When my wife and my daughter and I first came back from Korea, I really made an honest attempt to give my parents ample time to get acquainted with my new family. After all, I had kind of sprung the whole idea of getting married on my parents quite by accident. I told them I was getting married after I got married. So, I really didn’t give them a chance to object or to come to the wedding for that matter. I had done that for a reason. The first time I saw my future wife, I just knew she would be the woman that I was going to marry. That was it. Don’t ask me how I knew. I just knew. But I didn’t exactly clue my parents in to the fact that I was getting married because they didn’t exactly give me warm fuzzy feelings about the photos I had sent home to them. In fact, they didn’t say anything about the photos I had previously sent home to them from Korea. So, I stopped sending them photos. I also stopped writing them letters and giving them information about what I was up to. There was a simple madness to my reason, or a reason for my madness (as the case might have been). Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale. No. It won’t be a tale of a fateful trip on a tiny ship for a three-hour cruise. Nothing like that. But an interesting tale, nevertheless. This is the tale of a soldier stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia. Does the story begin to sound familiar? I thought it might. That soldier was dating a college girl from Montgomery, Alabama, and he sent pictures of his girl home to his parents. He asked his parents what they thought of his girl, and he mentioned that he was going to bring her home to meet them. Apparently, they were not thrilled at all with that idea. Not at all. Oh, hell no. They told him he needn’t bother to come home at all if he showed up with that girl. Well, after that reaction, he said to hell with them. In case you haven’t guessed by now, that soldier was me. After they showed me their true colors, so to speak, I decided to cut off diplomatic relations with them. I figured if I didn’t tell them about my plans to get married, they couldn’t object to them. Not only that, but I also didn’t invite them to the wedding. There were a few reasons for that. First, in order to invite them to the wedding, I would’ve had to have told them I was getting married. That wasn’t going to happen. Second, since I was getting married in Korea, they would have had to have flown from North Dakota all the way over to Korea for the wedding. I couldn’t see my cheap bastard of a stepfather springing for the tickets to fly over. That just wasn’t going to happen. He was such a damn tightwad that he sounded like a rusty suit of armor every time he moved. Hell, he had to carry an oil can around with him every time he went somewhere. You know. To oil his joints so he wouldn’t squeak so bad much like the Tin Man. Third, that being the case meant I would have had to purchase their airline tickets. I’m sorry. I just didn’t like him that well that I wanted him at my wedding. Not only that, but I just didn’t have the money. Fourth, and this is the real reason, I just didn’t want to hear their bullshit about how I shouldn’t be marrying a foreigner. As it happened, when I did finally tell them that I had gotten married, that’s exactly what they told me. So, when I brought my new family back to the United States, I gave my parents ample opportunity to bond with my wife and daughter. I took them on a two-day trip to the International Peace Garden north of Dunseith, North Dakota on the North Dakota – Canada international border. I also took them on a three-day trip to Theodore Roosevelt National Park and to see the show in Medora, North Dakota. The show in Medora is the reenactment of the “charge up San Juan Hill” by the Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War. The problem was that no matter what I tried during my time on leave, I could not get my parents to open up and fully accept my wife and daughter as part of their family. We were always hungry in our own house (or should I say their house). They flat refused to feed us. But my stepfather was kind of funny that way. He refused to feed his own brother and his family, whenever they used to stop by our house as well. Why should I expect him to act differently for my family? My wife and I were always sneaking out to eat at restaurants. It was sort of like sneaking out to go to midnight madness sales at department stores only different. Midnight madness. You gotta love it. The concept is insanity at its finest. And my wife and I were charter members of the midnight madness club. When we went on the five-day (total) trip to the International Peace Garden and Theodore Roosevelt National Park, I paid for all of the transportation, and I paid for all of the hotel accommodations. All I asked my parents to do was to pay for the food. I thought that was reasonable. Apparently I was wrong. They didn’t buy us shit. My wife and daughter and I had been eating very light meals for the whole trip. After the last night in Theodore Roosevelt National Park, when we saw the show at Medora, we drove to Dickinson, North Dakota to stay the evening. In Dickinson, my wife and I snuck out of the hotel and went next door to a pizza restaurant and ordered the biggest pizza they had on the menu. We decided we were going to have our own version of midnight madness. Except our midnight madness was an 18-inch extra-large pizza. We finished the whole damn thing. Just the two of us. The whole damn thing. We were that damn hungry. And let me tell you something. That pizza was delicious. After we got my parents back to their house, we took off to visit other relatives and we never went back to their house. We eventually did return a year and a half later for Christmas. But that visit was only for a few days. My wife has avoided my parents like the plague ever since that ill-fated trip from hell. I can’t say I blame her. What I can say is that her maiden voyage to my parents’ house was one massive trip into an exercise in futility.
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