Road Trip with Ma and Pa

Dam, we did it

Most people go to Las Vegas for the gambling and the high life. They go to win money. They go for a lost weekend with a lover or with friends for fun and frolic. 

I went with my mom and dad on a road trip to see art. Specifically, the Rita Deanin Abbey Art Museum.

We set off from LA. I had arrived from Toronto the day before and over dinner we discussed what time was reasonable to get going. My map app told me the journey would take just over four hours. 

"Let's start early," my mother said. 

"What's early?" I asked.

"Nine," she said with decision. 

My mother typically does not get out of bed much before noon; my father shook his head dubiously. We began a weird sort of backward bargaining. 

"How about let's be happy if we leave by noon," I suggested.

"No, we can leave by ten," Mom said.

"Eleven?" I offered. 

My father went upstairs to pack.

Miracles happen. We were all in the car at 10:50 a.m. A good omen.

"Oh no," my mom said as I buckled up.

"What?" 

"I left my coffee inside."

So close. I sighed and undid my seatbelt. "Where is it?"

"Never mind. It's fine. I don't need it." My mother is like this, endlessly self-abnegating. (The opposite of me.) 

"I'll get it," I said. "Just give me the housekey."

"You have it," she said. "It's attached to the car key."

"No, it's not." I demonstrated, waving the keyless fob. "Dad, do you have your key?" 

"No," he said, grimly. Dismay pervaded the atmosphere, less about being totally locked out--several people have spares-- but at the shadow cast by error and the consequent reduction of the goodness of the omen. 

Then came redemption. By sheer chance I had brought along my own key from Toronto and zipped it into a small pocketbook. And again by chance, I had brought this little bag along for the road trip and shoved it in my suitcase. Whew! I burrowed through the boot, found the key, and retrieved the still-hot coffee. We were ready to ride... at exactly eleven o' clock. 

We plowed our way along the Ventura Freeway, the 101 becoming the 134, then climbed out of the LA basin. Snowcapped peaks to the left overlooked our progress past Hesperia and then Victorville, into the desolate terrain of the Mojave desert. My mother, age 92, sighed happily. "I just love traveling by car."

Worth it, the whole trip, for that alone. 

I do love my mom 💖

*****

We stopped in Barstow, the "Hub of the West", for lunch at Roy's Café, on Main Street, a fragment of old Route 66 and the southern Mormon trail. A series of murals commemorate the town's history (caveat: some a tad dicey IMHO). 

The Barstow story

Get your kicks...

...or not

In Las Vegas the GPS pointed us to our hotel just off the Strip though it insisted we get there via the (gated) employee car park. Friendly locals directed us to the guest entrance and soon thereafter, our rooms. Very Vegas views: flashing neon lights in the foreground, desert and mountains beyond, and directly below, a tempting swimming pool. 

But my dad had eyes only for one thing: his mobility scooter. Walking has become painful for him due to a spinal condition so he has been using a rollator (we named her Stella) for the past few months, which helps. My sisters and I have encouraged him to explore scooters but he hesitated. However, he took to this one like a duck to the proverbial. He mastered forward and reverse and hardly ran into anything. (He didn't really come close to that woman with a baby buggy-- honest.) 

After a delicious dinner at a Japanese restaurant my parents wanted to hit the Strip so we set off for a post-prandial tour. ("Here," said my mom as we traversed a casino at the MGM Grand. "Bet on something." She handed me $20. I handed it back, betting that we'd have more fun getting out of the place. Plus, the casinos seem entirely electronic and incompatible with paper money.)  I found myself jogging to keep up as my father disappeared into the middle distance on his electric steed. We strayed further than I intended, and my mother gradually wore down. Las Vegas is, however, set up for hospitality. A kind parking valet at a random nearby hotel called a cab for my mom, while I jog-walked alongside my speed-demon dad back to our own hotel. (Luddite's confession: no ride-hailing apps on my phone.)

Speed demon Dad

The native New Yorker

Quick casino transit

The next night we visited The Sphere, a new installation / venue shaped like--yes--a globe. Inside they display audiovisual magic aka technology with robots and other AI. The staff at The Sphere made the experience magical for us too; I called their accessibility office about two hours before our show to ask whether we would be better off with my dad's walker or (somehow) his scooter. "No worries!" said the friendly young man on the end of the phone. "We'll provide you a wheelchair and an escort!" And they did, a big gray-bearded man, Mark, who it seems attended the high school down the road from me. Mark told us quite a lot about himself (too much, according to my mother), including that his father used to play drums for Bob Hope's band and that as a child, he would tag along. Now by his accounting he's some sort of property mogul, one who apparently likes to serve as a wheelchair escort on the side. I have no idea whether any of it was true but then again, what is truth? He got us to the front of several queues, which is more important than truth. 

