Do you happen to know one of those families for whom catastrophes always seem to follow them on vacation? Perhaps that family is your family?
My family is also that family. When my parents, aunt, uncle, cousins, and myself end up in the same location long enough, all bets are off.
Prior to a Disney World trip in 2009, we made those stereotypical family vacation T-shirts. Ours displayed a nice picture of our happy, smiling faces on the front, then chronicled all of the crazy calamities we’ve encountered on the back. To give a sliver of representation, we’ve been evacuated off of theme park rides. We once stayed in a hotel where a shooting occurred next door overnight. At the age of four, I was scarred for life when we were ushered out of a fast food restaurant in Dallas because of a suspected gas leak. In a single fateful camping trip, in which we survived a slippery mountain hike in the rain and a near raccoon invasion, I additionally sprained a finger, got the second-worst sunburn of my life, and narrowly avoided a deer attack.
Particularly, however, we’ve had some interesting run-ins with the weather. I didn’t know what a camping trip without rain was like until I was 19. My lovely family has been evacuated from a state park due to flooding . . . and that wasn’t even the trip where we weathered a tropical storm.
Surely the weather catastrophes had to have some kind of magnet. Who in our family was attracting them? We tossed around the vicious specter of blame for years upon years as we attempted a very scientific approach to determining the culprit. My dad ended up with the official tag– a false accusation that lasted almost three years.
Then, my sophomore year of college, I had to return home for a funeral. The moment my aunt and uncle picked me up from Waco, it began to rain. It rained the entire 5+ hour drive to my hometown. The rain there was enough to cancel school the next day. It rained the entire way back until, miraculously, it cleared up south of Waco once my aunt and uncle had dropped me off. Notably, this storm was one of the significant storms to end one of the most severe droughts in west Texas history.
I accepted my fate that day and apologized for the years of false accusation.
Remembered 6/20/2018, in response to:
I wrote:
Dear Nineteen,
Stop trying to frame your dad and just embrace your cosmic powers. I’m still trying to figure out how to turn them into a lucrative side business. Oh, and you’re not too bad at snow either, just FYI.
Love,
Twenty-Five
For the record, this was posted 6 months after I managed to bring snow to San Antonio during a conference. I’m that good.
Calley Jones, Author 