to vacation ... verb, intransitive ...
(1) to leave one's usual regimen and enter a new one,
not infrequently playful and intended to be restorative.
I came from a family that vacationed by going to see another part of the family that was at a distance and not accessible during the rest of the year. The South of France was not in the cards dealt to my parents. I don't remember my Dad's first car that could carry us away from Brooklyn but his second was a 1951 Mercury. Mom and Dad up front. Four kids on a cushy back seat or on the floor. In 1952, a couple of years before the family moved briefly from Brooklyn to Ohio, we were 4, 8, 9 and 12 -- three WWII babies and a boomer. The four of us in 2014 are all still kicking, if not up-and-at'em ... lookin' for our "get up n' go." Grandparents, each with our own tribe. In those days in the back of the Mercury and on the way to Uncle Linwood and Aunt Helen's farm in the Virginia hills, we fussed and each of us wanted an opportunity to be promoted to the front seat or wanted a window seat in the back. Reminiscent of the ten pups our Bernard gave birth to in 1972 ... ten pups and 8 nipples. Like Yuppies bellying up to a bar looking for nurture.
Pecking orders and food chains.
I wanna die like my grandpa, comfortably asleep in the front seat.
Not like the rest of us in abject terror, screaming in the back.
Dad -- in the 1950's -- was still the angry soldier-boy who came home from the Big War and Mom was still the demure daughter of a religious leader and scholar ... capable of more than a little sadness over her losses in that same War.
Trips, before the interstate Highway System was in place, were lengthy; cars didn't always start (especially not in wet weather); and bathrooms on the road were far less genteel than what one comes to expect in the antiseptic 21st Century. In 1956 -- I think it was around St. Patrick's Day -- we had visited Grandma and Grandpa in New York and were returning home on the newly built Pennsylvania Turnpike in about two feet of snow. I really had to pee and there it was ... the orange roof of the Howard Johnson's. Oh, the orange roof and the depressurization that it promised, until, that is, all hope dissolved with the 1955 Pontiac skidding into a snow bank.
Choice? To let it rip and piss off my Dad or to hold it in. Lucky me ... I made it ... the Tow truck came and I got to pee like a big boy ... in the urinal. Funny! How much of everyday life one brings on a vacation. In the 1980's, I took my youngest and two of her friends to the Beach. As we got there, I was engaged by the three youngsters in "I'm thinking something and it's a secret." My secret was that everyone brought their backside to the beach.
M and I didn't begin vacationing with the kids right off when we got married. But by the time they were 3, 12 and 13 in 1979, we stumbled on a sublet in a backwater beach-town called Chincoteague (pronounced Shincoteague). A colleague, Anne, sublet a week to us that she and her family couldn't use. (Anne died last year, though we had lost touch over the many years since we trained together.) All but two of the past 35 years, we've vacationed in that town ... Some years later, we bought a house there with one of our older kids who loved the island and its memories.
Chincoteague is connected to the bottom of Assateague, a perhaps 35 mile long barrier island that once was twice as long, till a storm broke through ... leaving the Assateague of today with its herds of undomesticated ponies that got there somehow and enchant young kids with stories of Misty of Chincoteague. There are entrances to Assateague top and bottom and no roads between, leaving the beaches away from these entry points more or less empty. There isn't much to do in Chincoteague and, with no commercial or residential building allowed on Assateague, there's just beach and bikes and walking except for the parking lot areas. It's sufficiently quiet so that I was able to run a seminar on the beach for 4 days in 1994. and back in town, there is a book store.
Directions? 'Walk to Beach. Turn left and walk till you only see geeky-looking folk. Sit."
I have no plans for the week and my schedule remains pretty much the same. Usually, prepare some foods for the beach and then head off, alone, on bike. One long bridge ... 3 more miles ... a shorter but steeper bridge ... and another 3 miles. I sing to myself songs from David's Psalms about Creation ... Mah Gadlu Ma'asecha ... How great are your creations, O God .... M'od ... Greatly ... Amku Machshvosecha ... Deep are your Plans.
Memory? I remember songs and the people who taught them to me. Then, I dig a hole and pile the sand to form a seat ... I bring a book. This year, someone recommended a book on inner voices and world peace. With any luck, the postman will deliver it in a few days while the 37 wars rage on in the loud world away from Chincoteague. That's about 9 that I arrive on the beach. By 3, I'm beached out and ready to head home with the same songs on my lips.
Dear God! The Winter was long and hard and I need a vacation.
Lifnei Karaso? Mi Ya'mod? Before his icy chill? Who can stand?
