To Grandmother's House We Go

Grandma and Papa lived exactly 3.2 hours away in Troy, NY. Each month, need it or not, we’d treck through the foothills of Vermont to visit them. These trips were a source of great contention between my parents. Dad felt greatly put out by having to spend an entire weekend each month sleeping in a dusty old pink room once occupied by my mother and her sister Mary.
At least two thirds of the trip, every trip, would showcase Mom and Dad bickering on the same two topics: Why the Riggionne sisters were “so annnnoying” and how Dad could possibly “be so mean to my sisters!” The constant arguing on this topic became so common place to my brothers and I that we’d allow it to lull us to sleep during the first half of the trip. After all, we already knew how these spats would end – with Dad pissed off and determined to sleep in until past 2 p.m. the next afternoon and Mom resentful that she’d ever moved so far away from her family to be with such an “uncooperative man.” They were both right. They were both wrong. Nothing new there. That was my parents.
The quarter way mark to Grandma’s house was an eccentric but modest home tucked at the base of Mount Monadnock. The home was painted a landmark purple and seemed to wink and wave as we passed by. Just a half hour more until McDonald’s, we’d assure ourselves.
To help us pass the time, and surely as much to help avoid Mom’s disapproving glare, Dad made up trivia games on the long ride. He’d ask us questions on what various street signs and signals meant. The first to answer what a double yellow line meant got a point. The quickest to point out the purpose of a yield sign got two points. The game paid off in dividends years later when I didn’t have to study for my drivers test and managed to get a 100 percent on the written exam.
The monotony of the drive was also broken up by our monthly visits to McDonalds. I’d always order the same thing – chicken nuggets with barbeque sauce, a strawberry shake, and a small fry. But McDonalds didn’t come cheap. We had to earn McDonalds during the first half of the trip to “qualify” for such a treat. Constant fighting between Ron and I made Dad institute a “three strikes” policy early on in our monthly ventures to Grandma’s house. In order to earn McDonalds, a person could not have more than three strikes. Strikes came from behavioral infractions such as trying to poke each other’s eyeballs out, screaming, shrieking, biting, hitting, spitting, and pretty much anything else we could think of to make driving miserable for him.
Somehow, I always managed to earn at least three strikes by the time we hit the edges of the town of Keene, NH. Fortunately, Dad was forgiving (or at least that’s what I credited him for at the time, now, as a parent myself, realizing he had an obligation to feed us dinner!) and allowed me to earn “strike erasers” for prolonged periods of no strikes. As silly as the game seemed, it got us through these long and windy trips. The second half of the trip was always the worst, with McDonalds digested and only more squabbling from the front seat for us to listen to. On the other hand, we now had no reason not to bite and torture each other, so we often turned into mini vampires on part two of the journeys.
Grandma’s house smelled of Hot Dog Charlies – mini cocktail franks in a special barbeque type sauce – that she constantly had on the stove. Sometimes, the smell was mixed with that of fried grease from the Ted’s Fish Fry orders my aunts would place in bulk. Only in Troy, NY could you get a fish fry like these, they’d insist.
Their home, at 8 Cherry Lane, was modest in size, but had been able to house the five children who’d been raised there quite comfortably. The kitchen often felt claustrophobic when stocked with the handfuls of children, children’s spouses, and their offspring that gathered there. To use the word “hectic” to describe visits to Grandma’s house would be an understatement. The building swarmed with people skirmishing to talk over one another, each with a message oh-so-much-more-important to deliver than the others. But somehow, the home was filled with such love. It was a love my father seemed to completely miss. And it was a love that I felt the home I’d grown up in had somehow lacked. Trips to Grandma’s house sucked, but trips to Grandma’s house also gave me a feeling of belonging. That’s what made it worth returning and I suspect it’s what caused my mother to fight so hard for those monthly homecomings.