Pre-departure rush

It’s not such a very long list, really. Finish editing an article, send off a couple of emails, make a casserole, enter receipts from the past ten days into the online checkbook, throw a load of laundry into the washing machine, and empty the dishwasher. All really quite manageable and not very complicated at all.

Except that my plan was to be in bed over an hour ago.

But vacation eves are always like this, or have been for as long as I can remember. I always have far too long a To Do list the night before going away. Partly this is because I procrastinate, and partly it’s because I’m unrealistic about what I can accomplish, and partly it’s because I always have an elusive fantasy of leaving the house perfectly clean and tidy when we go away.

So it’s always a little bit stressful, and one thing I can rely on is getting to bed later than I intend to, usually by hours.

In a way, it’s the worst part of going away on vacation: the last 24-hour rush to get out the door. But within me lies a small suspicion that this is maybe not only the worst part but also the best part. Because unlike other times of the year when my To Do list itself seems to extend out the door, when I’m getting ready to go off on a trip, there’s more excitement than despair underlying the line-up of tasks. Yes, it’s a lot to do, but it’s not just the usual cycle of housework and deadlines that, once done, will only need to be started again. This surge of tasks comes with a deadline and a reward: finish up and you get to leave!

So as much as I may sigh and gripe over all there is to do before I can comfortably close my suitcase and hit the road, I’m not sure I’d trade it for a serene, well-planned pre-departure countdown. Part of the fun of leaving is that sprint to get out.

Because, of course, once it’s finally done, we’ll be gone and headed somewhere else: Washington, D.C. in this case, for a four-day visit with family. Yes, there’s a lot to do, but the prize comes in getting through it and then leaving it all behind. Working hard tonight to meet deadlines and tidy up and wash clothes means not having to do any of that while I’m away.

So I’ll do my best to get it all done and I’ll try to not to stay up too late in doing so. Getting ready to leave can be stressful, but it’s also thrilling: the very same combination that marks every departure, to varying degrees. I’ll finish packing, finalize that article, and pop the laundry into the dryer. Then to bed. After printing out driving directions and watering the plants.

Okay, maybe not so soon to bed after all. It’s hard to get ready for vacation. But it’s almost always worth the crunch time that comes before departure. And I’m not sure I’d want it any other way.

Other people having fun

I’ve been looking at pictures all week. Pictures of New York City, pictures of Vermont and Vancouver, pictures of Boston’s Freedom Trail, pictures of a Caribbean cruise (not the one that lost power and had no working bathrooms!), pictures of the Arizona desert.

It’s public school vacation week here, and our friends are madly posting their vacation snapshots on Facebook. Not only do I know where they all went; I know what they did while they were there, how crowded it was or wasn’t, what the snow or surf conditions were like, and even what they wore throughout their vacation.

And I have to say I’m thoroughly enjoying it. So I was surprised to hear a segment on NPR’s Morning Edition earlier this week about how therapists are reporting increased business from unhappy patients who are overwhelmed with feelings of envy and insecurity because of what they see their friends doing on Facebook: the clothes, the vacations, the parties, the fun.

We didn’t go far this vacation week – we went to Portland last weekend, which was great, but other than that the big excursions have been to a nearby museum and a frozen yogurt parlor – but I don’t feel envious or insecure; I feel happily entertained by my friends’ photos. Here’s one of Holly’s friends posing next to a horse in Central Park, and here are our former neighbors at a Diamondbacks spring training game. Jody and her daughter got caught in a blizzard but ultimately reached their destination; Diane waited in the airport for a long time after her flight was cancelled, but now she’s with her new grandchild. I think it’s great fun to see where people are and what they’re doing, and I’m happy for them that they can take interesting trips.

I have a recurrent memory from childhood of sitting in long backups at the toll gates on the Maine Turnpike on a summer weekend, waiting seemingly forever for our turn to get through and continue making our way home. All around us were other cars with other sunburned, tired vacationers like us. “Isn’t it nice to see that so many people have been vacationing and having fun?” my parents used to say as the car inched forward fractionally.

