Sometimes in the middle of camping season instead of loading and
unloading the camper in between goes my dad would just leave it on
the back of the truck. Sometimes my mom would need to transport a
huge amount of kids and she would just load them into the old cab
over because the 90's were still in a transitional stage of child
vehicular safety. It was a different time altogether in terms of
safety rules and standards. We used to double-buckle seat belts which
meant clipping with two children abreast. If we were too wide in the
bottom to sit side by side we used to go laps. We did have car seats
for children too small or floppy to be put in a regular belt but as
soon as they were rigid enough, around 18 months or so, out went the
plastic bucket to make more room. If we were on a long trip we were
free to roam around the back of the van or lay down on the benches
and floor for a nap. Now it is literally a crime to not have a kid
anywhere from conception to six years old in a car or booster seat
and they can fine you, take your license, and impound your car for
not buckling up the kiddos.
Well, back to the camper story I guess, my mom was in charge of the
young women's group at our church and she needed to take them all out
to perform in a roadshow in the next town over. A road show is a
series of amateur vaudeville acts, jokes, short plays and
song-and-dance numbers that are, as far as I can tell, serving the
soul purpose of making community theater look like high art because
it was certainly not entertaining. At the show which I watched from
the audience with a group of old folks bussed in for the performance
and one of the old ladies who could not even keep up the minimum
facade of polite civility said in a stage whisper, ' I hope they are
having fun because it is terrible'. It is the one perk of being old,
at a certain age everything is forgiven and you can say what you
please again like when you were three. Anyway, the girls drive out
all loaded up in the back of the camper, do the show, and come back
seemingly without incident. The next morning my dad is heading out to
work and there is a lot of hardware missing off the passenger side of
the camper. The trailer mirror which is the second mirror of the far
outside of the right hand door is missing apparently by trauma. There
are huge scrapes down the side of the camper and the two, 60 pound or
so, mounting jacks are missing from the front and back corners. My
dad is a little upset about the damage to our rig but is more
concerned about what had been hit hard enough to knock off all that
gear. He came inside and asked my mom whoat she hit and if she had
picked up the jacks that got ripped off. Mom mom was genuinely
baffled about what he was talking about. She went out and looked and
was surprised to see the extensive damage that she had allegedly
done. My dad, naturally concerned about his liability in all this
went with her for a little ride back along the path she had driven to
a from the next town over. No jacks, no mirror or glass were found.
My mom somehow was able to dodge a bullet and not something large
enough to rip all the hardware off of the side of a camper, now that
is irony.
