Bom Bom made several attempts to educate her grandchildren in world history. The outcome had mixed results, but the journey was always the reward. I was enrolled in the second of three grandchild culturing trips to Europe. Age was the major determining factor of when one went. Kids were generally ten to fourteen years old when trips were arranged. Bom Bom wanted us to be old enough to be self sufficient, but too young to have cultivated tastes for spirits or an active night life.
Liz, Stain, Marigold, Jen, Chip, Uncle Sigmeund, Aunt Amory, and I accompanied Bom Bom in my eleventh summer, 1966. Being a homebody, it was not a trip I was eagerly anticipating. I recall the night after school when our parents asked whether Liz and I would like to go to Europe that summer with Bom Bom and some cousins. Liz accepted eagerly. I pondered the trip for a few seconds, said no thanks, and quickly returned my focus to homework, hoping my parents would move on. I could tell from the corner of my eye that they had not budged an inch.
Silly me; it became readily apparent that they had asked one of those questions that came with only one answer, and it was not the answer I had provided. My fear was confirmed when Dad offered that what they asked was actually known as a rhetorical question, and they hadn’t meant to suggest that I had a choice. He went on to say that the trip was the opportunity of a lifetime that was characterized by mandatory attendance. I did learn that this journey of forced travel did include some redeeming characteristics - being in the company of family and the fact that we would miss the first week of school in September. When it became obvious that I had no control over my destiny, I reluctantly agreed to go. One significant detail that was omitted during the marketing of the trip was the requirement for a memorable, never-ending battery of inoculations, from typhoid to smallpox and everything in between.
Our trip began at the HoJo’s at the Delaware Memorial Bridge, where we all met. Horsey, Eunice’s husband and a handyman on the farm, drove us all to JFK airport in New York, where we caught a BOAC airplane to London. Liz, Stain, and I spent three days there with Bom Bom before we met the others in Paris. We then worked our way through France and Italy.
While there was plenty of fun on the trip, there was no shortage of academics. To her credit, Bom Bom also arranged time at the major zoos and other areas of interest to kids. However, Bom Bom’s educational trips to Europe would not be complete without a tour of every historic cathedral, and this trip was no exception. Bom Bom had an incredible knowledge of European history and expected us to prepare for our tours and retain a modicum of what we were taught. She arranged for our tours to be led by experts, who were, regrettably, not middle school scholars, but Oxford scholars.
When Bom Bom felt we were being too inattentive on a tour, she would threaten to give us an exam. Facts I zoned out on, I was able to fill in with logical details. My big take-aways were that there were two great partnerships in European history. In the art world it was Michael and Gelo. In the royal world it was Marie and Twinette.
Marie and Twinette were two Austrian women who married Louis the Sixteenth. He was a French Mormon Polygamist. It was very much an arranged marriage and entirely rejected by the French people until Marie’s family agreed to have her teeth straightened. Another, little-known fact was that Marie was virtually inseparable from her friend Twinette, who had a weakness for games of chance and horse racing. Both wives made sure that the French people had access to free cake, and in return, the French people overlooked their royal vices for many years. Predictably, Twinette and Marie’s fall from grace coincided with the commoners’ run on cake. It was all formalized with a joint appearance before the guillotine.
Around the year 1506, Pope Julius the Second needed to find painters for the Sistene Chapel ceiling.
Painters did not like to paint high ceilings because as a group they were afraid of heights and it made their necks hurt. Michael and Gelo were up-and-coming sculptors.
Unfortunately, they had not painted a thing since art class in grade school, but Pope Julius saw something in them and hired them to paint the Sistine Chapel. They took the job because the Pope offered an attractive wage and dangled the carrot of an even bigger sculpting job that would pay the big bucks if they hung in there....literally, painting on their backs much of the time. The Pope did not place a high priority on paying his workers in a timely manner, which resulted in Gelo and Michael being some of history’s earliest starving artists. When the Pope neglected to pay them for several weeks, Michael and Gelo exacted revenge. Instead of painting the ceiling white, as contracted, they began painting scenes of “Great Moments in the Bible.” This effort backfired, as the Pope took delight in their rebellious graffiti.
Marigold, Liz, Jen, and I all loved Italy but quickly grew wary of being pinched all the time by stealthy male strangers. Bom Bom and Aunt Amory had warned us, but the Italian men’s approach took us by surprise. Stain, on the other hand, admired the the hairy-chested men. During the trip, it became necessary for Stain and Chip to get haircuts. Stain insisted on keeping all of his clipped curly locks and on special occasions would tape them to his chest just below his shirt line. The look went well with his cane, but the cane quickly became problematic.