No, I would think to myself. What would be nice would be to hit some open highway and get home. I wish none of these other people was here vacationing and having fun. They are all in our way and I want to get home.

But now I understand what my parents meant, and I’m glad their words have stayed in my mind. Maybe I’m just older than the people referred to on Morning Edition who feel envious and insecure about their friends’ photos; maybe I’ve just lived long enough to feel grateful any time anyone anywhere is having fun, and if it’s someone I know, all the better. I don’t feel bad that we didn’t go far this week, but I think it’s wonderful so many of them did. 

I don’t think this suggests that I’m a particularly selfless person, just that it’s so clear to me that plenty can go wrong in life at any time, and seeing pictures of people enjoying themselves, even if it’s very far away from where I am right now, is a pleasurable experience for me. I wish them safe travels and a wonderful time. And yes, to be truthful, I look forward to posting some enviable vacation photos of my own next time a vacation week rolls around.

Running wherever

Two weeks ago, in the Sunday Boston Globe published on the eve of the Boston Marathon – a perfect time for writing about running -- Geoff Edgers wrote an engaging essay about all the different cities all over the world in which he’s gone running. And it inspired me to think about all the different places I’ve gone running in the past 25 years.

Running is definitely not my favorite form of sightseeing. Walking is the ideal way to get to know a city; running is not. It’s not only that you’re moving faster (but not a whole lot faster, in my case); it’s that you take in less scenery when you’re preoccupied with oxygen intake, or at least that’s the case with me. Other factors that preoccupy me when I run in new places are finding long roads that don’t dead-end and not getting lost.

But even before starting my running streak, travel almost always included plenty of running, simply because a lot of times there was no other good exercise option. And I can apply all kinds of superlatives to apply to the various worldwide running routes I’ve explored.

Most dangerous: Bermuda, where I found no sidewalks and ran amidst the traffic for five miles.

Most anxiety-provoking: a run in the English countryside near Stratford, which sounds lovely enough in itself, but I became wildly lost in the course of the run, and the only road I could find was a highway where no one could stop to give me directions. Worse still, I was on a group business trip and had slipped out with just enough time to fit in a run before the bus left the hotel to take us on an excursion: the more lost I became, the more I was in danger of either missing the bus or holding up the whole group. I found my way back literally just in time to board the bus, unshowered and frazzled, to the amusement of my colleagues.

My most ill-advised running plan, though I didn’t fully realize it until years later, was in Venezuela. We were staying in a villa in a gated community; I ran past the guardhouse and then found a rural winding trail alongside the beach. I knew nothing about the area or the advisability of being out on my own running. Every now and then, I’d pass a group of fishermen, but no one else was out on this rugged stretch of beach. It turned out fine, but with the wisdom I’ve gained in the past twenty years, I find it a little hair-raising to think about how blithely I set out knowing nothing about the safety of my surroundings.

In Meteetsie, Wyoming, I set off on a state highway with the goal of a five-mile out-and-back. On the horizon I could see a singular tree. In about two and a half miles, I reached that tree and turned around. It’s the only time I’ve ever been able to fix my sights on a single landmark for the entire run.

In Paris, I ran in the early morning of a New Year’s Day and had the surrealistic experience of having the streets of Paris around Place d’Etoile all to myself. The whole city was still sleeping off New Year’s Eve.

In La Jolla, California, I ran “the Stanford Dish.” At Disney World, I ran below a magpie nest and had the top of my head pecked as a punishment. In Boston during a pre-dawn run I once tripped over a rat, though at the time I assured myself it was a squirrel.

But over the course of a quarter-century, I think my most memorable run happened in August in Colorado. It was on the Rio Grande Trail that runs alongside the Roaring Fork River outside of Aspen, in a canyon below mountainside property that for more than fifty years belonged to my grandparents. I’ve run that same route dozens of times, but this one was unforgettable because earlier in the day, we’d held my grandmother’s memorial service. As I ran near my grandparents’ ranch, I was convinced I could feel her spirit and that of my grandfather’s settling over the valley.

