Day 100 (September 30): Memphis
There's a lot of fatigue going around. This day is a Monday. We wake up in a KOA surrounded by farm fields about 20 miles west of Memphis, in Marion, Arkansas. One of our travel skills is to look at a campground with Google Earth before we book it. We look to see how closely the campground sites are packed together. We look for evidence of a good (or bad) playground. We check out the pool. This one doesn't look promising.
We execute breakfast. I can't think of a more appropriate verb. The KOA has a renowned restaurant. We got pulled pork sandwiches from them the night before and they were great. This morning the line is long and the food looks mediocre.
School. This is a big day for Lily because we have withdrawn her from her online charter school and now we're going with a more traditional homeschooling approach. We got her new math curriculum from an Amazon Locker in Birmingham on Saturday and today we're diving in. It goes well and we feel encouraged. Honestly, I can't remember much else about it.
Pool. At last, the kids are happy. For a few minutes. This is one of our constant struggles: how much do we let them sort out their bickering. They're playing a game and somebody loses. There's crying. There's shouting. The noise annoys me. The bickering annoys me. That they are spending their time fighting instead of enjoying a cool pool on a hot day really annoys me. But they're kids and this is part of it. They're figuring things out and learning to solve their problems, as Elise reminds me. So I try to let it go. In part, that means I restrain myself from intervening; I can do this. In part that means I try not to let it bother me; I am not very good at this.
Elise was smart enough to exercise early in the morning when it was merely 70-something degrees. I'm dumb and I'm exercising on the side of the pool (part lifeguard). It's 90 degrees and I can't get a grip on my yoga mat because of the sweat. I can't hear the cues from my online trainer because of the highway noise, the wind and the screaming kids. I'm frustrated.
Lunch. Enterprise picks us up (you've seen the commercials, it's true) and a while later we're driving a rented minivan into downtown Memphis. First we visit the Bass Pro Shop, which is a former basketball arena in the shape of a pyramid (think Luxor Hotel in Vegas). This is an epic experience and Henry runs around with Elise's iPhone and his buddy Alex on FaceTime. We escape without buying junk for the kids!
We navigate to the National Civil Rights Museum, which has been constructed around the Loraine Motel, site of MLK Jr's assassination. The kids can't tell the difference between this and the museum's we've visited in Montgomery and Birmingham. On the positive, they know the stories so well they can name the exhibits without reading the signs. On the negative, they're bored and uninterested.
And then there we are, standing where a wall once separated the two rooms rented by King and his entourage. There's the balcony. There's the railing. There is the plaza across which the bullet traveled. Then, in a space I wish I could have lingered, there's a ramp in a dark room leading to the exit. With great subtlety, there are the shadows of people marching, on the dark blue wall leading to the exit. They are carrying on with the struggle, side by side with each visitor. We are leaving the museum, leaving our civil rights tour and yet we are not done. Looking at our kids - our bored, tired, hot kids - we realize we have just begun.
There is dinner at Central BBQ around the corner. They are the best ribs I've eaten in my entire life. Even the kids eat some of their food. But everybody is tired and grumpy. We sneak a dose of joy when I rent an electric scooter and take each of the kids for a ride, clinging to the handle bar. That's right, no helmets, totally stupid but entirely fun.
We can't drive down Beale Street because, thank goodness, it's pedestrian only. We stop and take a picture of the I am a Man sculpture, recently installed in a city park. I stand there in the blazing heat, the sun nearing the horizon, trying to take in this site. "I am a man" was the mantra of the sanitation workers' strike that brought MLK to Memphis in 1968. This sculpture is extraordinary. I don't know if the picture captures it because I know what I saw while I stood there so for me the picture evokes a memory.
Something about the emphasis on gender strikes a chord with me. I think to myself, the tension between the 14th amendment (1868, equal protection) and the 19th (1920, women's vote) is on display here. The New York Times brought to my attention the 400th anniversary of the first slaves in North America. Earlier in the year, several columns in the Times brought to my attention the treatment of black women by the women's suffrage movement.
Now I'm standing on a sweltering corner in Memphis, my tired family waiting in the car while I try to reconcile race and gender. Maybe later.
It's bedtime. the air conditioners are cranking away, keeping the inside of the RV around 75 degrees. This would be way too hot for me to fall asleep at home but here I can drift into slumber. Tomorrow is the first of October. A month from now we'll be in Portland, preparing to leave the country for nine months. 100 days has been a long time. We've been to 23 states and one province. The kids have learned innumerable travel skills. They've grappled with homesickness. They miss their friends.
Day 200…it's going to be in early January, I think, which means we'll be somewhere in Australia. We will have spent a month in south America (mostly Argentina) and a month in Australia, mostly in apartments for two weeks at a time. How will the kids have coped with not speaking the language? How did they endure the 15 hour flight from Santiago to Sydney? How is school going? And so many more questions.
