Great Expectations

By Kelly McManus

Summer is my favorite season. That’s probably because all my favorite things happen in the summer—lake swimming, camping, rafting, mountain climbing, watching shooting stars from my sleeping bag, huckleberry picking, canoeing, birthday cake, birthday dinner, birthday presents, and you get the idea. Summer is the best!

Did I mention birthdays?? I have always felt sorry for people whose birthday does not occur in the dog days of summer. Most of my childhood birthdays were spent camping on my favorite lake in Idaho (Priest Lake), swimming most of the day, then picking some huckleberries for my birthday cake (angel food cake drowned in huckleberries and whipped cream), swimming some more, then roasting my birthday dinner on a stick over a campfire (see Pat’s Roasted Wiener recipe in Bun’s Cookbook). It really was the perfect birthday, which is probably why this is how I still celebrate my birthday all these years later.

The only problem was the presents. Mom and Dad could never get it right when I was a kid, and I couldn’t have been more clear about what I wanted. Even as a self-centered child, I could tell it wasn’t from a lack of trying on their part. It was obvious that my parents put a lot of thought and care into getting me precisely the wrong birthday present every year. A perfect example was when I spent an entire year telling them I wanted a horse for my birthday. What did I get? A pair of green suede cowboy boots. Cowboy boots do not a cowboy make. They had the usual excuses for my horseless state—like we live in a trailer court in Pullman, WA, and we are broke because Dad is a grad student…again. And even I had to admit they were very nice cowboy boots, and green is my favorite color. But EVERYONE knows, self-respecting cowboys don’t wear green suede cowboy boots, especially if they don’t have a horse. Totally clueless.

Kelly gives Shan a ride in the little red wagon.

Then there was the birthday I desperately wanted a car. I needed wheels, man! What I got instead was a little red wagon. Sigh… While it was not the vehicle of my 4-year-old dreams, it quickly became my pride and joy. As usual, though, the problem was Mom and Dad. Being by nature extremely creative and frugal people who had lived in poverty their entire lives, they had made self-reliance an art form. Since we could not afford a real car, my little red wagon quickly became the wheels not only for our family, but also our extended community of poverty-stricken college students at WSU. This was extremely annoying to me.

If Dad needed a dump truck to move dirt and gravel to build a dike around our flooding basement apartment windows in a downpour, he conscripted my wagon. If our upstairs neighbor Bob needed to run his sick dog, Homer, to the vet, my wagon was the ambulance. Bob’s wife, Lil, used my wagon one time as a pickup to haul a load of chicken poop for the little garden she was building behind our apartments. I had a hard time forgiving her for that one, but she was our babysitter and shared her garden produce with us, so what’s a kid to do?  Mom was the usual offender because she needed a station wagon every week to buzz down to the grocery store with the kids, and my little red wagon was it.

I couldn’t really complain about the grocery runs, though, because they were always an exciting and sometimes life-threatening diversion from our mundane stay-at-home life. Mom would pile Shannon and me into my little red wagon and pull us down the big hill we lived on to the main drag through town. From there, it was an easy, relatively flat, half-mile stroll to our local supermarket. The hill was the challenge. More often than not, our wagon would roar past Mom on the steepest part of the hill as gravity ripped the metal wagon handle out of her hands. After capsizing a couple of times when this happened, I took over the wagon handle on the way down and became quite adroit at piloting Shannon and me to a safe stop at the bottom of the hill, where we would wait for Mom to catch up. Rather than being rewarded for my wagoneer skills, though, I would then get kicked out of the wagon, so Mom only had to pull baby Shannon. And, of course, on the trek home with our week’s supply of groceries piled around Shannon, I would have to get behind my wagon and help push us back up the hill. On at least one unfortunate occasion, I was also the lumpy brake when the overloaded wagon’s handle escaped Mom’s sweaty, exhausted grip.

The final indignity to my wagon ownership came when we had to move to a different apartment on a neighboring hill, and my parents confiscated my little red wagon to move all the belongings of our family of four to our new digs. This was when it finally hit me that I lived in a socialist family. Apparently, my parents did not believe in children having their own possessions. All this was communicated eloquently by wails and squawks as I threw my small body across my little wagon to protect it. My sobs were affecting morale, so Dad decided his pathetic band of movers needed to be inspired. His message went something like this: Everything was to be shared and shared graciously because we were all in this together, sink or swim. At the moment, we were all united in sacrificing for the cause of surviving grad school. Once we survived grad school, life would be glorious, and we would all get ponies. At least that was my take on it, and the pony hope was what kept me going in the darkest hours—which was probably moving our household on my little red wagon. I stood up, sniffled, straightened my shoulders, and donated my wagon to the cause. Dad always had a way with words.

We must have been quite the sight with our small couch balanced precariously on a child’s wagon pulled by Dad, followed closely by Mom trying to steady the couch without dropping the lamp she was carrying. Shannon toddled beside her, sucking her thumb and carrying only her ratty, stuffed animal skunk. I, of course, brought up the rear, piled high with unbreakable items, while anxiously keeping an eye on my beloved wagon. I lost count of how many trips we made, which is easy to do when you can’t count, but it was a lot.

Mom and Dad kept my little red wagon for the rest of their lives. It was a treasure to them, and they loved to regale us with stories about our little family moving with only a wagon. Every fall, Mom would fill my old rusted wagon with pumpkins and display it on the front porch, surrounded by cornstalks and chrysanthemums to give it the honor it deserved. Come to think of it, that little red wagon was probably the best birthday present I ever received. Mom and Dad nailed it!