The Shrimp, The Seahorse and The Raccoon, Mandi Hayes-Spencer [english novels to improve english txt] 📗

My name is Esther Reeves. I'm 29 years old, short, squatty and fairly well rounded. Well, as well rounded as one can get when you come from a family that creates disaster in their wake. But that's not our fault. You see, we're gentically faulted.
Our hometown of Flatwooods is a small, tightly woven community in Kentucky. Everyone knows everyone here. The lawns stay manicured within an inch of their lives, houses are tidy and neighborly affection is abundant. Basically, we're normal in a lot of ways.
But, you take this small town family out of their comfort zone and it never fails, we make a mess. It's become a joke with our friends that when we come home from an out of town jaunt, a dinner party is had so one and all can hear tales of our travels.
To explain my family, the best way I can put it is; if you took Everybody Loves Raymond, Roseanne, with just a dash of Momma’s Family thrown in, mixed them all together, what you get is us. It was a good recipe for the most fabulously memorable vacations.
My family always takes a week long summer trip. We’ll go to Disneyland, Myrtle Beach, fishing or swimming. We went places that were well known, normal summer destinations. The problem with normal places is that it's best if normal people go. We are nothing but.
I always hated the long drives. I was one of those kids who asks, “Are we there yet?” about a thousand and one times. So, as punishment for these aggravating questions I had to share the backseat of the car with a person who, I honestly sometimes think to this day, was born to torture me during my adolescence. At a whopping six years older then me, my brother was my own private hell in the backseat of our minivan.
Eddie would make up games that always resulted in my getting a charlie horse to the leg. One game, his favorite, was the secret word game. He'd pick a word, usually something you said all the time like "it" or "the." If I said the word, he'd whollop me in the leg. When I would wise up, and shutup, he'd hit me anyways, saying I was "thinking it."
This game, and others like it, resulted in a lot of fights. We were threatened, yelled at and once, my mom pulled over and swore she was taking us to the nearest boarding school if we didn't stop. We never were dropped off, but not because we stopped fighting. We just learned to berate each other in whispers.
We’ve all been on trips with either siblings or kids of our own where we’ve considered yanking our hair out one strand at a time. We’ve repeated, “One more time and I am pulling this car over!” or “It‘s just around the corner, five more minutes!” about a thousand times, hoping to shut someone up enough that we can drive in peace. Maybe we've even arrived to check into our hotel rooms with ketchup packets stuck to our faces or crayons tangled in our hair.
Isn’t this what a family vacation is all about? If you say no, well, you're not a member of my family. Which, in regards to trips, is lucky for you.
As people will do, my mom and dad always had some really off the wall event planned during our vacations. One of those things that you will only do once, and you only do it in the first place to say you did it at all. The best memory I have of this is when they took us shrimping. It was the four of us, a cooler of food, and a net.
During this big outing we had both success and failure. We did manage to catch some shrimp. However, we only managed to catch about four of them and in the process, we killed a seahorse. Yes, you heard me; we killed a seahorse.
As a little girl who didn’t even know she loved seahorses, I was devastated. I remember telling everyone we’d “murdered” it and walking a little ways down the beach and conducting a rather moving funeral ceremony for my dead seahorse friend. I even hummed a tune that if I recall, was less funeral music then it was the tune to Ode To The President.
While in mourning, I all of the sudden heard my mom screaming. Afraid she’d gotten herself tangled in the net and hoping against hope she wasn’t going to end up like the seahorse, I ran down to where they were. While sprinting up the beach, I was running scenarios in my head on what the best ways to extract a grown woman from a shrimping net would be.
Upon arrival, I found my mom yelling obscenities at a raccoon who was pilfering our packed cooler. The nosey little guy was dragging out turkey sandwiches one by one, totally ignoring the family of four that was gaping at it. It also seemed rather unmoved over the sinful remarks my mom was tossing at it.
After watching the raccoon meticulosly unwrap and eat our lunch, we decided maybe we should give up the good fight and leave. With a heavy heart over the seahorse, a mom still borderline rabid over having her packed lunch stolen and a dad whose face had turned purple from holding back his snide remarks, I helped pack the car.
We left that place four shrimp heavier then we were when we arrived. Which was fine, as we were also leaving one cooler lighter then we were when we got there. It evened itself out quite nicely in the end. The only real loser in the equation was the seahorse.
It’s these types of things that make a vacation interesting. I remember the shrimping debacle like it was yesterday. And, it still makes me smile. I have no doubt someone has had something like what I’ve said here happen to you while on vacation. Maybe you’ve not murdered a seahorse and held it‘s funeral on the beach or had a theiving raccon rob them blind, but you know what I mean. Right? Right?
Then again, my family is top notch in the weird department.

Publication Date: 07-06-2010

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