Page 385 - WhyAsInY

Portrait of a (first) MarriaGe
Phyllis was pregnant with Peter. We also went alone to Little Dix Bay in Virgin Gorda in the late seventies and again in March 1983. We visited the kids when they were in summer camp, and we took two long week- ends biking and skiing in Vermont with our good friends and neighbors Rebecca and Marcel Margulies. (Marcel was a constant playmate and phenomenal athlete when it came to skiing and biking; there was no comparison between our abilities, however. To me, he was “Superman.”) All other vacations were with children. Starting in December 1976, we took annual ski weekends in Vermont with the entire Rebell family, and along the way we took two weeklong trips with the boys to Vail, Colorado. In addition, I believe that we took three summer vacations with the children in Martha’s Vineyard, two before Rachel arrived and one after.
(One of my favorite stories concerning our young family occurred during a trip in our station wagon to the Vineyard. Notwithstanding that we had made every effort to get Peter, who was about three, to relieve himself before we undertook the journey, Peter announced that he needed to go after we had just started driving on the Merritt Parkway. No problem, said I; we were equipped with a Tommee Tippee Cup, a plastic child’s drinking glass that was of size sufficient to accommodate Peter’s need. Phyllis assisted Peter while Danny—as usual—slept in the right-hand corner of the backseat. With the cup filled almost to the brim, the challenge was to rid ourselves of its contents without having to stop our progress. Again, no problem. Totally oblivious to Bernoulli’s principle, I suggested to Phyllis that all she had to do was to open the front passenger’s window, hold the cup down and dump the contents, while I maintained our sixty-miles-per-hour progress. This time, however, problem. Danny was rudely awakened when the contents blew right back into the car—more precisely, blew right back into Danny’s face. For years, Danny believed our cover story that he had been showered with apple juice. [There I’ve gone again with a digres- sion, but to have omitted that story would have upset Rachel, who told me that not just she, but her children, Maya and Elijah, as well, insisted that it find its way into this book.])
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