I have an embarrassing secret to share.  The sad part is I didn’t even know it was embarrassing until recently.

Ok, so last week my wife and I were watching Desperate Housewives (I am sad, sad, sad to report that this is not my embarrassing secret).  One of the husbands on the show is going through a midlife crisis.  He has given up his job to start a pizza parlor, bought a sports car and started playing in a garage band.  All things that men in their mid life apparently want to do.  Who knew?

Then, last week he comes home, all excited and waving a brochure about a motorhome.  He wants to sell the pizza parlor, pull the kids out of school and spend a year traveling around the country in the motorhome.  His wife (remember, she’s desperate) calls him an idiot and beats him around the head with the brochure for coming up with such a hair-brained ignoramus kind of an idea.

Here’s the embarrassing part.

I have always wanted to buy a big fancy motorhome, pull all the kids out of school and travel around the country for a year. 

As Cathy would say, Aaack!

My grandparents had a motorhome and drove across the country a dozen or so times (this was back when gas cost a nickel and chocolate poured down the mountains in streams brimming with gummy fish).  They took me on a couple of their trips and I remember just loving it.

As an adult, I have enjoyed traveling to those places I learned about in 10th grade U.S. History class and visiting the homes of writers and the settings of books.  I have always appreciated these moments when the intangible images in my head are combined with the reality of a place I am standing in. 

I remember vividly following Daniel Boone’s path where he tried to find a pass through the Appalachians and having no difficulty imagining how overwhelming that must have seemed. 

I remember standing at a vista in South Dakota imagining what it must have been like for Lewis and Clark to see those open plains for the first time. 

I remember standing in the dense overgrowth of the everglades and being able to understand, at least on some level, what it must have been like for the Seminole Indians to live there and fight there and hide there. 

I remember visiting Thomas Edison’s workplace where he grew the plants that he used to make filaments and seeing some of his original light bulbs still burning over 100 years later. 

I also remember visiting the place where John Wilkes Booth plotted to assassinate Lincoln (it’s now a Chinese restaurant called “Wok N’ Roll.”)  This was less moving.

We hear the phrase “making history come alive” a lot.  Honestly, this rarely happens.  At best, history just sits up, looks around hazily for a couple of seconds and then dies again.  I think this is because usually we are trying to connect visiting an historic place with something we learned 20 years ago.  Whatever immediacy we may have felt is long gone.

This is where the brilliance of my apparent mid life crisis comes in.  My plan is to develop an entire curriculum that would follow our American History and pull in the lives and works of America’s greatest authors, artists, scientists, and if we have any great mathematicians, them too.  It would be a chance to see our history not from pages and pictures in a book, but from the actual homes, fields, and locations where it happened. 

That’s totally awesome right?

Yeah, I know.  It’s not. 

I’m sure, like stupid Lynette on stupid Desperate Housewives, this sounds like some crazy idea dreamed up by some delusional husband in the throes of trying to recapture his youth. 

But that’s just not true.  And I know this for two reasons. 

1.  My youth wasn’t all that great.  High School kind of sucked and the only thing I would really want to recapture from that period of my life is the 1977 Chrysler New Yorker I drove and that my father sold to a serial killer (long story). 

2.  What kind of idiot tries to recapture their youth by bringing their children along?  That’s more like youth capturing you.

But the main reason this appeals to me (aside from the fact that motorhomes are pretty cool.  I mean, it’s like a house, but on wheels.  AWEsome!) is that I want to create this defining family moment.  For good or bad, our family would remember, for the rest of  out lives, that one nutty year that we left everything behind, and traveled around the country in a motorhome, (cue Paul Simon) “we’ve all gone, to look for America.”

I am not so naïve to believe that there wouldn’t be days when we all kind of hated each other while trapped in a giant metal box traveling across West Texas, but I am optimistic enough to believe that the joys would outnumber the frustrations and that our family would come to know, appreciate and love one another in ways that we hadn’t previously.  I believe it would be the central galvanizing experience for our family – that great adventure that we would look back on for the rest of our life. 

I know that there is nothing particularly practical about it.  It would be a giant pain to take the kids out of school, leave behind job and home and friends, all so that we can pile in a tiny space and spend every day on the road.  But magic and memories rarely come out of practicality. 

We live this life only once.  It is easy to live the life that is expected, to do what everyone else does.  It is hard, and possibly foolish to trade normalcy and security for a dream.  But it can also be hard to live with the knowledge of the dreams you did not live, and the chances you did not take. 

It is hard having a soapy TV show reveal your dreams to be impractical delusions, but it is harder to live a life without having those dreams at all.

Who knows whether this will ever happen.  The biggest question mark is my extremely skeptical wife, who is not nearly as desperate as she needs to be.  But, we wouldn’t even consider this for another 8-10 years at the earliest and this gives me plenty of time to nag.  (It only took me 5 years to nag her into getting pregnant!) 

And if it doesn’t work out, I guess I can always buy that sports car.