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Not Ren

Ren and I speak past two when the restaurant closes—though it is curious that a restaurant doesn't care about dinner. The staff trickles out, some waving goodbye as though we are regulars, and this is just what we do every weekend. We ask if we ought to make ourselves scarce, but the staff assure us they will sweep around us.

Ren began our first meeting by asking my favorite cryptid, Gef the Talking Mongoose, about whom I had written a book. They followed up by telling me about a few cryptids with whom I am not acquainted, one of which is a ghostly Megatherium that once tromped about the woods of Sherman, New York.

Not a turtle

The child sits out of the county fair bathroom wearing a shirt reading, "There Are Only Two Genders," in white print on black. For all the effort someone made in creating it, it might be Times New Roman. Such things are rarely haute couture or made of material intended to end up as hand-me-downs. Three washes and it will be indecipherable lint.

They are the sort of young and obese where gender characteristics are notional, compounding the irony of this loose shirt. I settle on them being male because they are next to a boy, and I can't imagine most girls that age would consent to wear something so stupidly tacky (and poorly designed) in private, to say nothing of in public around so many strangers of every age. Girls tend to be more image-conscious and feel they are the main characters on the stage sooner.

I don't fault the boy.

Mom and Dad

My father errs in telling my mother he does not want her to join him on a trip to visit his sister Judy, seven hours away. He refuses to explain why beyond saying it may be the last time he ever does. No one in this is even seventy or sick, so the statement does not prove exculpatory.

My mother has no one else but me who will listen. My older brother is in his own world. My younger brother never mastered a bedside manner despite soon becoming a doctor.

She is a child

We were settling in Bryan's birthday hibachi when my mother dropped that my eldest niece, Ayannah, would be moving to Lebanon to live with her internet boyfriend. I vaguely knew about him; I was aware she had stayed up all night videoing with a guy for years. This may have preceded the end of her last relationship, but I do not know. She met the guy playing some online game, as is not uncommon. I have met more important people in less admirable ways.

I protested that she was too young to take such a drastic step. She was barely nineteen! What could she be thinking?

They did, though

Our drive to Salem, with a pit stop at a college's botanical garden, will not be brief. My app suggests a hair over four hours, giving me ample time to psychoanalyze my family via the days in Lake George preceding--it is a decent sport after this rocky week. Amber suggests that my family will be happy in retrospect and that all travails will be remixed as bonding experiences. We did not bond. We suffered and complained, but it did not bring us any closer together, especially as we fell into familiar trauma responses of trying to recede and caretake. I appreciate Amber's optimism, if this is indeed what they present, but I know my family too well to put much stock in it.

Outside this discussion, which borders on a game (and is a way for me to remember what has occurred for later recollection), we sing along to my assiduously made Road Trip mix. I create one before every vacation, spending hours filling a flash drive with as many songs as should occupy our time on the road with five hours to spare--around twenty hours. I span genres and eras, but most of them are intended to be worth singing along to when the road before us is tinted orange from the sunset--not that I have the mildest interest in still being on the road when that happens today. Before getting to Salem, we will have gone through two hundred songs. Amber declined to have me put it on shuffle, so it plays through straight. Most of my songs were ripped from YouTube or have existed on one hard drive or another for twenty years, so the naming schemes are, at best, inconsistent. We note with excitement when it goes from 01 to 02 and, finally, 03.

Vacation closed

It is almost a relief that my mother takes the blame for selecting these cabins. I gave this as an option, mainly because only a few listings met the qualifications for our rental. She needed her dogs with her, or she could not go on vacation, as had happened with Portland years before (though that house was chosen for its pet-friendliness; she didn't feel up for the long trip with them). It narrowed our options considerably to the degree that only three or four possibilities existed. I do not know what resulted in these cabins winning out, but I cannot fathom that most others would have been worse.

My tendency in general, but specifically on vacation, is to fall into the Rescuer role in the Reenactment Triangle, even when no one asks to be rescued. It is the bane of being the middle child, the designated peacekeeper, the former gifted kid who is still programmed for the approval of adults.