Hurricane Katrina relief work in Mississippi
February 2007

In February 2007, Jonah and I took a very special road trip together. It started in Philadelphia, where the two of us attended the biannual Convention of NFTY, the North American Federation of Temple Youth. I was on the faculty; he very much wasn’t. The Convention was fun for both of us, and even noteworthy due to my having observed Jonah at previous NFTY conventions where he struggled to find a level of comfortability among a gathering of 500 teens. By 2007 and 11th grade, however, he was “in the zone” and at the top of his social game. Jonah loved NFTY, he was friends with just about everybody, and the Convention was clearly the proverbial icing on his Jewish cake.

So when I told him we’d need to leave the Convention a day early, I’d expected more teen resistance. After all, kids wait two years for this gathering of friends from across North America and even the world. Nevertheless, Jonah didn’t bat an eye or hesitate even a moment before saying okay. While his friends would be spending another twenty-four hours together before heading home, he and I were flying down south to Ocean Springs, Mississippi, one of hundreds of towns that had buckled beneath a brutal beating from Hurricane Katrina a year and a half earlier (August 2005). The U.S. government had promised to help but their assistance was meager and disillusioning. Ordinary folks stepped in to lend a hand. Ocean Springs is only a few miles down the road from Biloxi where, soon after our arrival, we drove by a 500-year-old tree that had taken flight during the hurricane and landed in the middle of a three-story building. The destruction and despair we encountered there rattled us deeply. Houses that looked as if they’d been stepped on, and foundations that no longer even had houses, lined both sides of too many roads.

Swamp Team
February 2007

Jonah eagerly joined the work crews, and he worked hard, lending a hand to anyone who asked, pulling nails out of water-ravaged boards so they could be used again for rebuilding, pulling down ruined parts of houses to make way for new construction, scraping and sanding salvageable walls, and much, much more. The messiest work by far was when they assigned us to a swamp, explaining that a number of houses had simply slid down the hills around it and we were to pull out as much as we could from this rather disgusting bog. Why not bring in bulldozers and the like? Because this was a fragile wetland and large equipment would destroy it. So timber by timber, shingle by shingle, even submerged family memory by family memory, we lifted out as much as we could. It would take years so we only retrieved a tiny bit of it, but I understand the teams eventually got it all. Jonah posed proudly for a photo in our pre-muck coveralls. And then he stepped in to do the work, just as proudly.

Besides the relief activities, Jonah and I shared some other great memories on this road trip. Bedding down in sleeping bags inside a house that had no lights and no heat. Breakfast with our work buddies at the Waffle House. Driving into Biloxi for Mardi Gras. Buying ridiculous and offensive hats there. And coming home with bags full of the beads thrown at us by occupants of the passing floats.

Some things Jonah did without me. He helped build an enormous bonfire in the backyard of the place we were staying. And I do mean enormous. It burned about “two Jonahs high.” He also made a lot of music with his new friends and his backpacker guitar. He eagerly interviewed on camera for a participant who was filming a documentary of our trip.

The Swagger
February 2007

And, of course, he swaggered. I’m not really sure where this came from. I suspect it evolved at a time when he was trying to act bigger than he felt. But by the time he was bigger, both physically and charismatically, the swagger had simply become a part of him. And it made him a study in contradictions. That swagger evoked a cool superiority that one might actually buy into if you’d never met the boy. Because superiority was definitely not Jonah’s thing, I can only conclude that he swagged to entertain. What he did, he did for joy and for others. And that swagger, and the personality behind it, was part of what I continue to love most about him.

Sometime during the trip, Jonah turned to a temple participant and fellow bonfire-builder Jay Werner and told him they should make a t-shirt for a future Katina Relief trip that would say, “We’re on a mission from God” (referencing Elwood Blues in the 1980 film, The Blues Brothers). In 2012, that t-shirt got made. So it would seem Jonah got back down to the Gulf.

