'We have no destination, so shut-up till we get there'

“Did your family ever take Sunday drives when you were a kid?” Wendy asked, when we were in the midst of a drive of our own, the other day -- well, Sunday to be precise and I suspect that was what prompted her query.

Ah – Sunday drives. My mind drifted back – to scenes – of intense boredom, punctuated by threats of disciplinary mayhem on arrival back at the home front later in the day.

Having been forced to endure the ecclesiastical banalities of Sunday School – invariably taught by geekish adolescent girls with bad complexions – my brother and I would skip home (well, not exactly skip – macho dude boys don’t skip) enticed by the thought of having a whole day to ourselves in complete freedom from school and other impediments to juvenile creativity and intelligence.

“We’re going to go for a drive,” Mother would announce cheerily as we came in the back door.

Whaaaaaaaaaaat? We would think. How did she get the old man to agree to that? She must have made him very happy while we were cooling our heels in the hallway of the Sunday School, having been unceremoniously ejected from the class – yet again – for being disruptive. I mean, really, it was Sunday School, what could these pimply lasses actually do to maintain order. Hey, there was no punishment, unlike the brutal schools of the day. Well, it’s true, there may be Hell later on. I’m not exactly certain how God regards Sunday School misbehavior.

Anyway, the announcement of a Sunday drive did not evoke enchantment amongst the younger members of the Lidster household. In fact, we were left with a certain amount of dread, not to mention resentment of a day wasted in the company of the parents. Saturdays and Sundays, all things going well, meant getting away from them.

And, Sunday drives were invariably a combination of two negative elements: length and mind-numbing tedium. Throw in elements of the old man’s temperament (not always benevolent, I can still see that arm flailing away over the back of his seat, trying to make physical contact with one or the other of us because we’d been warned and warned to shut up yet hadn’t) and his refusal to accept that juvenile bladders were smaller than adult ones therefore requests for pee stops weren’t given frivolously (usually) and you have a formula for a truly dreadful day for the average kid.

The boredom arose from the fact they never, ever wanted to go anyplace interesting like Vancouver’s sans pareil Stanley Park, the scary suspension bridges at Lynn or Capilano Canyons, the lift up Grouse Mountain, an amusement park, the airport, or across the border to Washington State so we could buy Hershey Bars (couldn’t get them in Canada back then). No, where they wanted to go was some boring place out in the country and they would drive and drive and drive and drive (gas was only about 3-cents a gallon back then) and get nowhere. Trees and fields and stuff, and that was about it. They didn’t even pass any decent drive-ins so we could beg and plead for hotdogs, burgers, sodas, shakes – none of which we were ever going to get, so I don’t know why we bothered. “Here, boys,” Mom would say. “If you’re hungry, I brought along some nice apples.”

And, that old, dull, blue Chevy would plod along, mile after mile. Our car was as boring as the drive was. “Me, get a car with a V-8?” the old man would say. “I’m not going to pay a fortune for gas. This one is just fine. I don’t care if your friend’s dad has a Ford Fairlane. Fords are junk. Pure and simple: Fords are junk.”

Thinking back, I supposed a kind of bittersweet nostalgia should be creeping in by now – you know, thinking of the times with Mom and Dad and how I never appreciated them enough.

OK – checking for that nostalgia. Nope, none there.

A genuine mark of being a grown up of a certain age is sure knowledge that I’ll never have to take a Sunday drive with my parents again. Oh, I love taking them with Wendy because we go where ‘we’ want to go, and we haven’t had to deal with Sunday School either.