I'm starting my memoirs writing class tomorrow. Here's something I wrote for my students to read --
When I was a child, my parents would take my younger brother and me on picnics three or four times a summer. Most of the time, we’d go to a state park somewhere in New York State’s Mohawk Valley, where we lived.
We’d drive around the picnic area until we found a site with not too much sun or shade. After my father parked the car as near as possible, my mother would put a vinyl tablecloth on the picnic table and wipe off the attached benches before bringing out the frying pan, hamburger buns, pickles, potato chips, cookies, plastic forks and cups, paper dishes and napkins. Meanwhile, my father would be emptying the metal chest filled with ice cubes, hamburger patties, potato salad, tomatoes, and bottles of Pepsi and Utica Club beer. Finally, he’d return to the car, lug the Coleman stove out of the trunk, set it up at one end of the picnic table, and pump the tank – was it propane or gasoline? – to get the burners working.
My mother would fry the hamburgers while Jim and I ate potato chips and flicked ants off the table. After we ate, we kids had to wait an hour before we could go swimming, so while my mother cleaned up, my father would take us for a walk to look at the stone steps leading to the lakefront. He would always tell us the same story about how he used to build steps just like these in various parks throughout the South when he was in the Civilian Conservation Corps as a teenager. Finally, we’d walk back to our picnic table.
My father would stay behind, reading that morning’s Sunday newspaper, while my mother walked us to the lake. Both my brother and I wore our swimsuits under our shorts and shirts, because we didn’t like to go into the bathhouse to change. Swimming – or, more accurately, splashing around – was never as much fun as I had anticipated, because we didn’t know any of the other kids. But at least we knew our mother was sitting on the sand, watching out for us. After a couple of hours and a signal from our mother, we’d trudge up to the sour-smelling bathhouses. The women’s bathhouse was always filled with teenaged girls who laughed too loudly and crying babies who were overtired, so I changed in a hurry and left to find my brother and mother, who would be waiting outside.
After we moved to the suburbs, my family stopped going on picnics. My brother listened to ball games on the radio, I played tennis behind the junior high school, and my parents – well, I don’t remember what they did because I was busy doing teenaged things with my friends. I began to drift away from my family, and after being away at college for four years, I took a teaching job in another part of the state.
Now, decades later, I have begun to see some things more clearly.
One thing I now realize is that those picnics were a lot of work. When Jim and I were kids, both my parents worked fulltime jobs -- my father for the local gas and electric company, my mother at a General Electric factory. On Saturdays, my mother cleaned our apartment, and my father repaired whatever needed fixing. But it never occurred to my brother and me that those picnics took much preparation time on Saturday – making the hamburger patties and potato salad, getting the Coleman stove and ice chest from wherever they were stored.
I remember my mother swimming with us only once or twice. Most of the time, she just sat on the beach watching us. And I suspect my father never joined us there because he had never learned to swim. Growing up on a hardscrabble farm with a hard-drinking father and a mother who eventually got fed up and left the farm, my father probably had never seen a lake or swimming hole until he joined the CCC and went south to help create state parks.
Did my parents enjoy those Sunday outings as much as we did, or did they take time away from their one day of leisure just for us? Oh, how I wish I had remembered to thank my parents for those picnics while they were still alive.