I love how Jonah continues to have an impact on people. In small ways, but ways that matter. One of the other kids who joined that trip to Mississippi in 2007 wrote, “Jonah, I only met you once. We went to Mississippi to help out Hurricane Katrina victims. We built homes and cleaned swamps. You were a great guy. You were strong and caring. We shared some laughs, and a few good stories. After one week, you left an impression in my mind that stuck pretty well. You had a lot of heart.”

That big heart of his continued to grow. During his freshman year at UB, Jonah told us that he was hoping to spend Spring Break ‘09 in New Orleans, continuing in college the Katrina relief work he’d done in high school. He never got the chance. But during his too-brief nineteen years, he made a profound impression on a lot of people. And I think that impression (like the Blues Brothers t-shirt) is helping to inspire others to do some good in the world – to treat others with goodness, and to lend a hand where we can.

Perhaps that’s the most important road trip of them all. Attaboy, Jo!

Billy

P.S. “Road Trip” is The Jonah Maccabee Foundation’s summer fundraiser for 2013. Remembering some of the fun Jonah had on these vacations, we’d like to help other kids to enjoy and to grow during their own childhood years. Please consider making your tax-deductible gift at jonahmac.org by Sunday, July 31. Okay, or any other time. Thank you.

This story made a brief appearance in “Doctored Memories” (May 12, 2010) but it lends itself easily to our “Road Trip” series. So I expanded the story for your enjoyment. Billy

For many, many years, our family made an annual summer move to the URJ Kutz Camp in Warwick, New York. At different points in time, we would either serve on faculty (Ellen and me, of course), as fac brats (Katie, Jonah and Aiden, of course) or as actual program participants (that would be Jonah). Oh, and for one summer, toilet cleaner and pot scrubber (Jonah again). In the early years (1991-95) we made quite the road trip from Cleveland, Ohio, in order to find our way to Warwick. This 8-hour drive took us 11 hours because, having three young children, we had to allow for outrageously frequent bathroom stops. There’s nothing much more urgent than a child crying from the backseat, “I really need to go!”

Jonah @ Kutz
Summer 1996

In the summer of 1996, we took an entirely different kind of road trip. Geographically, not much ground was covered – only maybe five miles (about an 8-minute ride) from Kutz to the Warwick Hospital. But the urgency tapped into a set of emotions that parents do their very best to not have to call upon.

While at camp our address was on Faculty Row, a handful of bungalow-type cabins which contained just enough tiny rooms to sleep, eat a light meal and (if you’re a kid) engage in some quiet play. Jonah and Katie had been sharing a room with a bunk bed – Katie on the bottom and Jonah up on top. Baby Aiden, all of two years old, camped out on the roof. No, he had himself a crib that was shoved into an even tinier room of his own.

On one particular evening, sometime after midnight, Ellen and I awoke with a start as we heard a thump and a very groggy whimpering. It seems that my sleeping Jonah had managed to roll himself off his bed (the top bunk, remember) and, on his way down (while taking in the sights, perhaps) struck the edge of a small night table that no one would ever for even a minute have thought could be a danger to a child.

An inch or two of Jonah’s forehead was cut open down to the bone. Blood was pouring out, drenching the blue Superman t-shirt in which he had gone to sleep earlier that evening. The irony of his choice for sleeping garb was not lost on us. Lots of kids wonder if they can fly. Ours decided to try it while he was asleep.

The Faculty Row cabins housed two families. Lucky for us, Laura, the camp nurse, was our immediate neighbor. We banged on the wall and shouted for her to come over. Her first task was to convince us that Jonah wasn’t bleeding to death. That wasn’t immediately apparent judging by the aforementioned Superman shirt. But keeping her cool, she patched Jonah up and we loaded him into the car, driving into Warwick to the local emergency room. When we got there, the medical staff had us restrain Jonah’s young arms behind him and inside of a pillow case, then they wrapped his entire body in a large sheet, so that we could hold still his squirming 6-year-old frame for novocaine injections and stitches. We attempted to comfort Jonah as this was going on by reminding him that he was the grandson of two doctors, but it wasn’t much help in convincing him that the hospital staff could be trusted. I have to admit that when I saw them going for his head with a large sewing needle, even though I’d watched them administer the anaesthetic (and even though I was the direct descendant of a doctor), I wasn’t so sure myself that this wasn’t torture.

