Phone home...or is it?

We had the best time in New Jersey last weekend! Our trip got off to a rough start though. Here’s what happened. I am not making this up:

This trip was going to cover a thousand miles in just a three day visit. Get there on Saturday, party on Sunday, leave on Monday, so we knew it was going to be tiring. We set off on Saturday morning at about seven, no great rush. The fun started when we were about ten miles from home and Kathy asked me,

“Do you have the cell phone?”
“Um, no. I left it right by the back door. We’re not too far away yet, let’s go back and get it.”
“No, I’m not going back. We’ll just have to do without it.”

So we fussed about that for a while, and finally settled down. One hundred and fifty miles later, I started in my seat, remembering that I had forgotten to do something. I had left some booklets that the lectors would need for Palm Sunday sitting on the dining room table. I had to call the church office to tell them to print the booklets out again! We had to find a phone.

Kathy managed to maintain, I’m sure suppressing a whole bunch of “I told you so’s”, as we pulled off the interstate and into a restaurant parking lot. I poured quarters into a pay phone and couldn’t get it to work. After several tries, I got back into the car and we tried a Holiday Inn down the road.. There was something strange about the hotel though, as we realized there were no guests, just contractors’ vans. They were renovating the place—it was closed. I was getting frantic when Kathy pointed out that there was a Wal-Mart down the hill.

It was my turn to suppress something—my distaste at having to shop in the Heart of Darkness. I left Kathy circling the parking lot while I went in and bravely asked the greeter where the cell phones were. She directed me to Electronics and a very nice salesperson named Shannon. I asked if they had the kind of cell phones you just buy without contracts and such and she said sure. I was standing right in front of them .

“You’ll need one of these and one of these and one of these. Do you need a car charger? And one of these.”

Realizing we were in the middle of our trip, she very nicely called the cell phone company and activated the phone. This all took about twenty minutes, but I wasn’t worried about Kathy—I knew that she would know that something good must be happening if I hadn’t come right back out of the store.

The phone came with a whopping ten minutes on it, so I bought a card with 120 minutes. Shannon said, “See this little triangle on the lcd screen? I can’t add minutes until that little triangle goes away.” Fine, I said, and sixty dollars later, I triumphantly went back to the car with my new communicator.

I used my ten minutes to call the church secretary and explain the problem and asked her to print what I needed and she said sure.

I dutifully read the little book that came with the phone and discovered the “little triangle” meant I was roaming. Well, I was going to be roaming for three days, so this wouldn’t do. We stopped at a rest area and I called the customer service number. Another very nice person was on the other end, but she was very difficult to understand. We both kept shouting “What? What?”, until she was speaking very slowly, as if to an idiot (yes, I suppose I did fit the bill). We finally got my minutes loaded after she made me enter an impossibly long string of random numbers. I’m sure she only did it for fun.

We went tootling down the highway, happily playing with our new toy. I plugged in the charger and left the phone in the console tray.

After a while I went digging in my backpack for something and I pulled out...our Verizon cell phone. Again, Kathy maintained. She refrained from snapping off the turn signal and lunging at me with murderous intent. After a moment of absolute speechlessness, she philosophically remarked, “Well, we always said we needed another phone.”

After wasting hours chasing around after a phone, we finally got to the hotel at about 5pm on Saturday. It was a wonderful place. Our room had a panoramic view of the mountains and was very comfortable. Even though we were tired from the trip, my brother had invited us to his house that night, so he picked me up while Kathy slept. I saw my nieces and sisters and nephews and just sort of chilled for couple hours there.

On Sunday we went to church and the choir was magnificent. They brought in a kettle drum and some brass for Palm Sunday. The cantor had such a wonderful voice, Kathy whispered to me that he could sing on Broadway! I answered that he probably did, since many artists live in North Jersey and work in Manhattan. Later brother Brian told me that actually the man we heard was not good enough for Broadway—he drove down from Connecticut just to sing at this church.

In the afternoon we put on our finery and made our way to the restaurant for the extravaganza. We were celebrating Brian and Gail’s 25th anniversary as well their 50th birthdays, so this was kind of like a wedding reception. The two families pretty much stayed separated, but that was OK because we wanted to visit with our own kind, after all.

I loved seeing everyone doing so well. My one nephew has had internships with newline cinema and has a chance for a good job in the film biz in New York. His brother is a junior (I think) in college. We have five nieces, two in college, two in high school and one teaching in Boston. They are all gorgeous. Pix to follow.

We danced; Kathy got a kick line started during “New York New York”—she characterized it later as doing what other people wish they had to nerve to do anyway. We talked, we ate, some of us drank, including a certain underage nephew, but hey—it’s all in the family. Brian put together a funny and touching Powerpoint of photos of his wife Gail and his family growing up, and each of the girls made a speech about their mom.

At some point, Kathy blew out her knee on the dance floor and could barely walk to the car. That ended our plans to go to ‘afters’ at Brian’s house. We drove back to the hotel, put our feet up and fell asleep.

I wish I could say that the drive home was uneventful. It wasn’t. We were stopped on Route 80 for an hour and a half due to an accident five miles down the road. We were sitting for so long, that people just turned off their engines. After a while, you could see individuals leaving their cars and racing into the woods to go pee. Mind you, there are no leaves on the trees yet, so you had to find an evergreen for protection. Thus, you were screened from our side of the road, but not the other.

When we reached the site of the accident, there was only a mangled guard rail to mark the spot. It struck us then that what was a minor inconvenience for us was a devastating moment for someone else. The embankment dropped straight off at the point, so if a car had gone over the rail, it’s unlikely the people survived. Chagrined at our insensitivity, we said a prayer for the people involved and hoped they would be OK.

We pulled into our driveway about ten hours after we started out, tired but happy that we had been able to go at all and see my Dad and the sibs and their children. The only downer was that our own children could not go, but maybe another time. It was just important to share at least a little time together, check each other out face to face instead of always over the phone or email. I hope it doesn’t take so long for us to do this again.