Reasons I Love My Mother

Reason #326:

I love my mother and father for taking me to New York City for the very fist time during the summer of 2000. In fact, I think it was ten years ago this week that we went. Weird.

Before the trip, my dad had us children pick five things we definitely wanted to see while there, and then proceeded to make a color-coded itinerary that he kept in a plastic sleeve and carried around as reference material. Deviation from said list threw him (and the trip) into a tailspin. The items in red on the itinerary were things I wanted to do, blue items were things Janelle wanted, and so forth. It was a sweet approach to try and make sure we got to do everything we wanted to, but also, it was a nightmare.

And my mom wasted no time in pointing that out.

I remember walking around the city as a family, and my dad would be twenty paces ahead of us shouting, “Make this light, make this light!”. He wanted us to run, catch up with him, and make it across the cross-walk before the light changed. Not only would my mom give him a hard time for rushing her, but she started deliberately going slower. I can still hear her saying his name in that way she would, “Jo-seph, I am not going to spend this trip running.”

It cracked me up.

I was also so, so grateful for that trip when it happened. I was sixteen and wanted nothing more than to graduate and move to the big city. I had dreamed about living in New York my entire life and they knew that. I have one specific memory of that trip that I will never forget and I have my parents to thank for it: we were on our way to see “Kiss Me Kate” on Broadway and I had never seen Times Square before. I had no idea where it was or how to get to it, but my dad was holding the map and he simply said to me, “Chris, go run ahead one block and look to the left.”

And I did. And it was Time Square. And I cried.