My mother had taken my sisters, me, our Aunt Dawn and her six children, to a nearby lot that was renting and selling motor homes. It was late winter, 1974, in the suburbs of Jersey. Joy, my mother, had her Gemini aroused and she was hellbent to hit the road, just get on the highway and go somewhere. We spent over an hour on that lot going through one Winnebago after another. It was adventure heaven for 11-year-old Timmy. Tables turned into beds. There were beds above the front seats. There was a toilet, a fridge, an oven, all on wheels that would go with us from place to place. We were all so excited. We believed that that summer we would be cruising America in search of discoveries and treasures. It didn’t happen. We spent another summer at my grandfather’s house in Buck Hill Falls, PA. It was an idyllic way to spend a youthful summer, privileged and spoiled, really. But those motorhomes, man, they lured my imagination with their siren songs.

Joy was born in 1933. She would have been better suited for the world had she been born 20 years later. As it turned out she was, instead, married on her 20th and gave birth to six children by the time she was 29. I was her last. Her full name was Helen Joy. My father had said his whole life had been hell and joy. No truer words had he ever spoken. Their marriage was broken but kept together by a cultural glue and a religious stigma. I witnessed the worst of it and enjoyed the best.

The next summer, in 1975, I would turn 13 on July 12, in a Denver hotel. Up to that point the farthest I had traveled away from South Orange, New Jersey, was to the Montreal World’s Fair in 1967. Joy loaded all six of her children in the family station wagon, along with the second-youngest sister, Theo, Joy was the eldest of four wild, Irish roses, and off we went for a four-day excursion to the Great White North. Eight years later, Joy was determined to outdo this escapade when she planned and mapped out a cross-country odyssey.

There were five of us in a Dodge Dart: Joy (42), my sisters Debbie (17) and Kathy (15), their friend Cathy McDonough (15), and 12 year-old me. My father and two older brothers were resigned to being three “lonely” bachelors for the next five weeks. I should have known something was brewing when, two nights prior, my father had shared his limited wisdom of women with me. “Do you know what a period is, Tim?” The future English teacher said, “Yes,” and that would have been that had my father, Donnie, not recognized my patented glazey stare and proceeded to tell me about the natural wonders of the menstrual cycle and how it pretty much drives the engine of the world. That’s all, nothing major.

And then there I was at 6:30 a.m. on June 16, two days after 7th grade had let out, crammed in a green Dodge Dart with four women who will each have had their periods at least once during this trip. Ignorance of this fact would have been bliss, but there I was with little to do on our 8-hour drives but watch the American landscape roll by and wonder which of the four might be bleeding at any given time. And, thus, began my conflicted adoration with traveling the highways and byways of America. We may not have the toilet inside with us, and the seats may not convert into beds, but we got to stay in hotels and motels that had pools, indoors and outdoors, and we got to eat in restaurants nearly every night. I became a connoisseur of fried shrimp.It amazed me that nearly every eatery had them on their menus. A learned lesson: Avoid all seafood when in rural desert areas. Remarkable disruptions can occur to the human colon if you don’t.

We visited the oldest of our brood, Donna, married a year earlier at 19 and living in Manhattan, KS, where her West Point-graduated husband was stationed at Fort Riley. A fort in the geographic center of America. Spoiler Alert: If the enemy makes it that far then you’re pretty much done for. We passed through Oklahoma, and entering Texas immediately made sense out of the lyrics to America’s “Horse With No Name.” We eventually made all the touristy stops: Santa Fe, The Painted Desert, The Petrified Forest, The Grand Canyon (my father had asked me to take a picture of Kathy standing in the foreground of it with her mouth wide open for comparison), Las Vegas (stayed at The Desert Inn – Joy loved her gambling and I loved poolside service), Los Angeles (Hollywood, Grauman’s Chinese Theater, Universal Studio), Disneyland (I was left to roam on my own and was willing to make Huck Finn Island my home), Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, Hearst Castle in San Simeon (Patty had been kidnapped the year before), Reno, Lake Tahoe (did I mention Joy loved gambling – you must if you have six children), the Mormon Tabernacle (you can hear a pin drop on stage all the way in the rear), and, eventually, Denver, CO. It was here that Cathy McDonough took a flight home. She had had enough of the Straub’s Dysfunction on Wheels Tour, and my father had been conscripted to join us here and drive the rest of the way back to New Jersey after visiting Donna again in Kansas.

I remember so clearly my mother falling into my father’s arms when he opened the hotel room door. This was one of two times I recall ever seeing them hug. And she cried. This was the first time I had ever seen her cry. It was my 13th birthday. I had fried shrimp for dinner. Donnie and I shared a knowing glance across the table at one another, a glance that communicated something along the lines of, “There must have been a lot of menstruating going on.” My young, male mind was in full self-preservation mode for most of that trip and remained largely oblivious to the menstruating women surrounding me. I was crammed in the back seat of a Dodge Dart too enthralled with discovering my America, the America that honors the rights of women to drive their own car.

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