“Got anything planned for the summer?” an acquaintance asks. He knows me less as the local village pastor and more as the guy who erects a giant Home Depot skeleton in his front yard every year. We’ve run into each other at Dunkin Donuts, a New England staple that successfully sells dense cake as doughnuts. People in Massachusetts love Dunkin’ like they love Tom Brady and ignoring basic traffic laws.
“Yes,” I say. “Lauren and I decided to subject ourselves to close-quarter torture with the children for two weeks.”
He stares blankly back at me with a pleasant but confused smile. He takes a scalding sip of coffee, biding his time to think of something to say or to plan his escape.
I tell him we’re going on vacation, traveling by car for twelve-plus hours. We’re doing this because Lauren fears turbulence and air pockets at twenty thousand feet. I’m doing this because I’m terrified we don’t have enough money in savings to cover the cost of damage my children can do to an airplane. She’s the way she is out of rational fear. I’m the way I am because I watched the 1983 Twilight Zone movie and know what a gremlin can do to an aircraft wing.
Eyes darting, he produces an “Ah” before adding, “Well, youse have a nice trip, ok?” He makes for the exit before I get to ask him to pray a hedge of protection around me.
Traveling for penance sake with unsavory characters is a tenet of my faith tradition. Centuries before the dawn of American family road trips, there were pilgrimages where folks fearful of plagues and life-ending bouts of dysentery would walk the Camino de Santiago, the Via Francigena to Rome, or all the way to the Holy Land of Jerusalem to ensure admittance into a promising afterlife where plagues and dysentery could not reach.
As a child, I was subjected to my own roads of perdition. Rites of less-than-holy passages with my parents and sister visiting sacred shrines and destinations throughout the South — Dollywood’s Big Bear Mountain roller coaster, the gates of Graceland, the giant sombrero at South of the Border, the North Wilkesboro Speedway, and any strip club where Ric Flair spent a night in the 1980s.
On these trips, my mother would pray and my father would cuss. Then they’d switch because they weren’t complementarians and believed men and women were created as equals. Inevitably, we’d get lost at least once. As a ten-year-old, I would become upset and cry at the thought of never returning home and having to start a new life beside the Piggly Wiggly in Laurinburg, North Carolina. My parents, empty of swears, would assure me that every road would eventually take us where we needed to be. This instilled in me that a bona fide family vacation required a venture into the unknown, leading you down a path that could change who you were and who you could become.
Because of this, I packed for the unexpected. My shin guards from that one year when I decided to play soccer. Nintendo games minus the Nintendo. Enough bottles of Afrin to raise questions at a pharmacy counter. I packed it all for such exotic locations like Myrtle Beach and Tweetsie Railroad.
I’ve successfully passed this gene on to my oldest. She’s been packing for weeks. Art pieces she’s removed from the refrigerator. An orange slice. New and slightly used Kleenex tissues. A diverse collection of potential penicillin-producing tchotchkes stuffed inside her tiny rollaboard suitcase. The contents change daily. Her choice of stuffed traveling companion has not. Half unicorn. Half cheetah. All disturbing.
She won this creature from Dr. Moreau’s island out of a claw game at the bowling alley.
“Why’d you want this?” I ask her. I need answers to validate the $22 worth of tokens we spent.
“Dad, it’s rainbow-colored.” She says this without looking up. “See?”
I do. If God were day drinking and painting animals on the sixth day of creation, this is what it would look like.
And like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, the plaything known as Rainbow-Cheetah causes division at the four-hour mark of our trip. They fight over the toy like I do when discussing Duke’s vs. Hellmann’s mayonnaise: passionately with tears and wails of agony and accusations.
I play the calm mediator, mistakenly implementing logic with two people who still need my assistance when they go potty. Lauren takes a different approach — she acts like she’s possessed. Neck jerking, head spinning, limbs contorting, my kids look at me in the hopes I have a crucifix and know Latin. I don’t. I mouth to them that I’m a low-church Baptist pastor who struggles with the English language. Their worry turns to agitation and then pity.
For several minutes, I talk as if I’m a hostage negotiator while my daughters produce sounds mimicking drowning turkeys. Finally, they agree to share custody, leaving me to turn around and deal with motion sickness. We make it to the hotel a couple hours later.
Some people say travel tuckers kids out. These people are liars.
My children fling themselves around the room until they’re exhausted and concussed. Lauren and I stay awake and discuss the day’s trauma until we, too, fall asleep.
I see the road sign I’ve been waiting for the following morning.
“You wanna pull over?” Lauren asks.
“No, it isn’t right. Not yet. We at least need to be in Virginia,” I tell her. “We need to be in the actual South.”
She looks at me longingly — longingly wishing I’d stop being stupid. “I know there’s one in Winchester. I used to go there all the time after concerts. We can stop there,” she says.
Cruising down I-85, I receive my vision like the biblical character Jacob did at Bethel. A gold and black temple calling the faithful off the highway into sanctuary. This is my children’s first visit to the altar of crisp golden dough and patty melts, and they do not realize what they’re about to experience. A state of transcendence, going well beyond comfort food. What awaits behind the never-locked doors is an exploration of eating in the ethereal. A space scattered and covered in love and respect. A place where the cooking and people are equally good.
The Waffle House may not be the House of God, but it is undoubtedly the House of Good. It’s the kind of spot a pilgrim needs on their journey.
Here, under the ambient lighting of overhead fixtures and the oppressive sun beating through windows, I watch my offspring taste the gospel of assurance first given to me by my eccentric grandmother, Marie, who would pile my and my sister’s sleepy eyes into her boat-sized car for late night trips to the Waffle House where she worked. There, she would protect and sustain us like Mary the Mother of Jesus, shielding us from the inebriated and blessing us with bowls of buttered grits.
I think of Marie while ordering off those glossy menus for my kiddos slices of slathered tradition that shaped me into who I became and am still becoming. With her thick glasses and dark permed hair, smoke swirling around her courtesy of the Marlboro Light 100s, she acted the part of the mysterious oracle leading us through a dangerous yet divine setting.
Lauren and I sit in the burnt orange-colored booth, watching our girls cover themselves in bites of syrup-soaked waffles and sausage patties fried hard. Their futures are unknown to me outside of the certainty that I’ll always see them this way — small, full of wonder, sticky.
The check comes and we leave. The oldest insists on squirreling away a few packets of extra butter. The youngest decides we’re standing on holy ground and goes barefoot. When Lauren shouts, “Get your fist out of your sister’s mouth!” as we exit, the saints at the counter barely bat an eye. I know they’ve seen worse.
We jump back on the highway. Another six hours lie ahead of us, but I suspect we’ve already arrived at what we were supposed to find. Somewhere between the waffles, the diaper changes, and toll booths, I discovered meaning and purpose: I can return home and rest my head on my cool pillow, knowing I’ve given my children Hallmark-worthy memories or maybe material to discuss with their future therapist.
Either way, they’ll have stories to tell.
