Yellow
The summer before I started high school my brother Alex and I went to stay with our aunt in Maryland. I remember how excited we were – no rules, no parents, just endless fun. This summer vacation was bound to be so epic that it needed a name: we called it Camp Aunt Chrissy.
Camp Aunt Chrissy was anything but a camp. Ice cream at midnight, swimming pools, amusement parks, movie theaters – I have never had so many belly laughs in my life as I did that week. In fact, we had so many things to laugh about that at the end of the week Aunt Chrissy said to us, “What happens at Camp Aunt Chrissy stays at Camp Aunt Chrissy”.
What happened at Camp Aunt Chrissy most definitely did not stay at Camp Aunt Chrissy. How could I not share everything that happened? Every joke, every funny moment, it would all be part of a story that was worth telling. This whole story would take up an entire chapter of a book, but I’ll share the best part of it with you – the part that just might be my happiest memory.
First of all, you need to know that my family is the most dramatic and unserious group of people in the universe. The source of the humor is my grandmother, who never fails at cracking jokes at the most inappropriate and awkward times. This story is about her, her super-intense-traction water shoes and a yellow water slide.
At one point during the summer, Aunt Chrissy took my brother, Cousin Dylan and I to Six Flags. She had passes to the waterpark (it was by far the hottest day of the summer), so off to the wave pool we went. My grandmother came along for the day. She had plans to sit on the lounge chairs in the shade all day, but us grandchildren begged and begged for her to come in the pool with us. She argued with us about the waves in the pool, and finally we settled on sitting in the water in the kiddie section of the water park.
You know the “Water Works” part of a water park with all the water guns and the giant bucket that dumps on you and blows your bathing suit right off? It’s arguably the best part of the water park, which is the exact reason why my grandma thought it would be a fun place to go play in. We waited for her to put on her water shoes and off we went.
This section of the water park had some water slides; not really big ones that you need tubes for, but smaller ones intended for children. Cousin Dylan wanted to go down one of those water slides – the biggest yellow slide. He was young still, so these water slides were just the right size for him. Alex and I agreed to go down the slide with him, and somehow we convinced our grandmother to come with us.
Her water shoes were sticking to everything and it was majorly slowing us down. The traction on the bottom of her shoes was acting more like suction cups, and a line was developing behind us because of how slow we were moving through the water park. When we finally made it up to the yellow slide, Alex hopped right in and went down. Cousin Dylan went next, screaming the whole way down. Grandma started to get nervous and insisted I go down first. I was worried she’d chicken out and walk back down the stairs but she promised she’d be on her way down right after me. So down I went on the yellow slide, and waited at the bottom with everyone else. We could see Grandma standing at the top and called to her that it was her turn. Once she sat down we couldn’t see her, so we figured she started going down.
A whole minute goes by. We start laughing because the slide isn’t long enough for her to be taking this long. Aunt Chrissy calls up to her asking if everything is ok, and all we hear in response is Grandma cracking up. We can see another grandmother at the top of the slide with her grandkids looking utterly horrified. I start to worry, but no one else seems phased by the fact that our grandmother is stuck on a children’s waterslide: in fact, they think it’s the most hilarious thing to happen all week. Finally, after what must have been at least five minutes, we start to see Grandma coming around the last bend of the slide.
Our reaction to what we saw was priceless. There we sat at the bottom of the slide, dying with laughter as we watched Grandma scooching her way down the home stretch of the slide. It’s good to know her super-intense-traction water shoes were working, because they were disabling her from moving an inch on the slide. She had reduced herself to tears from laughing so hard at having to literally use her hands to go down the water slide. She started to crab-walk her way out, which only made the entire Camp Aunt Chrissy club laugh harder, and finally she made it to the bottom.
The other grandmother at the top had promptly left her place in line, thinking the same thing was going to happen to her. We laughed about it for a few minutes before Grandma asked, “What’s next?”, ready for another round of slides. This was the best day at Camp Aunt Chrissy, but I didn’t know then that this would be one of my favorite memories.
There’s a reason why they say yellow is the happiest color; I had never felt happier than I did in that moment. I felt yellow, and it made me want to find something to be happy about every day. Even on bad days, when I can’t find anything to be happy about, I remember my grandmother and the yellow slide. There’s no way I can possibly feel blue when I think of that.