Christmas on the Road:

You would think I would remember the presents, since so much effort and expense and wishing went into them, but the first things that come to my mind, remembering Christmas, are daring expeditions to my grandparents in a succession of sketchy family cars. The snow belt was a much more formidable barrier in the pre-superhighway days. We regularly put on chains to make the dicey ascent south through Ithaca. My father had a fondness for experimental vehicles, which included Corvairs of the unsafe-at-any-speed vintage, Ramblers, and one Borgward--a German Ford too small to fit American wheel-ruts, whose burnt-out bearings stranded us at Watertown's Hotel Woodruff. I found the go-go dancers in the hotel bar a revelation to my sharp Boy Scout-trained eyes. Whatever the conveyance, my siblings and I, mushed together across the back seat, got along like scalded cats and rabid dogs for the 7 to 15 hours it took to limp into Towanda PA. My parents mu st have been selectively deaf, possessed of sociopathic numbness or supernatural self-restraint. Undeservedly, we arrived each year unslaughtered.