This American Life - 64: Summer

Broadcast on: 23 May 1997

Memorial Day wasn't easy for Joey. Her mom's birthday was May 31st and her mom had officially declared that the period between Mother's Day, which of course is in the middle of May, and her birthday would be known in the family as Galatime, which mean basically it would be the one time during the year where mom would get whatever she wanted, which would have been fine. Except what mom off wanted was a road trip into the mountains on curvy roads, which didn't match Julie's personal style when Julie was a kid. I puked everywhere and always. I puked on every road trip from, I puked any time we were in the car for longer than like a half an hour from the age of four to the age of 12. I mean I used to be, yeah, so drugged up on drama mean. I didn't really ever experience my summer vacations. Say that again? You'd be so like, dragged up on Dramamine. You would be. Yeah. All the time. Oh, yeah. But you wouldn't even experience some of this vacation. You just sleep. I would just feel glassy-eyed and I'd just kind of sweaty. And I remember we went, it was a whole trip of like the Northwest and Canada and coming down the coast. And I don't, I didn't see anything. I don't remember anything. I don't remember Glacier. I don't remember Yellowstone. I don't remember being Cooper. I don't remember anything. For three weeks, I was on Dramamine one time, except for one day. And that one day I threw up. And so my mom put me back on it. She thought I was getting addicted. To Dramamine? So she took me off. But then she was more scared of the throw-up than of vacation. Power threw up all over the car. Like all, like my brother had like two pairs of shoes right in front of me. And I threw up like one in each shoe. So we had to wear a pair of like dress shoes and a pair of like Nike's. And I threw up in my brother's baseball card collection that was also on the floor in front of me. Different brother. Well, this is the week of Memorial Day. And the thing about Memorial Day and the beginning of summer is that every person, every family has it to kill his heel when summer finally arrives. If it's not the one person who gets sick in the car, it's the person who hates the sun or the one who can't stand the beach. The person who loves the beach loves it so hard, so fiercely, so thoroughly that no one else in the family can understand it. There's a promise of summer. I hope we have of all things getting easier, more fun, more free time. And then there's a reality of all we have to do to make summer of up towards potential. But didn't people take, didn't they like install like little bags or something? Well, yeah, no, my brothers did. Actually, when we were like two and a half weeks into this road trip that we took, they decided like all of a sudden that we were gonna have like puke drills and like that they would just that we needed to like prepare for them and stuff like an Olympic team. And so like they strategically placed plastic and paper bags all over the place, but also had like like this blanket that they had set up that you could quick pull out and it would immediately like drape across my lap because I had a problem with controlling where it went as well. And also

Transcription truncated.