[hangs head in shame]
Pay attention! The story will only be told once!
We left SCal after Christmas, en route to Sgt VOW’s new duty station: he was going to be an Army Recruiter in Wisconsin!
(insignificant true fact: Wisconsin was the furthest West available.)
For Christmas, my aunt had given us a fistful of McDonald’s coupon books. Keep this in mind throughout the story!
We got as far as Tucson for the first stop. My husband’s teen sister lived with us, and the whole car was worn out when we finally found a place to stay. And we went to McDonald’s. Of course.
All night long, Sgt VOW moaned and groaned in my ear, he tossed and turned, and he tangled all the covers. And he said over and over “I can’t sleep. How am I going to drive if I can’t sleep?”
Finally, about 2 AM, he admitted the Secret Sauce in his Big Mac had probably been bad, and he was actually sick with food poisoning. Atvthat time, all the nastiness in his body was making an appearance from one orifice or another. Once he was sufficiently purged, I gave him Tylenol and said, none too gently “I’ll drive. But you have to SHUT UP so I can sleep!”
We left Tucson about 9: 30 AM, with me behind the wheel. Teen sis sat in the front seat with me, and the invalid made a hospital ward in the backmseat with pillows and blankies, and slept like the proverbial baby.
I don’t remember where we spent the next night, but the following two nights were at my granparents’ house in the middle of Missouri. It snowed for those two nights.
We left the grandparents in the morning and the sky was cloudless and BLUE. The blueness was so intense, it had to be described in capital letters. We timed our departure just right, so we hit “going-to-work” traffic in St Louis. The center of Illinois had cleared, dry roads, but it was freezing cold. All three of us engaged in verbal combat, complete with name calling, over the heater controls.
As Fate would have it, we timed it just right AGAIN and hit “coming-home” traffic in Chicago. Chicago roads were wet and nasty, and we were trying to read signs in the twilight. We finally located Ft Sheridan, where we had reservations at the guest house.
In the process of moving stuff from the car to our room, I got stuck inside with an automatic locking door, while Sgt VOW and his sister were outside. I could NOT get the lock open. I’m quite infamous for locking myself out of cars and houses worldwide. Ft Sheridan was probably built the same time as the Crusader castles in Europe, and everything is big, heavy, and sturdy.
Sgt VOW gets an idea: shove the key under the door?
The big, heavy, sturdy door had inches and inches of weatherstripping. I don’t think a molecule of AIR could be squeezed underneath!
I sat on the floor and cried.
The general rule in most marriages is that anything that goes wrong IS THE WIFE’S FAULT. I had been listening to the bitching since we pulled out of my parents’ driveway in SCal. One of Sgt VOW’s many rants was on the road conditions in Illinois–specifically the use of salt. Cars in that part of the country display horrendous rust splotches from salt damage. Sgt VOW bitched that IIllinois would do better to follow the example if Oregon, “where they don’t throw salt around tontear up people’s cars.”
As we hit the traffic in Chicago, the bitch and moan chorus gained a new voice as Teen Sis complained about “too much McDonald’s.”
So that’s why I cried.
After venting a bit, I got up from the floor and tried YET AGAIN to get the damned door open. Maybe my tears had lubricated the locking mechanism, because I did get it open. I then cried all over the front of Sgt VOW and said the constant complaining had felt like it was directed at ME, even to the point of blaming me for the salt on the roads in Illinois.
He was so sorry. He comforted and patted me, and said everything was okay.
Then he and his sister went to McDonald’s to get us some dinner.
~VOW
or care 
)