“Strange,” I thought to myself as I ran, “I always believe in the imagery of spirits rising skyward, but theirs seem to be setting into the mountain, into the river, into the earth.”

I kept running, looking at the late-afternoon sunlight on the water, at the shimmering aspen trees for which the town is named, at the red packed dirt under my feet, at the sagebrush growing on the nearby hillsides. I didn’t want that run to end; it was the strongest sense of my grandparents’ spirits I’d had before or since, as I passed near their last earthly home and through the landscape that felt very much to me like where their spirits were settling to be at rest.

On our way

As the kids and I headed north to Portland, Maine, yesterday evening, I couldn't help thinking of the famous Norman Rockwell diptych: the first illustration showing three generations of an American family looking fresh, crisp and excied as they drive off in the station wagon for a day at the beach; the second illustration showing the same family tired, sticky and sunburned.

But what I kept thinking as we left Massachusetts and passed briefly through New Hampshire before reaching the Maine Turnpike was how I feel like we embody that story only in reverse. We're grubby and disorganized as we leave for our trip, not as we return. At least we were yesterday.

The vicissitudes of Tim's summer baseball schedule are such that the best time for us to get away is midweek, leaving after a Tuesday evening game and getting back in time for his Thursday evening game. Of course, this leaves out Rick, who has to be at work during the week, but since Tim has baseball games both Saturday and Sunday, it's our best chance to get away for two consecutive nights.

Still, it never seems easy. It still takes me about half the day to pack up for a two-night trip, and it's not exactly like I'm stocking campground essentials: in Portland, we stay in my parents' well-stocked condo. So it doesn't matter if we forget milk or shampoo or paper towels. But still, packing my clothes, reminding the kids of what they'll need, collecting materials for any work I plan to do while I'm away, gathering cameras, sandals, bike helmets. Facing the challenge of putting the bike rack on the car and then attaching the bikes. Fitting the cooler in the storage area in back of the car. Making sure that everyone's frivolous-but-necessary electronics are charged (or else that chargers have been packed).

So once we finally hit the road, we're already tired, not to mention the fact that Tim has just finished a tough six-inning baseball game. We stop at MacDonald's, a very rare indulgence in my family but worth it when it's seven o'clock and I want to get to Maine more than I want to maintain our usual nutritional standards.

Fortunately, I remembered to pack a whole wheat bagel with Cheddar and cherry tomatoes for myself. As we drive, the kids get French fry grease all over themselves and the car, and I'm not doing much better: two bites into my bagel, a cherry tomato squirts all over my shirt.

I make the slightest hand motion toward my phone, and both kids perk up like terriers. "I get to call Daddy!" "No, it's my turn!" I listen to them argue about it for thirty seconds or so and then ask, "What does either of you have to say to Daddy?" Nothing, as it turns out. They both saw him less than an hour ago. What matters is being the one deemed important enough to dial his number. (Of course, I too saw him less than an hour ago, but I already have several things to say to him: I haven't fed the dog yet, and could you wrap those loaves of banana bread that I left cooling on the counter in Saran wrap, and what do you think we should do about the problem with the washing machine, and sorry that you have to be at work tomorrow while we're out boating.)

Finally we arrive, sticky and a little greasy with a couple of arguments already under our belts, not fresh and crisp like Rockwell's beach-goers. But maybe we'll complete the reversal and return home that way, rather than tired and sunburned. If the journey is more important than the destination, we've completed this one safely and successfully, and I'm very happy to smell the ocean.

Returning home

I left Aspen at 9 a.m. yesterday morning and didn’t arrive home until well after midnight – this is because it takes about five hours to travel from Aspen to Denver using ground transportation, and the ground shuttles run only three times a day, so I had a long wait before my flight in Denver – but it was a good way to wrap up the trip. Flight days always make me think about what lies ahead and I find myself setting goals and contemplating decisions almost as if it’s a variation on New Year’s Day.

Sometimes this makes sense based on the calendar – today, for example, is the last day of school for the kids, so it’s somewhat logical to be thinking about what I want to have happen during the upcoming ten weeks of vacation – but even when there isn’t a particularly good reason to feel like I’m making a new beginning of sorts, that’s how traveling home usually feels to me, because being away from home is always a little bit like hitting the “reset” button. It’s a chance to take a break from ingrained habits and get out of ruts and think about what to do differently.