But eventually they did stitch him up and got most of the blood washed off. We took him back to Kutz Camp where he fell quickly into a very exhausted, peaceful sleep. The road trip (or should we call it “head trip”) was over.

See Jonah’s scar?
Kutz, Summer 1996

But not really. Six years later, Jonah would write for a school project, “Since I was the kind of kid who liked reading Batman, I thought that stitches would’ve made me look like a thug. So I put up a real fight at the hospital. In the end I ended up getting the stitches and going home like nothing happened.” Fight he did. Stitches he got. And home he went. But for the rest of his life, Jonah had a spiffy little scar on his forehead which, at various times, he would grow hair to cover or cut short to let the world know he had some unique markings all his own.

Life with Jonah was often a trip. And there were unique markings all over him, but they were on the inside. I loved watching this kid live his life. Once he got the hang of it, he had such a great time. In a sense, all of our lives have stitches. Most of us bang our heads on surprising obstacles more times than we’d think. But with the help of a few good people who care, we can get patched up and back on the top bunk in almost no time at all. That’s life. It roughs us up. But more often than not, lets us patch together really excellent journeys. That’s what a little boy named Jonah did. And if we’re brave, and don’t mind a few scars, we can do the same.

By the way, the very next day after Jonah’s little experiment with nocturnal flight, Kutz built guardrails for every top bunk in camp. In the end, Jonah may have gotten a great story to tell but, like I wrote above, parents would prefer not to have to call upon those emotions if they can possibly help it. If kids want to take flight at night, they’ll have to settle for doing so in their dreams.

Which isn’t a half-bad place to initiate some amazing road trips.

Billy

P.S. “Road Trip” is The Jonah Maccabee Foundation’s summer fundraiser for 2013. Remembering some of the fun Jonah had on these vacations, we’d like to help other kids to enjoy and to grow during their own childhood years. Please consider making your tax-deductible gift at jonahmac.org by Sunday, July 31. Okay, or any other time. Thank you.

This is a story previously told as “One for the Road” on this blog (May 31, 2009). But it’s too good to leave out of our “Road Trip” series. Enjoy!

Among my earliest memories of Jonah and driving is that of him and Aiden camped out in the backseat for each summer’s trip from Cleveland to Kutz Camp, watching enough DVDs to fill the entire 11-hour expedition. We never heard a peep out of them which, as everyone knows, is the pinnacle of successful parenting. But I also remember one time getting stopped for speeding and being horrified that my children in the backseat were looking on as the police officer wrote out my summons. This being the nadir of my parenting, I wondered how I could possibly mold them into responsible human beings (let alone, drivers) if their dad was a hardened vehicular criminal.

If this is how he treats his mother …
(Hawaii, April 2005)

When it came time for Jonah to occupy the driver’s seat, I had my concerns. At the age of fifteen, he’d staged a hit-and-run photo with Ellen where he looked just a bit too happy at the wreckage he’d wrought. So on his sixteenth birthday, when Jonah didn’t rush me down to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get him a Learner’s Permit, I was kind of relieved.

No, I was very relieved.

It would actually be closer to his seventeenth birthday before he’d studied the Driver’s Manual and took the test to get his permit. Okay, “studying” is an exaggeration here. As I recall, he took the online quiz over and over until he could pass it, and then felt ready for the real thing.

Of course, then he had to actually learn how to drive. I got to teach Jonah how to parallel park. Out in front of our house, Jonah would explain to me the simple geometry behind this ubiquitous maneuver and was then surprised when he’d hit the curb (which is pretty much how I’ve parked the car for decades but is an instant “fail” on the test).

Teaching Jonah how to drive was a thankfully uneventful and rather enjoyable experience for me. When my daughter was learning how to drive, I wasn’t quite so sanguine about it. Once, on Saw Mill River Road in Elmsford, I ejected Katie from the car when I felt she wasn’t driving safely. Apparently, my tolerance level rose considerably by the time Jonah got behind the wheel.

