The Whistles

When you’re 8, there’s nothing more exciting than a road trip. Maybe my favorite thing to do during the summer besides visit my father was to drive to California with my brother and my mom, and her best friend Candy and her daughter Monica.

A trip to California always meant visiting Disneyland, Newport Beach, or Sea World; the hollowed shrines of kid fun. It also meant eating out for every meal, at most likely a fast food place. This creates a kid’s dream scenario- tons of fatty sugary foods and hours of running around driving your parents crazy.

One trip, we stopped off at McDonald’s to get happy meals. As you may or may not know, Happy Meals always contain one toy, usually a small hunk of plastic that kids play with in earnest for a half hour only to lose by the end of the day.

This particular time, that toy happened to be whistles. These weren’t normal whistles however. A referee whistle? No no no. This is a whistle that sounded like an air raid alarm, a shrill high pitch that drove directly into your brain stem and made you want to tear out any connective tissue that reached your ears.

My mom was driving when the first whistle came out of the little house shaped box that Happy Meals come in. Soon, a cacophony of screeches echoed throughout the Cutless Sierra...

Take that noise, multiple it times three whistles, add the factor of sugary soda and McDonald’s fries, and jam that into a car ride through the desert.

Needless to say, my mother and Candy were more than a little pissed about the whistles. They told us to stop.

But there was an upwelling of rebellion in our young hearts. The more that they told us stop, they louder we played. This was our stand, a chance for defiance against the women who held us in check. We weren’t going to go quietly into the night. We would whistle!

Never cross my mother, especially with a loud whistle.

My mother slammed on the breaks and pulled over the car, like we just had a tire blow out or hit something. She grabbed the three whistles, and threw them as hard as she could into the desert.

As we drove away, I remember wondering if anyone would discover those whistles years from now and wonder how they got there; like an anthropologist searching through ruins of our once great civilization. They may conclude that the whistles were used in a family ritual of crossing from the desert towards the ocean during the summer.