Uncle Sigmeund had broken his leg skiing the previous winter. He was using a cane when the trip began but had set it aside very early on. Stain decided that he could put it to good use and hauled it everywhere. He assumed a limp when he used it, and people would look at him with a pitiful eye and rush to open doors to help him. As luck would have it, Stain had difficulty holding onto the cane and never failed to drop it at the most inopportune times. Dropping it in acoustically designed cathedrals amplified the noise many times over. However, by the time we left each cathedral, Queen Victoria’s tolerance had expired, and she had confiscated the cane from him. To the masses unfamiliar with the background, it appeared as a miracle. A poor crippled child who had hobbled into the church had left running and skipping.
The high point of the trip was a two-week cruise through the Greek Isles on the SS Ankara. While in the Greek Isles, we would sail at night and tour islands during the day. After a couple of hours on tour each day, Stain and Chip’s attention spans deteriorated to the point where they wandered off to hunt in pairs for chameleons. They were so fascinated by the lizards’ unique feature of losing their tails when grabbed that they accumulated an impressive collection of tails, as well as tens of live lizards that they stored in their newly acquired conk horns. On the way back to the ship late on the first day, two unobservant and uninformed, calorically gifted British dowagers, thinking that Stain and Chip were endearing young lads, invited them to take the two empty seats in their rowboat back to the ship. As I had the benefit of my short lifetime of experiences with Stain and Chip, as well as currently sharing a ship cabin with them, I was aware that nothing could be further from the truth than those old dowagers’ impressions of the boys. What ensued was a regrettable international incident of sorts.
The boys chose to seize the opportunity by commencing a conk horn blowing competition that began as soon as the boat left the shore.
The ladies were every bit as horrified as the lizards that were escaping from their horns. The roar of the conk shell horns merely added insult to injury. When Stain noticed how horrified they were, he kindly paused and offered his conk to the screaming ladies, thinking in a weak moment that perhaps they might like a turn. The ladies both jumped to escape the lizards, even though their escape options were quite limited.
The move, not without peril, produced an extremely unstable rowboat, and the young Greek man whose lot was to row the passengers to the ship, pleaded with them to sit. By this time Chip and Stain realized that their lizard collection was at risk, and they began diving all over the boat trying to salvage as many chameleons as they could. This renewed instability caused the boat to take in water and the dowagers to shout even louder. The oarsman, unable to understand loud English any better than normal tones, responded by grabbing each boy by the collar and planting them in the bow, where they just sat and sulked. Having restored order, the oarsman brought everyone to the ship. After telling Chip and Stain that “Queen Victoria was not amused,” Bom Bom was able to make peace with the traumatized dowagers that evening in the state room. Going forward, when Stain and Chip transgressed on tours and started to put chameleons down our backs, Uncle Sigmeund would come to the rescue and divert all of the grandchildren from the historical tour gone bad to the closest beach, where we would snorkel in the crystal clear Mediterranean. All in all, it was a very fair trade-off.
The only other kids on the ship were a handful of Brits, led by a boy named Angus. Things started out well but deteriorated rapidly when he insisted on referring to us as the “kids from the colonies.” This reference really struck a nerve with Chip and Stain, who tried to settle it on the ping pong table, but Angus always managed to hit the ball overboard whenever he fell behind. This required a lengthy appeal to the cruise director, who only rationed two balls a day. Chip and Stain made exhaustive attempts to bring Angus up to speed on the Revolutionary War and its outcome, but Angus was hopelessly in denial, and it became a formidable obstacle to their friendship.
Every night after dinner, we were allocated time to write in our journals. Stain mostly drew pictures of robots and sea monsters. While my attention to lecturers was far from complete, I do think I would have recalled their coverage of the role of robots in early Greek culture, had there been any mention.... still, I could give him a pass on the sea monsters, as there was no shortage of references to Odysseus’s epic journey. After fulfilling our journal obligations, we would hang outside the galley so that we could procure empty wine bottles and corks. Using a ballpoint pen, we would write notes from historical figures we had been lectured of and toss them overboard. There were notes from Hercules, Zeus, Cleopatra, Achilles, and Queen Victoria. “Queen Victoria’s” note implored upon anyone who found it to honor the American people, and went on to express remorse for past injustices, specifically taxes and the Revolutionary War.
The cane was the only thing I can recall that was able to “push Bom Bom’s buttons.“ As for Stain, he was recognized far and wide on our ship as the hairy-chested kid with a cane .... from the Colonies.
Clean-up Editor - Toni Gardner, Author of "My Fathers" and "Walking WHere the Dog Walks"