To my Day 200 self: at this point in time, you were frustrated but optimistic. You felt you were accomplishing the goals of expanding the kids's horizons and that, mostly, that's all that matters. But you were worried about them eating enough to be healthy. You were worried about the contemptuous way we are communicating as well as the impact of the kids' exposure to your temper. You were worried that if you don't get a daytime high of less than 95 pretty soon, you will actually melt.
We execute breakfast. I can't think of a more appropriate verb. The KOA has a renowned restaurant. We got pulled pork sandwiches from them the night before and they were great. This morning the line is long and the food looks mediocre.
School. This is a big day for Lily because we have withdrawn her from her online charter school and now we're going with a more traditional homeschooling approach. We got her new math curriculum from an Amazon Locker in Birmingham on Saturday and today we're diving in. It goes well and we feel encouraged. Honestly, I can't remember much else about it.
Pool. At last, the kids are happy. For a few minutes. This is one of our constant struggles: how much do we let them sort out their bickering. They're playing a game and somebody loses. There's crying. There's shouting. The noise annoys me. The bickering annoys me. That they are spending their time fighting instead of enjoying a cool pool on a hot day really annoys me. But they're kids and this is part of it. They're figuring things out and learning to solve their problems, as Elise reminds me. So I try to let it go. In part, that means I restrain myself from intervening; I can do this. In part that means I try not to let it bother me; I am not very good at this.
Elise was smart enough to exercise early in the morning when it was merely 70-something degrees. I'm dumb and I'm exercising on the side of the pool (part lifeguard). It's 90 degrees and I can't get a grip on my yoga mat because of the sweat. I can't hear the cues from my online trainer because of the highway noise, the wind and the screaming kids. I'm frustrated.
Lunch. Enterprise picks us up (you've seen the commercials, it's true) and a while later we're driving a rented minivan into downtown Memphis. First we visit the Bass Pro Shop, which is a former basketball arena in the shape of a pyramid (think Luxor Hotel in Vegas). This is an epic experience and Henry runs around with Elise's iPhone and his buddy Alex on FaceTime. We escape without buying junk for the kids!
We navigate to the National Civil Rights Museum, which has been constructed around the Loraine Motel, site of MLK Jr's assassination. The kids can't tell the difference between this and the museum's we've visited in Montgomery and Birmingham. On the positive, they know the stories so well they can name the exhibits without reading the signs. On the negative, they're bored and uninterested.
And then there we are, standing where a wall once separated the two rooms rented by King and his entourage. There's the balcony. There's the railing. There is the plaza across which the bullet traveled. Then, in a space I wish I could have lingered, there's a ramp in a dark room leading to the exit. With great subtlety, there are the shadows of people marching, on the dark blue wall leading to the exit. They are carrying on with the struggle, side by side with each visitor. We are leaving the museum, leaving our civil rights tour and yet we are not done. Looking at our kids - our bored, tired, hot kids - we realize we have just begun.
There is dinner at Central BBQ around the corner. They are the best ribs I've eaten in my entire life. Even the kids eat some of their food. But everybody is tired and grumpy. We sneak a dose of joy when I rent an electric scooter and take each of the kids for a ride, clinging to the handle bar. That's right, no helmets, totally stupid but entirely fun.
We can't drive down Beale Street because, thank goodness, it's pedestrian only. We stop and take a picture of the I am a Man sculpture, recently installed in a city park. I stand there in the blazing heat, the sun nearing the horizon, trying to take in this site. "I am a man" was the mantra of the sanitation workers' strike that brought MLK to Memphis in 1968. This sculpture is extraordinary. I don't know if the picture captures it because I know what I saw while I stood there so for me the picture evokes a memory.
Something about the emphasis on gender strikes a chord with me. I think to myself, the tension between the 14th amendment (1868, equal protection) and the 19th (1920, women's vote) is on display here. The New York Times brought to my attention the 400th anniversary of the first slaves in North America. Earlier in the year, several columns in the Times brought to my attention the treatment of black women by the women's suffrage movement.
Now I'm standing on a sweltering corner in Memphis, my tired family waiting in the car while I try to reconcile race and gender. Maybe later.
It's bedtime. the air conditioners are cranking away, keeping the inside of the RV around 75 degrees. This would be way too hot for me to fall asleep at home but here I can drift into slumber. Tomorrow is the first of October. A month from now we'll be in Portland, preparing to leave the country for nine months. 100 days has been a long time. We've been to 23 states and one province. The kids have learned innumerable travel skills. They've grappled with homesickness. They miss their friends.
Day 200…it's going to be in early January, I think, which means we'll be somewhere in Australia. We will have spent a month in south America (mostly Argentina) and a month in Australia, mostly in apartments for two weeks at a time. How will the kids have coped with not speaking the language? How did they endure the 15 hour flight from Santiago to Sydney? How is school going? And so many more questions.
To my Day 200 self: at this point in time, you were frustrated but optimistic. You felt you were accomplishing the goals of expanding the kids's horizons and that, mostly, that's all that matters. But you were worried about them eating enough to be healthy. You were worried about the contemptuous way we are communicating as well as the impact of the kids' exposure to your temper. You were worried that if you don't get a daytime high of less than 95 pretty soon, you will actually melt.
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