In this case, my week in Colorado was so restorative that it’s also a chance to figure out just what about it was so meaningful to me. Mostly, it was a week of immersion in two of my favorite things: literary pursuits and outdoor exercise. I spent just about every morning hiking, biking or walking the trails in and around Aspen, and just about every afternoon listening to authors and other literary professionals discuss the business of writing. I did a lot of my own writing as well, and one of the industry experts I met with even suggested a direction for my work that I hadn’t previously considered.

So I’m returning home with new inspiration for writing, thanks to all the time I spent at conference events, and with a really bad sunburn, thanks to all the time I spent on the hiking and biking trails and the fact that on one crucial day, I didn’t use quite enough sunscreen in quite the right places.

What I accomplished during the week is easier to identify that what I’d like to make happen when I get home, though. So I tried to use my travel day to think about what my hopes were for the long summer that lies ahead.

I’d love to maintain the fitness level that I established during my Colorado week, but that’s hard with the kids and their interests. They don’t like long hikes and bike rides, but I can at least try to get them out for some kind of outdoor exercise every day, or if not every day then at least most days. I’m also trying to rethink some of the commitments that I took on too easily last year and make better decisions about what work assignments and what volunteer roles are right for me, rather than saying yes to everything. Having a weeklong break from housework helped me to renew my commitment to taking good care of our home this summer, and having the same break from cooking gave me new energy to contemplate healthy summer meals for my family.

So I woke this morning at home, grateful for safe travels and a wonderful vacation, and somewhat hesitantly ready to see this time period as a new chapter. An arrival home means a chance to establish new habits, and I think I’m ready to try to make the most of it.

Prepare for departure

It wasn’t hard for me to calculate that if I wanted to fit in a bare-minimum one-mile run on Sunday before my 8:10 a.m. flight to Colorado, I’d need to set the alarm for five o’clock at the latest.

So it would have made sense for me to get to bed early on Saturday. In fact, even without counting in time to run a mile for the sake of maintaining the running streak, I knew I’d need to get up early to make an 8:10 a.m. flight, and should concomitantly get to bed early.

But that never happens. It’s an area in which, despite the accumulating years of adulthood and accrued experience with travel, I really haven’t improved at all. I’m always up into the wee hours the night before flying out of town.

In part, this might be because I don’t travel a whole lot in any given year. I’d like to think if I had a job that required weekly or monthly travel, I’d have the routine a little more under control.

I can’t even blame the kids this time around, because they aren’t traveling with me. I was going away by myself. And I really wanted to break my pattern; I really wanted to prove myself able to be organized enough to get to bed at a reasonable hour the night before departure.

So I started lining up my tasks, errands and other To Do items at seven o’clock on Saturday morning, and I stayed very much on task all day. I didn’t waste any time and I didn’t run into any unexpected obstacles. I did everything I needed to do on Saturday, everything I’d put on my list. But it took me until 12:30 a.m. the next morning.

I wanted to clean the house really well before I left. I had about four weeks’ worth of trash and recycling to load into the car and take to the transfer station. I needed to stop at the post office. I wanted to weed the garden. I felt obligated to buy a week’s worth of groceries for my family, since they were staying home and making do without me. For that same reason, I wanted to write up a document listing everything they needed to remember while I was gone. (Tim’s orthodontic appointment; Holly’s class picnic; the dog’s heartworm pill.) I made a batch of homemade macaroni and cheese, and listed some other dinner ideas for them. And I really felt I had to fit in a five-mile run, knowing the following day wouldn’t allow for much exercise as I sat first on a plane and then in a van for hours on end.

When I was finally done with the house and grounds and errands and paperwork and also trying to fit in some time just having fun with the kids since we’d be spending the next seven days apart, I felt good about all I’d done. But there was one thing I hadn’t done yet: pack. And that’s why I was up until 12:30 a.m.

