Recently, I hung a 24x36 poster in my boys' room: a 1988 Fleetwood RV - an icon of sorts, worthy of diluted veneration.
When you can no longer find yourself in the family portraits, you've lost the relational Rose-tinted glasses for good. My family was bleeding out from the wound of my choices - a festering wound in which I keep seeming to jam my dirty finger. "I'm sorry!" (which I am on so many levels) can only ever mend if I strap a worldview to its back, but that would force me to dress up in play clothes. So, I watch them bleed. If you talked to them and those in their party, I don't doubt you'd take their side. I wouldn't blame you.
I am guilty. Yet in my guilt, the very real guilt of destroying my marriage, deceiving, rejecting my faith, and re-aligning my morality...among the throng of indictments I heard, "You don't love you sons. A good father would never do this. You have destroyed their lives." These ghosts still visit me in the shower when everything else grows quiet, and that is why Flaky Jumbo rests on the westward wall of my sons' room.
Flaky Jumbo wore earth-tones...a manilla envelop body with a Sedona rock trim. For 30+ years she'd carried voyagers in her belly as far as Oregon, and perhaps beyond. The Feng Shui definitely aligned with your dirty grandmother's decor, with onlookers staring rather than complimenting the ride. On the ladder of success Flaky Jumbo was a step into the basement. Oh yes, her namesake was a can of biscuits: Grands Flaky Jumbo Biscuits.
For 1.5 years, the boys and I gathered in her hallowed retro halls to spend every other weekend together. We'd pull into our spot at the local KOA between $300,000 rigs to set up home. The hideous RV served as a sanctuary for our relationship...a place where I was just Dad. We'd take to the pool to play Jailbreak for a hour, fire up the Coleman in the outside kitchen for tacos, put to rest an entire half-gallon of Bluebell, watch Netflix side by side in the queen bed, sleep in, eat camp-furnished Honey Buns, shoot a little hoops, learn to drive and veg.
She wasn't much to look at, but she helped still the ghosts..."Shhhhh! Let them be," she'd say. And so she decorates the wall with so much more than her image.
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