The Trip - Part One

Taken by Wing-Chi Poon on 19th December 2004

I think I mentioned that as my brother and I were spending our days selling everything we owned at the Park and Swap we really didn’t realize the truth behind what was happening. We were young, and we were spending time with our mother, and we were ingesting a hell of a lot of sugar.

The sad part was our animals. I had a rabbit still (my brother’s had died earlier) and she went to a neighbor I think. I liked her, she was big and fluffy. When we first got her we were warned she was a cat killer, but we kept her (mostly) in her hutch. I think my father made the hutch. I remember this one thunderstorm where we had to take the rabbits into our rooms. My brother’s rabbit left so many ‘presents’ all around the room, and mine (Snuffy, named after my favorite Sesame Street character) left only one. She was a good rabbit.

The turtles went to someone, I don’t remember. We also had fish. The birds had died long ago, as had the dog (another case of my mom taking an animal to the pound for some reason of the other). The only animal we were going to take was Georgie. One bi-polar mother, two kids, and a cat in a car for two weeks as they traveled across the United States. Such a recipe for excitement.

My brother had this giant stuffed pink snake, I still remember it. I used to sit in the center of its coils. My brother offered to trade it to me for batteries, and I agreed imagining myself sitting safe in its coils in the back seat of the car. Of course that night my mother tossed it out, and my brother stood by laughing. It was too big to bring in the car, and he had been warned earlier. Cheeky bugger just got free batteries.

A lot of stuff was tossed. The day we left, I clung to my closet door looking around my empty yellow room and cried so hard. My mother told me it was too late, I had agreed. She told me not to cry, I had even helped sell off everything. I don’t think she had the capacity to understand that I didn’t really know what forever meant, what leaving meant. I would never see my friends again, they were moving soon and we didn’t have a house or address at all, just the car cruising on the highways.

The car was once a burgundy red, but the Arizona sun had faded it. It had a pretty big trunk. The cat was in the back seat, I think I spent most of the time sleeping in the back seat too. I remember there were somethings we forgot:

My mothers new swimsuit, and it was the first one she bought that fit her in years.

The porta potty that consisted of some metal contraption and blue bags.