On the Road Again

Sorry for the radio silence over the last couple of days. When my friend Clark send me a voicemail saying, "What do you mean you'll be in Idaho?" it occurred to me that I haven't mentioned here that Suzanne, the girls, and I were planning on a trip to the West to see family and specifically to visit my mom for her birthday.

It's been a couple of weeks in the planning but there was so much else going on, I just never mentioned it. We were up until almost 2 a.m. on Thursday night doing the last of the packing and by 9 a.m. on Friday morning, we were on the road.

So we're here. We made it. It took three days and one 140 dollar speeding ticket, but we are now in Rigby, Idaho, home of big potatoes and even bigger trucks driven by guys with names like "Chad" and "Bucky."

A few of observations from the trip:

Council Bluffs, Iowa is a total hole. My brother, Dan, served six months of his mission there and tells me that the missionaries just called it "Council-tucky." It's a dirty, run-down hillbilly hole that looks like an unwashed mullet and smells like Skoal. We hated it.

We first spotted cows in Indiana. I hadn't seen a cow in months. It had been even longer for Suzanne. For a guy raised in Idaho, not seeing a cow is like a Detroiter not seeing a car fire for a few months.

A portable DVD player goes a long, long, long way with kids. All the way across Nebraska to be exact.

Cops are excruciatingly polite when they are handing over a ticket that costs the equivalent of a night in a decent hotel or a week's worth of groceries for a family of four. The politeness almost makes it worse. It's like someone saying, "Pardon me, sir, may I put an ice pick in your kidney? Thanks ever so much!"

Dry air is a joy. I walked outside the hotel room in Rawlins on Sunday morning and there was this slight, dry breeze and I laughed out loud just because it had been so long since I'd felt anything like it. It was a wonderful.

Overall, Idaho is pretty seductive in the summer. It only gets in the mid-eighties, the light is clear and clean, and everything is so vibrant and colorful, the landscape looks like it's made of stained glass. I've always thought that the warm months in Idaho (all three of them) are so fabulous because they're recompense for nine months of winter.

Anyway, we drove to Rexburg and visited with my mom during her chemo today. The facility is pretty great. It looks a lot more like an upscale salon than a oncology clinic. The main room has twenty foot vaulted ceilings, polished hardwood floors, and French doors that open up onto a patio area with a fountain and pools. On the south wall there's a big stone fireplace. Pretty shmancy. The room is ringed with recliners and next to each chair is a chemo stand with a hook for a drip and a machine to regulate the chemicals. When we were there, there were about five other people getting treated. Some were sleeping, others read. Mom was writing on her laptop when we got there but she put that away while we talked. The girls explored the patio area for a while and we talked about how much Rexburg had changed. Suzanne hasn't seen the city in about three years and, needless to say, it's plenty different. The girls came back in and Maryn discovered a copy of Highlights magazine. Like the pun-finding bloodhound she is, she zeroed in on the joke page and was soon telling winners like, "What's an astronaut's favorite meal of the day?" (Launch.) and "Where are french fries born?" (Greece/Grease).

Mom had one more bag of clear, chemical, cancer-remover to go through so we went to Deseret Book and to D.I. for a couple of minutes. That was a homecoming right there: Suzanne Brown and Deseret Industries, reunited again! Salvation Army is an okay substitute but there's something about D.I. that I think Suzanne will always prefer.

Once chemo was over with, we hopped in the car and headed for that mythical land known as Archer, Idaho and partook of the nectar of the gods. Yeah, you know it, baby. Big Jud's Country Diner! Suzanne and I split a Big Jud - she ate a third of it and I took care of the rest. Huge amounts of red meat, freshly fried potatoes, and a cold diet Pepsi to wash it all down. It was as though I had died (of a heart attack, no doubt) and gone to unhealthy food heaven. It was awesome.

In the evening, we had a big dinner with all the family over and then set off fireworks on the front lawn. It was a lot of fun. My mom got to have her grandkids hand her birthday presents and I think that was probably the best part of all for her. I've said it before and I'll say it again: she likes me okay but really my primary purpose in life was to provide my mother with grandchildren.

Anyway, tomorrow Suzanne, Mom, and I will go to the Rexburg temple. It will be the first time there for all of us so we'll see what it's like.