Arms and the Van

         When organizing large masses of humanity, time is of the essence, as General Paton noted: "I would rather have a good plan today than a perfect plan two weeks from now." The general must have felt the crunch of getting his men into the best possible position within the shortest possible time. But, for all Paton's accomplishments, he should have tried getting twelve children into a van and off on a road trip within any time at all. After a feat like that, he could have retired in full colors.

          Perhaps it's a little unfair to General Paton expecting him to accomplish this marvel of command from scratch, when mom and dad were able to build up to it over the years. The first four of us were reared in an apartment in the busy center of Chicopee town -- with the church and school an easy two steps down the sidewalk and the grocery store just across the street, perfect for short forays and an occasional skirmish at the doctor's and the park. When the family moved to Granby, however, the plot thickened. Dad needed to travel farther for work, Mom needed to drive us to school and the park, and we were enlisting pretty rapidly in the Powell ranks. So, to paraphrase Jaws: We were going to need a bigger car.

          Dad always had a truck. At least, that's what I remember. Whenever he rumbled into the gravel driveway after a day of work at the Hampden County Correctional Center it was in a truck, first a red and then a green one. I was told there had been a gray one back in the mists of time when the campaign was just underway, but I was newly enlisted then, busily stacking blocks and doing other intensive training to notice much. There had also been a station wagon, which served Mom's needs until all lesser forms of travel bowed humbly to the great and powerful means of Powell transportation: the Van.

         The Van, like the ocean in the song, was big, and it was blue. Unlike the song's description of the ocean, though, I don't think the Van had a bottom, since anything dropped under the seats never seemed to come up again. We were convinced that pennies and nickels of enormous quantity must have been buried under the floor lining, offering easy riches to the Kid who would undertake the excavation; but it would have taken so much work that we were content to sit on the seats and dream about it. Once in a while one of us would get into the spirit of Jacques Cousteau and attempt the deep-sea dive. These searches yielded some success: handfuls of pennies, exotic pencil erasers, a matchbox car, a forgotten bag of M&Ms. The rare find of a quarter would cause much admiration and speculation on future missions, especially Rob and Bill who one day -- they said -- hoped to explore the trenches under the back seat. Sadly, lack of funding and equipment doomed the missions to what-might-have-been.

              Mom took the helm of the Van during the week, driving us to school and running practice and the dentist, carefully coordinating the trips to make sure we all went where we had to go, and came back when we had had enough of it. She performed these expeditions with the utmost skill and patience. Dad took over the wheel on Sundays -- after guaranteeing his small company dressed, pressed and at the ready, Dad would rumble out of the driveway in the blue fifteen-seater onto South Street, through the tree-lined roads of Granby which passed farms and fields and foresty hills, to church. 

             An hour of song and prayer while the Van waited for us in the parking lot. It rubbed shoulders with the two police cars and fire truck of Granby's Protection Force, which shared the parking lot with the church, as did the Town Hall; and our big blue Van was not one bit out of place among those noble vehicles.