T A B L E++T A L K

Do you let your daughters play with Barbie? Discuss Mattel's glamour girl in the Mothers area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Nursing death
By Dawn MacKeen
Can breast-feeding be deadly?
(06/16/98)

Ballad of a bohemian childhood
By Maccabee Montandon
Other kids ate Fritos while I munched macrobiotic chips
(06/15/98)

Wax on
By Joan Walsh
A bikini-waxer muses on the fine line between pleasure and pain
(06/11/98)

Second Thoughts
By Sallie Tisdale
We are all criminals
(06/11/98)

Drama Queen Candidates
Mommy dearest -- not!
(06/10/98)

BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATURE ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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BY ANN HOOD | The first week I planned to take my kids to the Florida Keys, I was warned off by the man at the Key West Chamber of Commerce. "They're how old?" he asked. When I told him 4 and 1, he said, "You see, that's the week of the Hell's Angels convention and it's likely to be ... uh ... noisy."

A few months later I tried again.

"You see," I was told this time, "that's the week when there's the cross-dressing festival and it gets a little ... uh ... noisy here."

Hell's Angels and cross-dressers are not enough to keep me from an ordinary vacation plan. But this trip was different. Less than a year earlier my father had died, propelling me into a backward journey to find and claim pieces of my childhood. Since my brother died in 1982, my parents and I had formed a shaky tripod of a family; now that I'd lost my father too, it was too easy for me to glimpse a future point where I alone was the keeper of not just my own childhood memories, but of my family lore.

Sam groaned. "How many times do I have to tell you? I don't want to go on that dumb boat."

But a ride on a glass-bottom boat was important, even necessary, to me. I went back to the Florida Keys with Sam and Grace to try to capture some elusive part of myself, to preserve my family as I remembered it from my own childhood. Long before my brother's fatal accident, before the lung cancer that took my father's life, my family vacationed in Florida. Long before South Beach was South Beach, long before my college spring breaks in Fort Lauderdale, long before I rode an oversized tricycle through a boyfriend's parents' retirement village in Pampano, there was another Florida. In that Florida, there was no Disney World and Orlando was rural, a stretch of orange groves in the middle of nowhere. In that Florida, the beaches were deserted and the air smelled of citrus and Coppertone. In that Florida of my childhood, my father is young as he sits at the wheel of the car, directing us, my brother whispers in my ear and the world is happy and full of possibilities.

In the early '60s, my parents packed us into our green Chevy wagon and headed south as the radio played: She wore an itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini. We ate chewy pecan logs bought at Esso gas stations along the way. We watched for South of the Border signs to see both how far we still had to travel and what Pepe had to say: Chile today, hot tamale! There was no Route 95 to take us there. Instead, we drove past tobacco fields, billboards, orange groves.

Florida was where you went for a family vacation then. And you did not fly; you drove. You drove through the night if you had to, stopping at Howard Johnson's along the way for all-you-can-eat fried clams. You drove and you drove because there were no beaches more beautiful, no seafood tastier, no better place to get away. It was, I thought, a good place to go back to. Lacking the stamina of my once-young parents, I booked a flight to Miami for my kids and me, rented a car and went in search of some piece of me that I needed to find.

N E X T+P A G E: "No red car!"