8 A Difference of Opinion

Chapter 8 A DIFFERENCE OF OPINION "That Civil War reenactment was cool," Pep said as Dr. McDonald pulled the RV onto Route 522 out of Culpeper. Mrs. McDonald smiled to herself as she leafed through her Virginia guidebook. She loved it when an activity she had chosen was enjoyable to the whole family. It's usually hard to please everybody, and especially the kids. They usually hated everything, or said they did, anyway. It was close to noon, and the temperature had climbed past ninety. Dr. McDonald always tried to avoid running the air conditioner because it robbed the RV—which already guzzled gas—of mileage. But on this day, he

shut the windows and turned up the AC. Coke and Pep munched on trail mix Mrs. McDonald had prepared earlier. "Y'know, we should go to George Washington's home, Mount Vernon," suggested Dr. McDonald, "and Thomas Jefferson's home, Monticello. I don't think they're too far from here." "Everybody goes to those places, Ben," Mrs. McDonald said dismissively. "Everybody goes to those places because they're places worth going to," Dr. McDonald replied. "Do you know why the Pez museum and the Spam museum were so empty? Because nobody wants to go there. Nobody cares about Pez or Spam." Coke and Pep sat in the back, pretending not to be drinking in every word. As you know, it's always interesting to listen to your parents fighting. In any case, Mount Vernon and Monticello were not exactly on the route Mrs. McDonald

had plotted out. They were heading west through Virginia now, on Route 522. "Hey, guess what they have near Fredericksburg?" Mrs. McDonald suddenly asked. "A lot of guys named Frederick?" Coke guessed. "No," his mother said, "a tomb with Stonewall Jackson's arm in it!" "His arm?" asked Pep. "Yes! Remember they told us that his arm had to be amputated after he got shot in the Civil War? The soldier wasn't joking. The arm has its own grave near Fredericksburg." "I guess they disarmed him," cracked Coke.

"Very funny," Dr. McDonald said. "That would be great for Amazing but True, Mom," Pep said. "The burial site of an arm." "Hey, do you think Stonewall Jackson read A Farewell to Arms before he died?" asked Coke. "That book hadn't even been written when he died," Mrs. McDonald told him. "It was a joke, Mom." Coke rolled his eyes. He made a mental note to work on his theory that after the age of thirty, the part of the brain

that controls sense of humor withers away and dies. "We should totally go there," Pep said. "I want to see it." "We're heading west," Dr. McDonald said. "Fredericksburg is an hour east of here. I'm not driving an hour out of my way to see an arm." "You can't see the arm itself, dear," Mrs. McDonald told him. "You would just see the gravesite where the arm is buried." "Well, I'm not driving an hour out of my way to see the gravesite of an arm." Mrs. McDonald sighed. Her website received over a million hits a week, which made her the main breadwinner of the family (that means she makes more money). Dr. McDonald was a history professor at San Francisco State University who wrote scholarly books like The Impact of Coal on the Industrial Revolution. Sadly, the average person is more interested in Spam and Pez than they are in coal. It was the advertising revenue from Amazing but True that

paid for the trip. So when it came to deciding what places they would visit, Mrs. McDonald usually called the shots. But not this time. Dr. McDonald didn't put his foot down often, but when he did, there was no more argument. And he was doing all the driving, which counted for something. "It's a historic arm, honey," Mrs. McDonald said, giving it one last try. "It's Stonewall Jackson's arm." "I don't care if it's Vincent Van Gogh's ear!" Dr. McDonald said, raising his voice. "I'm not driving an hour out of my way to see the gravesite of a body part. If it was his whole body, maybe I'd think about it." And that was the end of that. But it was okay, because there are a lot of other amazing but true places in the state of Virginia. You probably don't know this, dear reader, but in Arlington, Virginia, there's an eighteen-foot-tall mermaid carved into a tree. In Bealeton, there's a giant roller skate outside a