School’s Out

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

Most of our summer vacations were connected to visits with family. A trip to see my sister provided a tornado in Biloxi. James’s dad lived in Houston, so one visit there involved a hurricane. Las Vegas was always willing to put on a heat wave in our behalf. And one summer, Vegas had some serious flash flooding while we were visiting my folks. My sons took advantage of the rarity of rain in the desert by discovering a low place in the neighborhood streets and diving into six feet of muddy water. (One of the younger ones almost drowned before I found them.)

Taking eight kids on vacation was seldom a vacation. Fortunately, I liked my kids. But we did have some interesting reactions whenever around the country we unloaded the van. We stopped at a 7-11 in Alabama, and I gave each of the children a little cash with which to buy a treat. As they raced into the stores, I saw bystanders counting children on their fingers. Doesn’t anyone in Alabama have eight kids?

My husband’s dad rented  a condo for us one year when we went to visit. There’s a great grocery chain in Houston called “Fiesta.” It specializes in all kinds of ethnic foods. Shopping there is an adventure in and of itself. My kids loved walking up and down past the long line of cash registers, each one flying the flag of the country whose language the cashier spoke—a world market of the first order. It was a “must” on every trip to Texas.

 Because my husband wanted to introduce our children to one of his favorite foods—coconut, he bought one at Fiesta and brought it to the condo to show the kids how to crack it open. He did. And the knife slipped as he was prying at the fruit, so he also showed them how to slice a 3-inch cut in his hand–which required  visit to the local emergency room. While we were registering at the hospital, the clerk clearly had never had a patient from Utah before. “And how many kids do y’all have?” When we answered “eight,” she was so horrified, she dropped the clipboard and scattered paperwork everywhere. No one has eight kids in Texas?

We did, however, have some great adventures in Texas. It’s where my husband taught us to go “crabbing.” We bought  a bunch of raw chicken legs and a ball of string, then we headed for the marshes along the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway—which consists of natural inlets, saltwater rivers, bays, and artificial canals. It’s protected from the hazards of the open sea, so plants and animals thrive along its edges. We gave each child a chicken leg tied to eight or ten feet of string. Their dad showed them how to toss it a ways into the swampy edges of the canal and then wait.

Our kids watched in awe as hundreds of little crabs scuttled across the sand and grabbed onto what must be a crab delicacy because they pilled on top of each other, clawing their way into get a share. When the string couldn’t hold any more weight, we each pulled our chicken leg covered in crustaceans slowly across the stretch of sand and sea grass and dumped clumps of wriggling crabs into a bucket of sea water. After a couple of hours, we had collected an impressive number of crabs which we took to my husband’s best friend’s house. He had a lovely, huge table with a Lazy Susan turntable in the middle, and ten kids of his own.

Four parents passed out implements of destruction (screw drivers, hammers, pliers—anything which might crack open a hard shell) to all the children old enough to manipulate such things. We boiled the crabs up in a five gallon pot (always start with cold water and then heat slowly; crabs do not like hot water and will leap out of the pot if you douse them in boiling water—turns out they are smarter than they look!). Then we dumped the crabs onto the Lazy Susan–Louisiana style–and let the kids go at it.

They had a ball.  Bits of crab-meat flying everywhere, kids’ faces dripping the butter we dipped the crab-meat in, a pile of discarded shells growing in the center of the table, big kids helping the little ones. Never was there a feast so enjoyed by so many. All for the price of a couple of pounds of chicken legs.

I read somewhere years ago that if you want your children to be close friends all their lives, you have to provide venues for them to build common histories. It’s the history which helps hold us together–that and memories of good days in the sun on the beaches of Texas, laughing all the way home.