So it’s a competition, eh? My parents, divorced since the invention of rocks, can’t stand to let the other one win. Competitive parents. And not competitive in anything that matters.
What’s the game? Who can have the worst road trip to St. Augustine.
In the left corner, weighing in at two sacks of flour, my mother, who won the heavyweight champion of the world title a couple months back when she got speeding tickets both to and from Tampa. It cost her a whopping $380 to J.Q. Law, and landed her in Internet traffic school.
In the right corner, weighing slightly more, my father, who took a stab at dethroning her this past weekend, and landed a couple of good upper cuts that might just put him over the top.
Ding, ding, ding.
My father, whose favorite driving move is to back into those yellow pipe bumpers that gas stations use to keep people from running over fuel pumps, came from Tampa late Friday night. He decided to take the route through the Ocala National Forest because, like my mother, there is too little that can go wrong when you get on an interstate, set the cruise control and kick back for the ride.
It was this haunted forest that became his undoing. Not long into it he heard a sound coming from the passenger seat where one of his two dogs was sitting. It was a sound you could identify through jet engines and a heavy metal concert — someone was throwing up. Now, it’s not a big dog, quite small in fact, but those are the ones who do the most “damage.” And damage she did. My dad pulled over and screamed for clean-up on aisle 6.
To spare you, we’ll move the story along. At some point he was back in the truck, back on the road and pointed toward Palatka. But not long after he was hit with another of those unmistakable noises — flat tire.
Now, there are flat tires, and then there are flat tires at 10 p.m. in the middle of a desolate national forest, in the capitol of nowhere, on a stretch of highway where gangs of bears are known to take your credit cards and order peanut M&Ms.
Changing a tire anywhere is terrifying. I always fear I will kick over the jack by accident causing the car to tip over and pin me by my pinky toe. But on the side of a dark road in the middle of the night is the making of a bad slasher film.
Yet, tough as it must have been, at this point in the story I’m thinking he’s a lightweight.
“Wait!” he says. “There’s more. So I got to your brother’s house. We have a beer while I tell him about the expedition, and after awhile I decide to go out to the car to get my bag, only … IT’S NOT THERE! I left it on the side of the road in the middle of the forest.”
So in the middle of the night, with my brother in tow, he goes out looking for his bag, which had to be found because it had his favorite cargo pants. They raced an hour and a half back like a cruise missile, eyes all-the-while trained on the side of the road until somehow, they found it. The trip ended at 3:30 a.m.
Judges?
“No way,” said my brother Scott over lunch at Ann O’Malley’s. “His is more cost effective. All he wasted was gas, time and a few burned-out brain cells. Plus, he found the bag. Mom racked up hundreds of dollars in speeding tickets, points on her insurance and a dump truck full of brain cells. Only an alien abduction could top that.”
I couldn’t tell if my dad was relieved or disappointed when the scores came in. Will he hang up his gloves, or try to knock out the champ next time?
Only time will tell if a rematch awaits.