Jonah finally took his driving test on December 31, 2007, halfway through his senior year. Why did he wait so long? I think it was part of his growing-up process. Driving was something Jonah viewed as a responsibility, more so than just a doorway to teen freedom. He knew that once he got his license, not only would he be asked to run errands for his parents, he’d have a potentially lethal weapon in his hands. That second thought, I believe, gave Jonah sufficient pause. When he did get his license, he became a terrific driver. Very responsible. Very attentive. Very safe.

That was always the wonderful surprise of Jonah’s life. He broadcast an air of unconcern, yet had this knack for doing really well when things mattered to him. Our job as parents was to try and make sure that whenever he found something that did matter, doors (on cars and elsewhere) opened for him. These successes made Jonah feel better and better about himself as he grew into the mature and able young man who went off to college. It gave his mom and dad a lot to smile about too.

Two more driving stories.

Portrait of a safe driver?
Kutz Camp, Summer 2007

First, during the Spring 2008 production of “Hair,” Jonah drove himself and Aiden to their weekly PGT rehearsals. Aiden remembers Jonah backing out of the driveway as they set off one afternoon for White Plains, and then pushing the pedal to the floor on Oak Street for the hundred yards or so to the first corner. Coming to a stop before the turn onto Woodlands Avenue, he looked over at Aiden as if to say, “Don’t ever let Mom know I did that.”

Second, before moving up to Buffalo this past fall, he sat me down and very earnestly tried to explain the way things now needed to be. “You know, Dad, since half the drivers in this family are now living in Buffalo, it seems only fair that half the cars should be there as well.” More geometry that, to Jonah’s disappointment, didn’t translate to reality.

Every parent both welcomes and dreads the day their child becomes licensed to drive. Jonah had given us the gift of delaying that day until he was genuinely ready. Risk-taking only within a stone’s throw from his home, he brought his characteristic spirit, intellect, charm, humor and heart to acquiring one of life’s mundane yet essential (and potentially hazardous) skills. Doing so, Jonah gave us yet another enduring memory of the effervescent and endearing young man we simply loved to watch grow.

Billy

P.S. “Road Trip” is The Jonah Maccabee Foundation’s summer fundraiser for 2013. Remembering some of the fun Jonah had on these vacations, we’d like to help other kids to enjoy and to grow during their own childhood years. Please consider making your tax-deductible gift at jonahmac.org by Sunday, July 31. Okay, or any other time. Thank you.

Niagara Falls
August 1999

As I prepared maps and sleeping arrangements for our 1999 road trip to upstate New York and Niagara Falls, everybody told me how brave I was to take my three kids for an entire week and across an international border – without Ellen. “What a dad!” they proclaimed. “You’re sooo much braver than I am!”

I wondered at all the fuss. I should have recognized the warnings.

In the years since The Trip, I’ve dubbed Niagara Falls: “Beauty and the Beast.” Why? Because regardless of which side you visit, the falls are exquisite but they’re also a trap. There is an abundance of gimmicky museums and thrill-rides for the family to see. And pretty much every one of them exits into a souvenir store. The trap within the trap. As I watched my young children running through a funhouse, screaming as a wax alligator jumped out to surprise them, or laughing at some crazy exhibit in the Ripley’s Museum, I’d nearly forget each time what awaited us at the exit.

The trip was so much fun for all three kids, and I reveled in the luxuriant delight of getting to be with them for a solid week, that I happily acquiesced to their pleas to get a little something from each and every souvenir shop.

Then it happened.

In one of the stores, picking up a bottle of Tylenol (wonder why I needed that?) I told Aiden, who was five at the time, that we were leaving. He about-faced to return to the shelf a toy he’d been eyeing. Now I’ve never been a parent who uses the phrase “We’re leaving” to hurry my children along by threatening them with the prospect of leaving them behind. So Aiden had no way of knowing that “We’re leaving” meant I would be paying for my Tylenol at the cash register and only then would we exit the store. He thought we were walking out at that very moment. And so, after placing his toy back on its shelf, he returned to the front of the store. He didn’t notice that I was standing at the cash register and although I must have told him hundreds of times that “I will never leave you behind … anywhere,” he thought I’d left him behind and went out to find me.

