Travel

Square boxes with spidery handwriting: “Chicago White Sox game”, “New Mexico with Carly and Barb”, “Carlsbad Caverns”.  Inside each box is a round carousel full of square slides. After dinner Gramps put up the folding screen, a turquoise colored metal tube with a folding tripod stand.  The unrolled screen smells strangely electric, as though the  sparkly, rough texture on the white side has absorbed crystallized photons from previous viewings.  Adults gather on the couch, kids playing around on the floor until the lights go out and we are hushed.  We jockey for who gets to push the button on the projector moving the carousel forward with a metallic clunk and whir of the fan. The labels are a rough guide to the contents, the collection of overly bright New Mexico cacti and rocks also containing a few surprise slides from great grandpa playing bocce ball at a family picnic on Simmons Island, then a gila monster attempting to hide from the camera, then some shots of my great uncles in black and white, posing in front of smooth-lined Oldsmobiles with runners. They wear white t shirts and pants that start up over their belly buttons, mugging like gangsters.  

Grandma loves the oldest photos, the black and white ones of people most of us in the room have never met.  My mother prefers the  kodachrome Christmas ones in her childhood home, silver aluminum tree surrounded by presents, her dog Chico who was put to sleep for pissing too much on the carpet, my aunts in beehives, holding Tom Collins glasses and ever-present cigarettes. My gramps and I love the ones of New Mexico.  The series of slides in the New Mexico carousel has a definite rhythm building to an exciting denouement.  Cacti, rocks, my grandma, aunt and uncle squinting in the clearly blinding sun lead to shots of an unfinished road in the middle of nowhere where my gramps bought a plot of land to build his dream home.  That is interesting to me, the thought of visiting a place and loving it so much, you just buy land and build a home there.  We hear again the story of how Grandma cried and cried and didn’t want to leave her (grown) babies to move far away to the desert, so they never did move.  All builds to the thrill of Carlsbad Caverns.  In the living room Grandma grimaces as Gramps describes the wait outside for the sun to set, we see shots of the mouth of the cave, I push the button before Gramps asks me to because we have all heard this narrative many times before.  Clunk, whirrr and the sky is growing darker.  Clunk, whirrr we can see stars now in the yellow, green, and blue sky.  The cave is pitch black.  Clunk, whirr and there it is!  The slide where the bats are erupting out of the mouth of the cave like some kind of creepy, living, flying vomit.  We all shudder at the thought of so many bats at one time, right over our heads.  Then the show moves to the interior of the caves, named limestone formations lit with colored lamps, underground lakes with blind fish.  We kids argue about the difference between stalagmites and stalactites.  The excitement ebbs, someone turns on the lights, and Gramps whispers to me, “someday I’ll take you there, doll.”