fish man.

   But my wife and child welcomed the prodigal with an ecstacy unseen in the old hut since Christmas. We were even ready to accept the Blue Goose as a permanent resident, despite Pierrot's initial hostility.

   We didn't have to do so, however.  A couple of hours later we got a phone call from the neighborhood where we'd obtained the bird.  The caller proved to be the owner.  She took Pokey away.

   Now everyone's happy.  But our son wants another parakeet as a companion for Pierrot--one we can name Pierrette, naturally.

Pippin (parrotlet)

Piedemont (parrotlet)

(P.S. Pierette has arrived)


Copyright 2014 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.

    

Black Bug is 'Freed' after These 20 Years

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

Of the editorial/opinion page staff

published by the StarTribune

December 3, 1967

   WE TOOK Big Joe out of the garage a while back.  He had been hanging in the rafters for 20 years and must have been pleased to get into the light and savor the prospect of some action.

   There had been action aplenty back about 1947 after my older son had painstakingly put Big Joe together and readied him for the Soap Box Derby.  The black bug won one heat and thereafter was retired, but not before it had given me the type of thrill associated with ski-jumping or Russian roulette.

   My son had a paper route in those days and his Sunday burden was such that my conscience goaded me into assisting him.  We used a wagon of inadequate size to haul the bundles from the station to where we spotted them.

   ON THIS particular Sunday the lad said that since we had the big bug we might as well use it instead of the little wagon, so we wheeled Big Joe a couple of blocks to an intersection from which point it was down-grade to the station.

   Before getting aboard, I mentioned with some trepidation that we had to go through a couple of intersections and since Big Joe had no brakes whatever we might get creamed by an automobile.  The chance of this was remote, my son said, since it was barely 5 a.m.  So off we started, hitting the first intersection at about 30 m.p.h., going faster through the next one, but suffering damage only to my nervous system.

   Shortly thereafter I consigned Big Joe to the garage rafters.  He was too hot an item for the boys in the neighborhood.  I told my son that if he ever had a compelling reason for getting the thing out of mothballs he was free to do so.

   HE NEVER DID.  He finished school, got married and moved away.  A second son came along but the cut of his jib was different.  He noticed Big Joe and would reach up and give its wheels an occasional spin but he never asked to ride the thing.  Neither did his playmates, although the Tierney kids next door gave it some longing looks and Katie could have talked me into getting it down had she turned on the charm.

   Then, on a Sunday afternoon this fall, my son and his family checked in for dinner.  Big Joe came into the conversation and there was much begging from the grandsons.  We went into the garage and lifted it from the rafters.

   WITH ITS WHEELS back on the ground and layers of dust removed, the bug seemed as shiny and sturdy as ever and won admiring glances from the assembled smallfry.  We maneuvered it into my son's station wagon and when the family drove off the curtain came down on some history.

   Through the mist of years I could see my son mooring an electric motor to the work bench and using it to spin and break in the special wheels he'd bought.  The wheels spun for days and he periodically applied lubricants and abrasives.

   Then there were Big Joe and his pilot high on the ramp and poised for the race--not long afterward, defeat.

   The word now is that Big Joe has fallen apart.  It's just as well.  His new surroundings were hilly and dangerous, and I'm glad he collapsed before anyone got hurt.

Copyright 2014 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune