By Scott Pezman, Grade 8.
My sister Phoebe asked if I had finished my winter break journal for your class on Monday. After my heart attack I realized I can do it now —it’s like a four hour flight from Cancun to Boston, I have a full battery, and I can fill up five pages telling you about our family’s ruined vacation if we don’t’ crash.
OK, I have no idea where to start so let me tell you….
Things that Really Surprised Each Family Member on Check-In Day
Dad: Sharing the all-inclusive resort with a big music festival.
Mom: Getting offered a cold towel right after she said how hot it was.
Phoebe: Mom telling the long-haired boy talking to her that she was only sixteen.
Me: the Mayans used to throw their dead into nearby cenotes, believing they were a conduit to the underworld. Look at me Ms. Greenberg, learning stuff.
We haven’t even taken off yet and Mom just leaned over to tell dad something and he patted her arm on the armrest and I think that’s the first mushy thing they’ve done this whole trip.
OK, something Mushy I Did on the Trip:
- Held a woman’s hand in the medical tent. So, Yeah.
I feel like I’m gonna come back to this theme (THEME see, I listen in class!) but something I saw this week —for the first time — was adults fighting over pool toys, inflatable donut floaty inner tubes. See, the drummer for their band wears a donut patterned muumuu to every show… so the inflatable rafts for the fans, of course, have the drummer’s little donut pattern all over them. It’s a MOTIF! Anyway, a hotel guy drove up in a golf cart to where a bunch of the music fans were drinking by the pool, and he starts tossing some tubes in. Playful stuff. Then he ran out of them. A woman grabbed one from another woman. People came running over from another pool. Anyone who already had a donut ran out of the pool, dripping, and hid it in their room. This was day one, the day Dad started calling them “those people.”
To be honest, there was no changing Dad’s mind about them after he accidentally stood in line for a poster, for an hour, thinking it was the line for the snorkel boat. He really loves snorkeling.
Later that night, Dad called the front desk on our next-door neighbors when they made too much noise at an “ungodly hour.” After he called a second time, he got into it with the security guy — for smoking on the balcony with them. It was like one a.m. when he sat down, and wrote that Yelp review. Phoebe was right — he should have waited until we got back. Posting about the Moon Palace while we were still in it was like… talking trash to the car next to you at a stoplight. Dad went viral. I’m not going to link the video here because I don’t want any more clicks, but if you read the comments… He’s a Karen. That’s what somebody wrote.
On taco night I was in the bathroom. I overheard mom ask dad about some mole on his shoulder. I had seen it at the pool the day before; it was shaped like Greenland. There was a change in her voice. She told him she’d set up an appointment when we got back. When I came out he was looking at it in the mirror and then put his shirt on.
Mom is such a nut about Ziplock bags: when I asked her for some duct tape, she had some folded up… in a ziplock bag. She was like, “ta-da!”. I used it to patch up one of those donut inner tubes I found popped, in the trash. I floated around the pool for a long time in it. There was a little river that kept bringing me to the swim up bar. The same four people sat on the stools there and after a while I wondered if any of them actually got out of the pool to pee.
Night four, Phoebe and I snuck out. The only reason I’m telling you this is because you said our journals would stay private. She met another girl, about her age, whose hippie parents brought her there for the festival. This girl snuck us into it through the back of the medical tent.
Confession: When I first met Phoebe’s friend I wanted her to think I was funny, yet vulnerable so I made a joke about the resort’s molé sauce… and my dad’s mole, and wanted to crawl inside my skin and die.
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Phoebe’s friend told us this while we emerged in a corner of the medical tent. It felt like breaking into a circus. There was muffled music, a light show. The girls slipped into the crowd, but it was too loud. In the medical tent I saw the kind of small water bottle that used to be the best for bottle flipping, so I tried to beat my old record.
I got five in a row when I saw a woman staring at me from a cot. She waved me over and reached out. She was maybe about your age Ms. Greenberg, but when she took my hand in hers it felt old and shaky. She rolled onto her elbow and patted my hand and looked me in the eye, telling me she was done, that “it” was all done, and she was all better now.
What?!
Things I Learned In The Medical Tent:
- There’s a kind of mushroom that can make you see invisible helicopters
- Everyone’s a child inside
- Do not discuss death with someone on mushrooms, such as the fact that the Mayans used to throw their dead into nearby cenotes, believing they were a conduit to the underworld.
- DO distract them!
Distraction worked for me, holding her hand, when I told her how I got my inflatable donut back:
That afternoon, like a dummy, I got out of the pool to pee. I stashed my donut floatie by a bush. When I got back, it was gone. Phoebe asked me what was wrong, dad overheard, and then he did something I’d never seen him do. My not-intimidating Dad, standing up from his pool chair, sun blotted out behind him and the sun shirt my mom made him wear now, looking kinda like the top half of a superhero costume. “What’s it look like?” he asked. I said it was the only one here with duct tape. Mom called after him. I watched his Aqua Sox march down the steps of the pool. He pointed his finger at this guy with goofy sunglasses laying in my tube and told him he had exactly three seconds to get the bleep off it and give it back to his son. (Me, behind him, feeling small.) People were watching. I got embarrassed. The bottom of my dad’s sun shirt was wet and he looked crazy but the guy was scared. And he handed me back the tube, mumbling something about mistaken identity. My dad put his hand on my shoulder, and we walked back to where the girls were looking worried, my arm looped through my donut.
Okay Ms Greenberg that’s the word count.
Dave Gentry 