When I was a couple of months old mom and I left Texas and she took me home to her parent’s house on North Cemetery Road, in Ewen, where we stayed for a several months, during which we did additional road trips: to Pennsylvania to meet my dad’s mom and some of his siblings and my cousins (his dad died sometime before I was born, so I never met him), to Florida to pick up my newborn cousin Brian to live with our grandparents for a few years, till his mom got married, and then finally to California, where we put the car on a boat and took a plane to Japan to join my dad, who had finished his year TDY and was being sent back to Japan for his second tour of duty there.
The trip to pick up my cousin Brian was easy, as grandma and my 10 year old cousin Jamie with us. Jamie tells me that it was a miserable trip for her, as she spent the entire time kneeling on the back seat so she could lean over the seat back to change the diapers of one of us babies (I am three months older than Brian), then pass that baby forward to be fed while she changed the diapers of the next baby, then pass the first one back and the next one forward, and repeat, the whole trip. I suspect that she exaggerates and that we didn’t need to be changed as soon as she got us back, but what do I know? I don’t remember that trip myself, and I have never had to change a baby’s diapers.
But for the trip to California, Mom and I were on our own. She often told the story of that trip saying that since baby car seats hadn’t been invented yet I travelled in a cardboard box on the floor of the car (or possibly they were beyond her budget, though I suspect it was that she’d never heard of them then—google says they were invented in 1962 in the UK).
She had planned the trip in advance, in great detail, and knew which small town she would stop in for meals and fuel, and where she would sleep each night. She complains that I must have been able to read those signs that weren’t visible from my vantage point in box on the floor of the passenger seat, as I usually started crying when she would pass the sign announcing the next stop in five miles.
She said that she quickly fell into a routine for stops. Arrive in town, find a local Diner, go in, find a waitress who wasn’t actively doing something and say “Could you hold my baby, I gotta pee!“. This always not only got a yes, but by the time she got out of the loo and the waitstaff understood that she was crossing the country on her own, I had charmed them enough that they played with me while mom ate, before she finally took me back. So I learned young to accept cuddles and friendship from people I had just met.
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