La Luna - The Moon

My first memory is of the lake when I was four years old.  I think that's my first memory. Truth is, I can't be sure. Between all the pictures that I've seen, and the countless retelling of events that I've heard, it's hard to distinguish authentic memory from plain old overexposure.

I remember being inside an RV. It has got to be my memory because there are no existing pictures of the RV.  I remember heat, a lot of it. My mom and dad were there, along with my Aunt Gloria and Uncle George, and my cousin Lorrie. There were bugs - so many bugs.  And I distinctly recall a night on the road when I crawled up onto the overhead bed and popped my head out of a little sunroof opening, except this night it was better described as a moonroof because I laid eyes on the first amazing moon of my memory.

The rest of the trip, filled in by my mom and those yellowing photos pressed firmly against the sticky pages of our 1980's photo albums (Why don't they make 'em like that anymore?), went like this:

It was August 1982. My Uncle George had borrowed his friend Beto's giant RV to take all of us to Lake Havasu in Arizona. Along with those mentioned above there were also my cousins George & Lupe & a couple of their friends, and my brother Eddie. My brother Ernie apparently had other plans so he insisted on staying behind (there's a story there I'll have to get to another time). We rode in the RV from Los Angeles to Lake Havasu, playing board games, listening to music, talking, stopping for food, and watching the landscape change.

Once we arrived at our little rented cabin it was an onslaught of every wild bug native to Arizona and others that may have hitched a ride from L.A.  There were mosquitoes, cockroaches, ants, wasps, daddy long-legs, and grasshoppers;  things that looked like land crawlers but then expanded wings and fluttered across the room; things that made a loud CRUNCH like a hard shell taco when my Uncle George stepped barefoot right out of the shower; and things that skidded along the walls loud enough for us to hear in the middle of the night when we were trying to find sleep. Just to be safe, my parents and I slept in the same bed with our heads at the feet of the bed.

When we weren't inside the cabin we were in the lake.  The hottest day for us went up to 114 degrees. A fiercely dry heat that could scald my pale skin if not for the quart-size portions of sunblock my mom lacquered onto my body. The temperature, however, made for soothing warm waters. Lorrie and I splashed around the shallow end, while the teenagers dared each other to swim out further. My dad floated with the current in a rubber tire, Coca-Cola in hand. And then it was my turn inside the rubber tire, spun around and around by my dad, knocking into Lorrie's rubber tire, and leaping out of it to dunk my whole body into the lake - Lorrie's laughter muffled by the rush of water in my ears.

We stayed at the lake for four or five days. On the drive back home I was up on the overhead bed watching my brother Eddie stick his head out of the moonroof and into the night air. The speed of the RV on the highway made his hair shoot straight up and I'm almost positive I remember him making a Don King joke. It was my turn. My hair was a laugh for maybe a minute. It was the moon that caught my attention. Not full or a perfect crescent, but it glowed so brilliantly against that black sky. No city lights around for miles, it reminded me of a cutout pasted against black construction paper. Like the photos positioned carefully against the sticky pages of our album, it was placed in my memory, to be relived on another day.