What I kept thinking about was how when I was growing up, my family drove cross country for a month every summer, and I couldn’t imagine how my mom prepared for that trip, if this was what it took me to get ready for one week away by air. Not only did she presumably have the packing and the house to think about – and in greater depth, since we went away for a month at a time – but there was the additional issue back then of what we’d need for a five-day car ride. Packing the food alone for that kind of undertaking might take me the whole day.

It’s a matter of overcompensation, I realize. I try to leave everything perfect so that it won’t matter that I’ve left. Whether I’m traveling with or without my family, I want whatever I’ve left behind – people or household or both – to be absolutely fine in my absence. I want to cover every contingency, from kids having a menu plan for the week to the floors being spotless, so that it won’t matter as much that I’m not there.

And of course, this is an impossible goal. I can’t leave everything perfect. Something I’ve overlooked in the fridge will spoil. One of the kids will forget something they were supposed to bring to school. It’s just not possible to exert quite that much control from away.

Nonetheless, my hard work paid off. The departure Sunday morning went without a hitch, and 24 hours later I haven’t thought of anything I forgot or didn’t get to. Plus there’s always the remarkably liberating feeling that comes with boarding the plane, knowing you did all you could and now it’s time to just enjoy the trip.

So now I get to forget about all of my responsibilities at home and just concentrate on why I’m here. The house is (or was) clean. I packed everything I needed. The refrigerator is stocked. The kids’ schedule is recorded. All should be well. And someday I’ll learn to get it all done before midnight.

Back home again

Planning a trip, paying for the trip, preparing for the trip, leaving on the trip, being on the trip…very little beats the satisfaction of having so much fun once you’re away that all the steps leading up to it seem entirely worth the effort.
But waking up the morning after your return in your own bed can be a pretty amazing feeling too.

We were away for just four days, but with train travel, two kids, the frenzied excitement of getting the cousins together, and the pace of city sightseeing which is so different from our normal suburban existence, it can seem like a big deal anyway. And we couldn’t have enjoyed ourselves more. Everything went beautifully: the transportation, the activities, the interactions among the cousins, the chance to be with my sister and, albeit briefly between business trips, my brother-in-law. We had a fabulous time, justifying every moment of trip preparation and every bit of exertion.

Yet on Sunday morning I woke with the feeling of bliss that comes from being back home.

And that’s interesting only because “home” has had a somewhat fluid meaning for me lately. We moved into our current residence only three weeks before departing for Washington. More than once, while away, I caught myself thinking something like “When I get back, I’ll bake bread” or “On Monday I’ll have time to run several loads of laundry” and pictured myself doing that in the house we no longer live in. So in truth, I wasn’t quite sure how it would feel to come “home” to a home that isn’t entirely home yet.

But I had my answer on Sunday morning: it felt great. It felt like the solid familiar firmness of my own bed. It felt like the silence that overtakes our household when the kids are asleep. It felt like the early-morning light seeping through the skylight in our new bedroom.

Both my kids used to love a particular picture book by Richard Scarry in which a family of animals – I forget the species – goes on a long daytrip that encompasses an epic number of permutations: there’s a visit to the beach, a drive through an airport, a stop at the toy store, a blizzard, a campground exploration, even a traffic accident – and at the end of the day, they pull into their driveway and say “Back, safe, home again.” Those are the words I always think of after a trip: Back, safe, home again.

Perhaps quoting Richard Scarry seems a little mundane. There are surely more profound quotations on departures and returns by weightier authors. Tolstoy, perhaps (“All happy homecomings are the same, but each unhappy homecoming is unhappy in its own way”?).

But to me, coming home always smacks of Richard Scarry’s phrasing. And waking after a trip, with the whole day spread out in front of me and my house, unfamiliar as it still is, spread out around me, feels like the greatest gift possible on this particular morning.

