Sittin’ On The Dock Of The Bay

Timmy and Gwendolyn got on like a house on fire. They were only 14 months apart and each knew how to rile the other up like oxygen to timber and flame. Marjorie used to try and police the scenes but 7 years in she’d lost steam. She looked over at Tim, driving the Chevy Impala convertible off into the daunting unknown of the family holiday, and knew; Tim would never intervene. He loved the blaze and glory of the sight of the house on fire.

It was this same sense of slightly reckless adventure that had Mr. Miller drive them into a new undiscovered region of West Coast America every summer – with little more than a roadmap, a too-small four-person tent, and a giant cooler stashed with Root Beers and baloney and a great big tub of mayonnaise.

The cooler had accompanied the Chevy Impala and the Millers into countless towns and the tent had been pitched alongside countless lakes and rivers. The constant flame of sibling warfare had lit up many a highway and competed with all the starry skies under which they set up camp.

They pulled out of the driveway. Timmy and Gwen leaned precariously over the back seat where the top had been folded down – meticulously and grotesquely pulling cheek cavities out with already grimy index fingers. As the Miller family pulled away, the two grimaced and hollered at their Walnut Avenue friends who stood mildly jealously on the side of the driveway.

‘Now sit down and behave like nice children,’ Mrs. Miller had wanted to say, but thought better and just let out a little half-voiced sigh instead as she fixed her eyes on the road ahead. They weren’t yet to the end of Walnut Avenue and the kindling had been lit.

She tried to tune out the bickering and chiding she could hear behind her – something about the seatbelt and the buckle, Gwen’s dolly Denise, and 3 packs of Dubble Bubble – and listened instead to Mr. Miller whistling Otis Redding’s Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay.

Occasionally he would remember the words and belt out ‘Ooo-weee, sittin’ on the dock of the baaaayee, wastin’ tahhhhh-ahm’.

The dock of the bay sounded like such a serene place to be sitting, thought Mrs. Miller. But had Otis Redding not sung about being lonely there and how nothing was ever going to change and hadn’t he just careened to his death from a plane flying out over the Midwest?

Mrs. Miller let out another little half-voiced sigh as Mr. Miller broke into a whistle again. The advantage of the Chevy Impala not having a car radio was that Mr. Miller could sing the parts of the song he knew ad infinitum and loop back on himself as many times as his soul desired. The road had rarely seen a man as content in his life as Mr. Miller. Mrs. Miller let out yet another half-voiced sigh.

Six hours and several baloney sandwiches, Root Beers, and soda pit stops later, the Millers came over the Inyo Mountains and through the Eureka Valley to approach the Mesquite Spring campsite.

The summer was hot in Death Valley and the weeks dragged on, punctuated only by the persistent drama that erupted in and among the Miller kids. Gwen lost campfire privileges for a week when she washed Timmy’s Etch-a-sketch under the campsite water tap. No sooner had the privileges been restored when the 7-year-old sat on a cactus and had to be awkwardly dangled into a tub of hot water and have the thorns soaked out of her little behind.

It wasn’t much more than a long weekend of calm before Timmy got hauled in by a Park Ranger for injuring a mule deer with his Red Ryder BB gun. The deer had been found limping toward Bighorn Gorge with a pellet lodged in its shank. It hadn’t taken them long to trace it back to the only young boy with a BB gun in the whole Mesquite campsite. Mrs. Miller responded by merely letting out another of her half-voiced sighs.

By the time summer drew to a close, Gwen had decided she did not like baloney sandwiches and refused to eat, while Timmy insisted on drinking Root Beer every morning for breakfast – instead of milk. Mrs. Miller just sighed, and Mr. Miller just kept singing Otis Redding.

On the last night before the Millers were to pack the Chevy Impala and head back to Lakewood, Mrs. Miller lay in the tent – sandwiched between Mr. Miller and the two children. She lay very still and listened to the odd sonorous combination of nature quieting down for the night, the children breathing peacefully in their already deep sleep, and Mr. Miller who had begun to hum Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay in his sleep. She let out a barely perceptible little sigh and smiled.

Driving home – headed southwest the next day – she thought about how it wasn’t all that bad.

They turned onto Walnut Avenue, and as they pulled into the driveway, the kids were once again leaning precariously out of the car making goofy faces at their neighborhood friends, and Mr. Miller was still singing that atrocious song. But she just smiled.

Perhaps it was pure delirium – or contentment at the thought of no longer being sandwiched like baloney into the mad Miller proximity of a small 4-person tent – but either way, she didn’t sigh. She just smiled – slightly.