Chapter Thirteen: Kids Are Always Right

When you're a child, there's one thing of which you can be sure. Actually, there are a lot of things of which you can be sure, but this one thing covers all of them.

When you're a child, you're always, always, always right.

I had a really hard time convincing my mother of this, but I'll be doggone if I didn't try.

For example, the time that we headed out from our country home in Randolph to head to Akron for something. We got into our brown Thunderbird and started up Hartville Road, and then made a left on 224. Now that I'm old, I can't be right all the time anymore, so I can't tell you where, exactly, we were trying to go. But I do remember that somewhere along 224, my mom decided to turn right. The minute she did it, I knew it was wrong. We'd never been down that road before. Nothing looked familiar. And, after all, as an only child, what more did I have to do but sit and stare out the window, memorizing each landmark that slid past my eyes? I didn't have much more to do than that, I'll tell you.

I did have a few things that I tried to do to pass car-riding time, though. One was to rock. It's absolutely mortifying to think about it now, but I guess it goes along with the whole "I was such a weird only child" theme that I can share it. Here's the truth. I was a weird only child. Even in the car. So, whether or not there was music, I would sit in the car and rock, rock, rock. I had to get the bounce just exactly right, so that I would hit the seat with enough force that it would push me back at exactly the right rate, and then I would lose momentum and bounce back again. Almost perpetual motion. It was an art. I did this every time we got in the car, no matter how short of a trip we were taking. When I was very young, I did this no matter who was in the car. My parents, to my recollection, never complained about this activity. It was those other doggone kids who had to butt in. And everyone knows that kids think they're always right. But the bigger factor is that kids can be so good at really embarassing you, so I learned pretty quickly that I shouldn't bounce if there were other kids in the car, especially Tony "Booger Hair" Smith. Or if we were at a stoplight and there were kids in the car next to us. So, my bouncing wasn't uncontrollable. It was just fun.

The other thing I did to pass the time in the car was sing. I very clearly remember sitting the in back seat of our Pinto station wagon and singing "I Wish I Was A Teddy Bear" by Donna Fargo when my mother looked back at me from the front passenger seat and smiled. It was an "Awww...isn't that cute?" kind of smile. I stopped singing in the car in front of my parents. I still sing in the car alone, though, and I still have a hard time singing in the car in front of my dad. So, kids, never stop singing. Hold onto that whole singing in the car thing. Even if your mother looks back at you and smiles that "Awww...isn't that cute?" kind of smile.

So, on this particular day, I was sitting in the Thunderbird, bouncing away, taking note of all these new landmarks, when I realized that my mother was lost. I'm sure I realized it long before she did, but I didn't say anything right away because I know how much she hates to be corrected. "You're a child!" she would say. "Don't you correct me!" And I would zip my lip and think, "All right, lady. But someday, I am going to be SOOOO right, and I'm not going to correct you, and you're going to make that one tragic mistake that will cause you to scream out with your very last dying breath, 'Why didn't you tell me, Neicie?!?'"

After a few minutes, though, she said something like, "I don't think this is right." Well, duh. I knew that.

"Then turn around and go back," I said. Seemed very logical to me. We knew where we were ten minutes ago. We have only made one turn. So turn around and go back. But did she listen to me? She kept right on driving, hoping, I suppose, that the road would suddenly become the exact right road that we needed to be on, in spite of the probability that we weren't even headed in the right direction. Of course, as a child you know that you have to say everything at least twice, because you don't have a loud enough voice to be heard the first time. You have to make up for the volume with quantity.

"Turn around and go back the way we came, Mom." It was so simple. It was so right. Why wouldn't she just listen?

At this point in my life, I understood how cars worked, and how you could control your movements by turning the wheel and hitting the brakes or gas, depending on whether you wanted to start or stop. This may sound very obvious to you, but when I was younger, while I was still figuring the world out and practicing trying to be right all the time, I thought that road travel worked a bit differently. After all, I was too little to see the road completely from my window. I thought that, once you got on the pavement, the car stood still and the road moved, taking you to where you wanted to go. In my mind, road worked very similarly to the conveyor belts in the grocery store. I didn't have all the details figured out, but that the driver had control of the car had not entered my little mind.

But the day that we were going the wrong way, and by now we'd been driving for about twelve days, I knew that my mom was in control. I knew that she had the power to pull the car into someone driveway, flip a few levers, back up, and go back the way we came. I knew she could do it! I'd seen both her and my dad do it many times! So why wouldn't she do it now? I know. She must not have heard me. Surely if she heard me, she'd take my advice. I could hear her muttering to herself in the driver's seat, something about nothing looking familar. I had to add a bit of volume to the quantity this time, for her to hear me over her own mutterings.

"Turn around and go back!" I called. But did she listen? No. There wasn't even a response. This was typical. It's a known fact that parents are not able to hear as well when they are driving. I think that the car being in motion is directly correlated to a parent's ability to hear. Everyone knows that parents have to turn the music up while they're driving and, if they have to slow down to find a house number or some such, they turn the music down. So I made my very strong suggestion again.

"Mom. I really think you should turn around and go back." This time, I got a response.

"I don't think so. I'm going to stop and ask for directions." Sure. Let's pull over here and ask this cornstalk. Or maybe that bush. Moses had good luck with bushes telling him what to do.

But no. My mom was determined to keep driving until we found an actual human being. This, as you can imagine, too a while.

In the time it would have taken me to build a whole Barbie village, make a snowman family or take a bath, my mom finally drove far enough to find a gas station, in spite of the fact that I reminded her of my most excellent idea every 45 seconds. I guess she trusted the opinion of a stranger better than she trusted the opinion of her eight year old daughter. From the looks of the gas station attendent, I couldn't for the life of me figure out why.

"Excuse me!" She called out the car window. The gas station guy approached the car. "I'm looking for so and so and such and such (No, she didn't really say that. I just can't remember where we were going)."

"Oh," the gas station guy answered, pulling of his baseball cap and scratching the top of his head. "Well, you'll want to, uh, let's see...which way did you come from?"

"I came from 224," she told him.

"Well, then, you'll want to go back the way you came." I'm sure, about this time, he was wondering why the weird kid was snickering in the back seat.

Of course, it was because when you're a child, you're always, always, always right.