Greg Bales

Trip Report

So the trip to Mississippi and then to Arkansas went well! As usual, we did a horrendous job of getting on the road. On Friday, we didn’t leave Iowa City until after noon; on Monday, we were almost as late leaving Searcy. But G was a trooper. He slept a lot, and when he did grow tired of sitting in the car seat, Johnny Cash, Gillian Welch, and a handful of hymns kept him reasonably calm. (He especially likes “Big River,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” and “Long Black Veil”; for Welch, “One More Dollar” and “Winter’s Come and Gone.” It’s only coincidence that those are all songs I’ve memorized.)

We were actually relieved that things went so well for reasons besides first-time-traveling nerves: G had spent the previous week in mighty complaining thanks to his upper incisors; he was very difficult to live with. But the pain of teething broke the day we left, and for most of the trip he was a flirty, raspberry-blowing joy. (In fact, in Arkansas Mom and my aunt taught him to blow raspberries as a game; we’ve been blowing them back and forth ever since.) There, he also had a grand time playing with his second cousins (one of whom sat on his lap—he loved it), his grandmother, and his great-grandparents.

The trip wasn’t without incident. On the way down, I was stretching my legs at a gas station just north of St. Louis, tripped, smashed my face on a pane of glass, and chipped a tooth. Then, On Saturday, when I repacked the diaper bag, I managed to leave out G’s spare change of clothes, so of course during a diaper change he peed on the clothes he was wearing. He had to borrow an outfit from the two-year-old daughter of some friends, which he wore on a tour of Rowan Oak. (Upshot: G is absolutely adorable in a flower-print shirt and pink pants.) And on Monday, my grandparents’ Internet went out just as I was submitting the grant proposal I had spent all night editing. (Not a grant for myself, I hasten to add.) We had to stop at a coffee shop on the way out of town to make sure that everything got off without a hitch.

But all of those mishaps—even the broken tooth, which I’ve already had repaired—were minor. On the whole, we attended a lovely wedding, visited with old friends and family, and enjoyed ourselves on a trip that was altogether too short.