My 94-year-old Dad conversed with Lia the robot and proved to be the absolute star of the show. Hilarious and smart. If I could figure out how to add a video to this blog I would show him off but you'll have to take my word. I do love my dad.

Inside the sphere...

It's a sphere

But the main event, the one that drew us to Las Vegas in the first place, was a visit to the Ruth Deanin Abbey Museum, a work of love jointly created by Rita and her husband (now widower) Robert Belliveau.

Rita died in 2021. She was one of my mother's numerous (as in, one of over 35) first cousins in and around Brooklyn in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Like my mother, Rita moved west and settled there: my parents to California, Rita to New Mexico and also to California and eventually to Nevada. She became a multi-media artist and a poet, and for a time the only woman professor of art at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. 

Rita married Edward Abbey, a writer and environmental activist who wrote novels and essays including The Monkey Wrench Gang (about a ragtag band of people determined to destroy the Glen Canyon Dam) and The Brave Cowboy, on which the classic western film Lonely Are the Brave, starring Kirk Douglas, was based  [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Abbey]. Rita and Edward had two sons, Joshua and Aaron, who were my occasional playmates when both my father and theirs were at Stanford University--my father as a graduate student and theirs as a creative-writing fellow. My parents told me that we used to visit the Abbeys when they lived in Half Moon Bay, on the coast between Palo Alto and San Francisco. Once Rita offered to lend my parents one of her paintings to cheer up their dowdy married-student Stanford University apartment. "Which way up does it go?" my father asked her, looking at it.

"Oh, it doesn't matter," Rita said airily. At least, that's what my parents remember Rita saying. I have it on good authority that her saying such a thing was extremely unlikely.

Indeed, some time later when the Abbeys paid a return visit to our family in Stanford Village, Rita spotted her painting in pride of place over the sofa and chastised my father. "You've hung it upside down!" He has told this story a few times now and I still can't work out whether he is joking or she was or if both were in complete earnest, or some combination. Memory is tricky. History is hard.

Rita's painting

Sculpture garden

In the museum in Las Vegas my father told the story again, this time also to my cousin Aaron (the good authority mentioned above), Rita's younger son, who joined us there. Laura Sanders, the amazing director, arranged everything and gave us a personal tour. We all swapped stories about Rita. I shared a childhood memory of Rita after she had divorced Edward and brought her boyfriend to visit us with  in Los Angeles. My family lived then in UCLA's family housing complex on Sawtelle Boulevard. I was about six or seven. Rita and Mirek had gone scuba diving in Santa Monica Bay and returned to our apartment with a bucket of live lobsters. My mother duly boiled a pot of water. Soon I heard her scream; I ran into the kitchen. A lobster had escaped from captivity and had caught her bare toe in its claw. The boyfriend ("that would be Mirek," says Aaron at the museum) pried it off and I accompanied my mother to the bathroom where she applied a bandaid. (As I reread this bit I think they must have been crabs. But my parents insist they were lobsters. Again. Memory. History. Tricky.)

We loved looking at Rita's amazing art and visiting her studio and talking family history. My mother gave names to the sepia-tinted faces in a long-ago group photograph. "That's my mother," she said, pointing out my grandmother as a youngster.

Glowing stained glass 

More about the museum and about Rita's husband Robert Rock Belliveau, who died this year: The Doctor Who Finished His Late Wife's Art Museum.

On our last day my father had to bid farewell to his new best friend, the mobility scooter, and return to the plodding effort of walking with Stella. We detoured on the way home to Hoover Dam, which I had never seen. Lake Mead shone in the brilliant blue sunshine, an actual body of water rather than the sea of solar tiles that had fooled me a few days earlier. The dam is a tremendous and breathtaking construction but I could not help wondering about the view back when the Colorado River flowed through, before the dam amputated its course. Would we build it today? 

Lake Mead 

Oops?

Not the Colorado River...

After a lunch stop at the Dam Cafe we headed west into the sunset, back to Los Angeles. A few days later I returned to Toronto. Next stop, England. "Globetrotter," my cousin Laura called me. I don't feel it. I'm just a gal looking for her homes. 

Lonely Are the Brave