An Olympic Adventure

It all started in late February, 1980. I was working in a four-track, year-round elementary school. One of my favorite families, a single father with three boys, didn’t return to school in January and everyone wondered where the children were. The teachers wanted me, the school social worker, to find out if everything was ok. I called their house. There was no answer. I knocked on their door. It looked as if they still lived there, but no one answered. I asked other students from the neighborhood  if they knew anything. No one seemed to know where they were. I decided not to panic. I wanted to wait and see.

At the end of February, the three boys came back to school with their father. They looked fine.

“Where have you been?” We all wanted to know.

“We were in Lake Placid, New York. We went to the Olympics.” The boys were excited. Their father was proud of what he’d done. The teachers were aghast.

“How could he take them out of school for such a long time? Doesn’t he know how important it is for them to be in school?”

I had a completely different reaction. I went home that night and couldn’t wait to talk to Garth and Jason over dinner. They were eleven and seven years old. 

“Guess what we’re going to do!” I announced. “We’re going to the Olympics.” 

I told them we needed to save our money because the 1984 Olympics would be in Los Angeles and we were going to be there. It was one of the best decisions of my life.

We saved our money. We bought tickets in advance. Jim’s sister, Kathy, and her husband graciously agreed that we could stay with them so we could go to ten days worth of Olympic events. 

In 1984, Garth was fifteen and Jason was almost eleven. We were psyched! I bought a new car, a red 1984 Subaru , to drive from Denver to L.A. and back. I mapped our route and we started out. I’d been having a lot of back pain, but there was no stopping us. Or, so I thought. 

By the time we got to Vail, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to drive all the way to L.A. I turned to Garth, who had recently gotten his learner’s permit, and told him he was going to have to drive. He didn’t hesitate. He climbed into the driver’s seat, with me in the passenger seat, and logged 1000 miles of driving in two days. I still think the best part of the Olympics for Garth was not the events. It was driving all the way California and back.

The 1984 Olympics was pure magic. We went to as many of the events as we could afford, which included watching endless field hockey games because the tickets were $5.00. We skipped the opening and closing ceremonies. Much too expensive! We watch one day of track and field. One day of diving. One day of baseball. We saw the end of the marathon. 

Mostly we soaked up the California sun and the Olympic culture. We ate our lunch in the park outside the Colosseum, surrounded by people from every country in the world. People were exchanging pins and a few were just giving them away. We said “thank you” in English to people who smiled and answered us in their language. Smiles are universal!

I drove while we were in LA, but Garth took the wheel again for the trip back. Jason slept in the back seat. We stopped at the Grand Canyon on the way home and spent our last night in Durango, CO. We talked about all we had seen and done on our two week vacation to California. Before eating our last restaurant meal, we drank a toast:

“To us!! Because we said we were going to go to the Olympics. And we did!”