Unaware of any of this, I finished paying the cashier and walked around the store to collect my kids. Since Aiden enjoyed hiding, I was only mildly surprised not to immediately find him. I calmly searched the t-shirt racks and called out his name, letting him know it was time to go. Katie and Jonah playfully joined in the search, but after four or five minutes it wasn’t fun anymore. We stepped outside the store to see if he was standing in front, but no such luck. We went back inside the store for one more search (I simply couldn’t believe he would have actually left the premises). I held it together but could feel the panic building inside me. Katie, Jonah and I left the store again. This was Clifton Hill, one main pedestrian drag, so I sent Katie up and Jonah down the hill to see if they could spot him.

After two or three more minutes, it was definitely time to panic. I walked over to the store manager to ask her to call the police. But as my mouth began to form the request, I heard Katie call my name. She had Aiden by the hand, two young men following closely behind. One was security staff for Clifton Hill, the other had spotted Aiden crying and frantically searching for his family. After the security person was satisfied I was indeed Aiden’s (inept and irresponsible) father, the other man said to me, “I lost my kid once in a crowd like this. I just couldn’t let your little boy run around without offering some help.”

Needless to say, I thanked the two gentlemen profusely. And then resolved to never let my children out of my sight ever again, a resolution which was of course completely unrealistic but altogether understandable. I sought out a handcuffs store, but settled for tightly gripping three small sets of hands the remainder of the evening.

It has been my good fortune and great privilege to parent Katie, Jonah and Aiden. I’ve never expected to get it right every time, and losing Aiden on Clifton Hill certainly confirmed that perfect parenting is rarely if ever available to any of us. Jonah’s death ten years later was another reminder that life is rarely in our control. So we grasp our loved ones’ hands a little bit tighter. And when the time arrives (as it must), we bite our lips, tell ourselves over and over that it’s the right thing to do,  loosen our grip, and we let our children go. What choice do we have? Their lives are not ours. We must eventually hand over the reins.

I suppose each of us is on a “Road Trip,” making the best plans we can, setting out on adventures whose outcomes we hope will contain few surprises and, then, only ones that uplift. At one time or another, of course, we must set about the more difficult work of managing those unexpected itinerary changes, the ones that are not much fun, hoping we’ll have the wisdom and the strength to meet those changes with patience, grace and a sense of humor.

When the trip is complete, we learn whether our most fervent prayer has come true: that everybody is home, safe and sound.

Billy

P.S. “Road Trip” is The Jonah Maccabee Foundation’s summer fundraiser for 2013. Remembering some of the fun Jonah had on these vacations, we’d like to help other kids to enjoy and to grow during their own childhood years. Please consider making your tax-deductible gift at jonahmac.org by Sunday, July 31. Okay, or any other time. Thank you.

Road trips are certainly part of every family’s experience. For parents, it’s often where some of the best time is spent with our kids. We’ve got them captive. And assuming they’re not plugged into any tech, we may even have their attention.

Jonah and I spent an unexpected, but lovely, day together back when he was in fifth or sixth grade. He’d been suspended from school for a day (probably for sassing one of his teachers) and, still too young to be at home alone, I had him with me at work. But I was officiating at a funeral that day, so neither Jonah nor I had any choice in the matter — he was coming with me. It was a graveside service in Paramus, NJ, and, surprising to both of us, we enjoyed the time together. The drive was pleasant, not too lengthy, and the cemetery itself was fascinating to him. Jonah did not stay in the car but wandered in and around the headstones a little ways away from where I was conducting the service. When the funeral was over, he and I did a little more walking around the cemetery, quietly talking about death and burial and such.

