I’m not very good company on vacations. Taking time to relax somewhere else has always felt like an effort, and I don’t get into the flow of things for a couple of three days. At home I have my routine of gardening, fixing things, having a latte with my wife, or getting into trouble with the grandkids. I hear the term “obsessive” tossed around regarding my personality on vacations, but I would use the word “lost.”
As much as I try to loosen up when we get away, I find myself looking around for things to do to make me feel at home, which usually translates into doing pretty much what I do at home.
After we arrived at our destination this year, hashtag exhaustion, I began by rearranging the coffee cups so I could reach them in the morning, and then check out the fine print on the hotel shampoo to make sure I wasn’t going to asphyxiate on the aroma it leaves in my hair. I put out our Do Not Disturb Sign, even though it was only three in the afternoon, and try to to open my pressure packed suitcase without being hit in the head by my rolled-up belt. I notice my special travel-proof tube of toothpaste has exploded on the one good shirt I packed, so I take off to find some Dawn dishwashing liquid, but by then everyone else is ready to tour the resort, which really meant going to the front desk and asking for more towels and finding out when the Kiddie Climbing Wall will open.
Along the way, I pass men in brightly colored swimwear they would never wear back home, many of whom want to tell you about the construction company advertised on their hats. Over by the bar there’s more men dressed in floral shirts from Choccolocco, Alabama watching European soccer on a TV the size and shape of Montana, but I swing wide when I hear them ordering drinks like Murder at Sunset and Fatal Attraction, and I head back to the room to put on sunscreen. Along the way I hear music coming out of fake rock speakers in the ground. Naturally, they are playing Jimmy Buffet, but because the speakers are spaced fifty yards apart in the landscaping, Jimmy’s voice sounds like four brothers who tried to form a quartet in their garage.
This year I brought a book to read, a 900-page edge-of-your-seater I’ve been using at home to block a vent that blows cold air on my wife regardless of our thermostat setting. I’m not much for hanging around the pool, but feel obligated after applying twenty bucks’ worth of sunscreen, and open my book, skim over the list of chapters, and begin to read the Forward:
When I began writing this book some forty years ago, in a season that now seems like another lifetime, I was merely four years old. I was dressed in a white jumper typical of British funerals and was overtaken by a flashback of my great-grandfather who lay in state in that vertically stained and monolithic cathedral. Long before his death by an errant leopard attack, when our family was still animal lovers, he sat me on his knee, the only one left after The Great War, and began sharing with me his horrifying saga of being trapped behind enemy lines in the bloody trenches of Alsace-Lorraine. I looked now at his graven face, stiff and uncluttered by his customary salt-and-pepper beard, and I knew this great general, this lifeless unheralded man who led the last slingshot brigade of the twentieth century, was in fact, not related to me at all.
While vacation seems like an odd time to burst into tears, I found this book particularly moving, and knew instinctively I could never get to the end of it without putting my family through quite a lot of emotional upheaval. With the help of a passing weightlifter, I put the book down and headed out to the fitness center to schedule a family beach yoga session that starts at sunrise from a lady who could stretch like a FEDEX rubber band.
By six the next morning our family has finished the yoga session and watched the sun make its grand entrance over the horizon in a blaze of glory. Inspiring though it sounds, with everyone feeling lengthier and in-tune with their inner child, they opt to return to their rooms and go back to bed. I detour for coffee and run into our Hispanic maid, and in a fit of unbridled energy, offer to help her arrange the resort soaps on her cleaning cart, which was an epic fail, considering I didn’t know Spanish and she spoke only three words of English, two of which were “Good Morning.”
I moved on to refill my coffee like I do at home, but in this case, it meant going back to the front desk to see if they have any Stevia. The concierge was now so accustomed to seeing me, he just looked at me and said, “Jeff, just go in the back and get it yourself.” While I’m back there I crossed paths with the reservation manager that had a jammed stapler, so we worked on that for a while making small talk like men do when they try to fix a stapler together.
By then it’s 6:30 and I’m ready to mow the resort’s small patch of zoysia grass in front of the marquis, so I mosey over to the maintenance garage, slightly left of the dumpster. Those guys are always up early, drinking coffee, standing around in threes, sometimes fours, doing exactly what they do at home. While negotiating for a lawnmower, we all agree I could rent out their back storage room with the 3000-gallon drum of gasoline for one-tenth of the price of our balcony room. “It could work,” Mower Guy says in native Floridian, “but we’ll have to clear it with the front desk.”
So, guess what? I head back over there, stopping on my way to talk to Cart Girl, freshen up my coffee in the room she’s working on, grab a beach towel, and re-arrange all her hotel soaps again, the ones no one really uses because they are shaped like seahorses. I tell her on the way out that Mower Guy has his eye on her, but since she didn’t understand a word of what I said the first time we talked, she simply hands me a complimentary hair net and shoe mitt and says “Ok,” which is her third and final word, rounding out her entire English vocabulary.
This is more like it, I tell myself. It’s starting to feel just like home. I’m getting a lot done, I’m finally relaxed. And miracles abound! It’s only quarter past seven! I am on vacation, with the rest of the day ahead of me! My family is still sleeping, I’m starting to find my rhythm, and if you aren’t doing anything, I’ll meet you in the lobby where I’ll be touching up the paint near the free cucumber water.