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I was at the dentist today enjoying some dentist office music on the radio (Richard Marx, I mean, that’s where he belongs) and reading a really cool magazine called “Reminisce.” It made me very jealous.
The people who write for “Reminisce’ are low-paid correspondents. IF they get paid, it’s in the form of a die cast, rag top red convertible model. That doesn’t stop them from sending a variety of pictures, as well as wonderful memories they share with the magazine’s audience.
I read a lot about cross country travel in homemade travel trailers. One woman recalled a contraption her husband made that motored down the road on a single-central wheel. Another fondly remembered a cross-country journey her family made from California to New York City in a bona fide travel trailer. She and her parents spent many nights in gas station parking lots, and the owners were kind enough to let them use the facilities without complaint. The travel trailer was a novelty, after all. The woman recalled her father passed away at the age of 45, six years after the cross country jaunt. That made it very special.
There were tales of homemade trailers that became real homes for the newly married. One man and woman could barely change their minds in the trailer, but called it home until their second child was born. One family put a picket fence around their tiny trailer.
Here’s my point: The people who submitted the stories and wrote them for free had a recurring theme to their work: They were happy. No one said, “Oh, all we had was this little tiny trailer…boo hoo hoo….it was awful.” Their stories were tales of family togetherness, a can-do spirit that made me wish life could contain smaller doses of happiness instead of the constant struggle for bigger, better, faster things.
There was a wonderful story of a newly-married couple who drove to New England in their crummy car to spend the night on the beach. They only had enough money for a little bit of food and brought a pot from their house and the insert from their stove so they could cook something on the beach. They dug a hole and slept in the sand and they were happy.
Where is this America? When many of us think of “vacation,” we become depressed at its financial burden, inconvenience and feeling it will never turn out as we expect. So, now as the blue skies of summer morph into the darker days of fall, promise yourself you’ll open the window, wander the yard and take it all in as if you’re going to write an article in 30 years for a magazine whose only real promise is allowing you to re-create a memory.
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Rush Limbaugh