Fuddrucker’s
February 2006

On our way home, we stopped at Fuddrucker’s for a hamburger and, from that time on, it became his favorite burger joint. There are no Fuddrucker’s anywhere near us, so the occasional drive across the George Washington Bridge for birthdays and such were on our permanent “road trip” itinerary. This photograph was taken there for Jonah’s 16th birthday.

It was an odd outing for Jonah and me that day, but it created a surprisingly sweet, indelible memory. I really enjoyed spending the time with him.

Billy

P.S. “Road Trip” is The Jonah Maccabee Foundation’s summer fundraiser for 2013. Remembering some of the fun Jonah had on these vacations, we’d like to help other kids to enjoy and to grow during their own childhood years. Please consider making your tax-deductible gift at jonahmac.org by Sunday, July 31. Okay, or any other time. Thank you.

Parenting is an endurance test, to be sure. But sometimes the shoe moves to the other foot, and children have to endure their parents. Such was the case in 1998, when I packed the car with suitcases and three children, and headed off to explore the roads and roadside attractions of Pennsylvania.

Ellen’s and my vacation times weren’t in sync back then, so I would take the kids on my own for what I’d thought would be a great vacation. Katie was ten at the time, Jonah eight, and Aiden four. The idea was to drive for a while into a nearby state, stop at restaurants and motels along the way, and find interesting places to visit. I prepared arduously for these trips, blissfully unaware of how tolerant my children would need to be in order to put up with my naive belief that we’d all love these adventures. What it ended up being was an interminable combination of mindless, limb-numbing hours in the car, too much fast food (not for me but for the kids!), mystery motel rooms which just as easily held magical mini-bars filled with chips and cookies as menacing families of cockroaches in the tub.

Our first road trip brought us into the State of Pennsylvania, to which we journeyed in search of trains and the Amish. It was in Strasburg, PA, that we found them both. While riding the 1800s-style Strasburg Railroad into the countryside of Lancaster County, we were all delighted to see Pennsylvania’s Amish folk carriaging back-and-forth alongside us. Of course, while the trains were a perfect preservation of the past, the Amish were as contemporary as they were ever going to get (which, for them, meant the 1720’s). My kids were fairly enthralled by all of this and, for a brief moment, it looked like I’d done okay on my trip planning.

Alas, the hours in the car, interrupted only briefly by uninspiring stops at McDonald’s and KFC, did not keep me high in the popularity polls. Katie’s leaving Claudia, the bunny she’d kept close by from the day she was born, in one of the motel beds did not improve things. We wouldn’t see Claudia again until she arrived home squeezed tightly into a shipping container courtesy of some kind motel staffperson who’d found the doll in the laundry. Needless to say, I don’t think Claudia joined us on future road trips. The kids, to their dismay, were not presented with a similar choice.

We brought two souvenirs home with us from our Pennsylvania road trip. The first was a train set. A starter set. Set us back three hundred bucks, it did. We had big plans. Wanted to build a whole city around it, just like the one we’d seen in Strasburg (yep, in the model railroad store). We set up our starter set exactly once. Next I saw it was years later, when Ellen was carrying it to the car to give away.

Billy, Katie, Aiden, Jonah
In case you don’t recognize us!
PA Road Trip, June 1998

Our second souvenir lasted a bit longer. It’s the one-and-only photograph from our entire Pennsylvania road trip. We had it taken at one of those photograph dress-up places. The four of us put on Western garb; I think we were bank robbers, probably train robbers. I’ve sometimes wondered about there being no other pictures from this trip. Apparently, Ellen was still the sole family photographer, a role she would begin to share with me the following summer when our road trip took us into upstate New York and Niagara Falls and where, for a very scary few minutes, we lost Aiden. But that’s a story for another time.

Billy

P.S. “Road Trip” is The Jonah Maccabee Foundation’s summer fundraiser for 2013. Remembering some of the fun Jonah had on these vacations, we’d like to help other kids to enjoy and to grow during their own childhood years. Please consider making your tax-deductible gift at jonahmac.org by Sunday, July 31. Okay, or any other time. Thank you.