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  • A Grand Canyon
  • Lee Zacharias (bio)

My mother said she always wanted to see the Grand Canyon. Actually what she said was "I always wanted to see the Grand Canyon, but I guess I'll never get there." Then the guess fell silent, the comma disappeared, she was sure she'd never get there, and the pause between the two clauses grew so short the thought was one, desire and disappointment a single breath. She wasn't going to see the Grand Canyon before she died, and to her it surely seemed a melancholy measure of her life. It did not bother her that she had never seen the Pyramids or Paris; she couldn't understand why anyone would want to travel abroad "when there are so many wonderful things to see in this country." And for a while after her retirement she did see a little bit of the United States—on a senior tour bus she went to Nashville, New Orleans, and Niagra Falls, sharing a room with a widowed acquaintance who lived too many miles away for any other social congress, but then her acquaintance moved to Arizona, the tours got too expensive, and she never did get west. Once, she told me, they were planning to go, they being my parents, but my father's brother, John, told my dad he wouldn't like it, and that was that; they went fishing in Wisconsin. We always went fishing in Wisconsin.

Whether they included we, my brother and me, or not, I don't know. Though I recall no such plans, the season between our departure from home and their divorce was brief, and my parents were not of a class that traveled without children. It's possible that the plans were only my mother's wishful thinking, but in either case it wouldn't have mattered to me—I loved the Wisconsin trips, on which I was free to tromp about the woods, to swim at will, and best of all, when my father got back from fishing, to take the boat. But my mother hated them; she hated staying in the cabins at the fishing camps, hated the bathrooms up the hill, and more than that she hated fish. Yet on those few occasions when she must have insisted on another destination, my father's Ford invariably [End Page 142] developed car trouble. "Did you hear that noise?" he would ask. "Oh my God," he would keen, and there was nothing to be done but turn around and drive straight home, where the suspicious rattle, squeak, or chuff that none of the rest of us could hear always turned out to have been a false alarm. We went to the Lake of the Ozarks and stayed a single night. We drove to Albany, taking three days to cross Pennsylvania on Route 6 because my father didn't want to pay the turnpike tolls, but when we got to New York we didn't even spend the night, never mind that my mother hadn't seen the sister who lived there since she was a child. Missouri was where my mother had been born; she had family there too, though I don't recall stopping in St. Louis to visit. On the other hand, Wisconsin was where my father's family lived, and on our way to and from the northern lakes we always stayed with John in Menomonee Falls and at the farm outside Eden with his sister, Marie. My mother couldn't stand John, and though she had no quarrel with Marie, she resented the farm, where breakfast, lunch, and dinner for ten meant she never got out of the kitchen. Yet after her divorce she nurtured a conviction that if it hadn't been for that, hadn't been for the divorce, she and my father would have spent a happy retirement traveling together. "All the things we could have seen, think how good we would have had it," she lamented, and when I reminded her that he had never wanted to go anywhere she wanted and that wherever they did go all they did was fight, she would say, "Even so." I...

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