Although the following urgent information may be of little use to people like Bill Gates, who is planning to be a passenger on an upcoming flight to space, it will hopefully be of great assistance to those of you who are planning your first family car trip this summer. The information is as follows: Tupperware was really invented for use as a “port-o-potty” during insufferably long family car trips that only masquerade as vacations. Pack it. This knowledge comes from vast personal experience both as a parent and as a wild child growing up with three, equally wild, siblings. We would have benefited beyond measure had the “port-o-potty” been invented during our great time of need. Nothing serves as a more dependable diuretic for children than the words, “Are you kids sure you went to the bathroom before we left?” It is the one question you will not fail to ask, no matter how many times you’ve searched in vain for the other kind of “port-o-potty”- shrubbery on the side of a highway, and, it is the one question every child will answer with a lie. Pack the Tupperware!

Here in the South, an armadillo, or more accurately, an armadilla, is described as a possum on the half shell. The armored critters, like Tupperware, also have an alternative use while enduring phony vacations trapped in an automobile; to play the game “Count the Road-kill.” Squished animal guts on the road, particularly big ones like raccoons (they count as two points instead of one), go a long way toward keeping children occupied. No matter how disturbing it is for you to see how quickly the sadist is unleashed in your child who will be chanting “Big guts! Big guts!” during the competitive game, it is still better than the torture of hearing “100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” sung by kids who can’t count past 20. They will start over every time they reach that number. You will wish you had as many Xanax to pop. If at all possible to remember this far in advance, ask your doctor for a prescription as a Christmas gift. Most pharmacies accept insurance co-pays for life saving medication such as Xanax or Valium.

Quite likely the man will be driving. He will swear on the lives of every grandmother he can think of that he knows how to get there. He doesn’t, but will insist that having gotten lost (and you will get lost) is the fault of male-hating ghosts who switched the exit signs in the middle of the night. The Pacific Ocean used to be in New England before those treacherous, male-hating ghosts switched it. Any halfway decent geography student knows that.

There is a marvelous saying: “We plan. God laughs.” I don’t suggest making any plans in the state of Florida if you have anything against the practice of rewarding severely impaired vision and the total lack of depth perception altogether, with a driver’s license. Morris Horowitz, a kindly octogenarian, administered the eye exam for license renewal in my grandmother’s Florida neighborhood – right up until the day he lost his outpatient privileges at the Ann Sullivan Home for Assisted Living. The last I heard of him, he was a Highway Exit Sign painter on the roads haunted by male-hating ghosts.

Remember: Tupperware and Xanax. Don’t leave home without them. American Express ripped off the slogan from survivors of family car trips.

Shalom, Y’all!