Fifty photos for fifty cents (and lots and lots of memories)

Maintaining my photo album is yet another one of those things that I know I should make a regular habit of, but it always falls in priority to the point where it doesn’t get done. Compared with keeping up the house, completing paid writing assignments, or playing with my children, it’s just too far down on the list. Back in the days of print photography, I was much better about it. I’d finish a roll of film, send it off to get developed, winnow through the packet of prints that came back, and slide the one I deemed worthy into the plastic album sleeves. When friends admired my well-organized albums and admitted they stored their packets of prints in shoeboxes, I felt a little bit superior.

But after I started using a digital camera, my good habits fell by the wayside. It’s so easy to just store electronic files and promise yourself you’ll print them someday. After all, you know they’re right there on your hard drive (and we all know what a safe place that is, ha ha. I frequently remind myself that storing files on my hard drive without backing up is like putting a mug of coffee on the roof of the car while I help the kids with their seatbelts. Maybe it’ll still be there when I remember to retrieve it, and maybe it won’t.)

So when Kodak ran that memorable ad for photo printers with the line “Mothers, don’t let your babies grow up to be pixels,” I knew they meant me.

Still, it’s hard to keep up. I don’t have my own photo printer, so I need to send my photo files out to be printed, and without the standard unit count of 24 that we all became accustomed to with film photography, I never quite feel that the time is right to print.

This year I came up with a different approach – the opposite of the keeping-up strategy that I used back in the film days. I kept procrastinating on ordering pictures although I had them all organized by month on my computer, and then right after Christmas I received a promotional email from Snapfish advertising 50 prints for 50 cents. Not only did it seem like a good deal even with shipping costs added on; I liked the idea of choosing the 50 photos that best reflected 2009 for us, although I wasn’t averse to paying a few cents more if I couldn’t winnow it down to 50.

Once I’d chosen, it actually came out to 54, and by the second week in January, the packet of photos had arrived in the mail. I happened to be going away over the weekend, so I took a newly purchased album and the photos with me, and a mere two hours on Saturday afternoon was all it took to get The Year in Pictures all wrapped up.

And I have to say, I’m delighted with the results. It’s not just a matter of feeling organized. Putting a year’s worth of pictures in an album has the effect of giving the year a certain shape and form that it didn’t necessarily have in my mind previous to this representation. On the one hand, it’s not an original observation to note that in family photos, everyone always looks happy and harmonious; no one (except maybe art students) takes pictures of family fights or boring rainy afternoons.

But it’s not just that. Seeing our year reflected in its most photogenic moments reminds me that even though every year has ups and downs, disappointments, disputes, illnesses, frustrations, we also had a lot of really great times during the past twelve months. There were the obvious and unforgettable ones, like our five-day trip to Florida in late February: look at the kids building a sand castle together on the beach and taking a ride at Busch Gardens. But there were those that we might forget without a commemorative photo as well: the June afternoon when Tim and I went running with Tim’s fourth grade teacher; the morning Tim and his friend Will fed the cows and sheep by themselves; Holly reading a picture book to her two younger cousins on Easter morning. Halloween costumes and Thanksgiving feasts: of course we’d remember that those holidays took place, but the pictures remind me that these annual observances have unique hallmarks from one year to the next: Holly marching in the school parade hand-in-hand with her friend Samantha (a monkey and a witch, together at last – why not?); Tim and three friends savoring a nothing-but-bacon breakfast at the end of Tim’s birthday sleepover.

And while I might have ended 2009 with the overall sense that we didn’t do much in the way of family travel last year, the photos remind me of all the many smaller excursions we took: the Boston Harbor Islands on a hot August day; Bath, Maine, for the Fourth of July; Pennsylvania during April vacation. True, I always feel like I don’t see my sisters and their families enough in the course of a year, but the photos remind me of the good times we managed to fit in with them: playing basketball in Swarthmore; a spring tea party over Easter weekend; an afternoon of tiara-making; an anniversary dinner which featured the most elaborate baked Alaska I have ever seen, made by my sister Lauren.

Maybe it’s just to excuse future procrastination, but in a way I like this approach: wait until the year is over and then compile photos from the entire twelve months. Yes, it sanitizes things by eliminating all the not-so-memorable times. But it also reminds me that if we‘re as fortunate as we were last year, we have plenty of good times to look forward to in the next twelve months.