Tag / Vacation

by Michael

Coming Home To Our Boy

When we went on vacation to celebrate, uh, vacation, as well as our tenth-year anniversary, me and Dawn left the boy at home.  We were nervous.  We weren’t sure if we should leave him.  We knew it would be costly to take him with us.  That made the decision more than anything, the cost.

My son doesn’t drive.  He doesn’t work.  He brings no money into the home.  In fact, he’s one big expense.  So we saved when we left him at home.  The cruise line told us we’d have to pay the same price for him—a kid not even two years old—as we’d pay for ourselves.  That was ridiculous.  I mean, I like my son.  I think he’s cute.  He’s smart, and he can be pretty tamed in social situations.  In my mother’s words, the boy has some sense.  But paying the same price I would for myself, for my wife?  Well, I don’t know that I like my son that much.  It took me and Dawn ten years to decide to cruise in Europe.  Ten years to pay for plane tickets to Barcelona.  Ten years to board that ship and pass that photographer and the deep red orange backdrop where all those happy travelers snapped pictures we refused to take while boarding.  Bryce showed up 18 months ago.  He hasn’t earned the trip.

So we left him.  The good thing is we returned.  I had my doubts lying on the Lido deck, listening to that terrible band singing Michael Jackson and Billy Joel.  I wasn’t sure I’d return when I went to buy stacks of toddler yogurt and all those cartons of no-sugar-added applesauce and too many bags of goldfish for our cabinets to hold.  But we came back.  And when we did, we were ready to see the kid.  My wife had been talking about how she couldn’t wait to see him.  For the last couple days it was all I heard.  In fact I hardly got in my little feelings for the child, she was so vocal about seeing her little puppy.

We had seen him mid-week, chatting on Skype while at the terminal in Naples.  The Swansons hosted the boy and his Grannie so we conference.  We talked, and he waved and kissed at the computer, confused at first whether to hug the thing.  It was his first time with Skype, and he did great.  He sat through the entire conversation without fidgeting, giving his attention to us who were reduced to boxes.  I turned the camera from my big forehead to his mother’s face and back again.  But he talked mostly to Dawn, so he saw her a lot.  He called to her, and she asked most of the questions about his well-being.

When we got off the elevator in our building, Dawn almost ran down the hall.  It was cute.  I hadn’t seen her so ready to be some place in a long time.  You should know that my wife has a thing about being places: she takes her time.  She does the opposite of rush.  She lives with time and is never on time.  So seeing her run entertained me.  She hardly noticed that I skipped behind her keeping up with the key and my own excitements.

I unlocked the door and let Dawn in.  Bryce ran to us, his voice that cross between a song and a scream and a delight all in one.  My mother was saying something in the background about us being home.  Bryce squealed.  His eyes were smiling and he ran to his mother who was bending down to her knees to take him in.  I closed the door expecting the noise to stop and not disrupt our neighbors.  I looked at the love on display and rolled the suitcases to the side.  I waited for my turn to be hugged and chose to simply kiss the kid when Dawn held him up and in my general direction.  She was hardly ready to let him go after so long.  And I thought it beautiful.

by Michael

Good Memories, pt 3

There are too many things to remember about our vacation.  I’ve jotted down lines in my moleskine journal to jog my mind.  Each phrase leads to a memory, to an event, to something we saw.  One line that’s not in my journal is the subject of this post.  I’ll finish up tomorrow with some pictures from our time, each one a memory in itself.

The evening I’ll write about was half way through the itinerary.  We left a show in one of the theaters on the ship.  Dawn was saying something about getting some popcorn when I went to have my nightly cup of tea.  From time to time we’d split up and agree when our next meeting would be.  We’d see a show together or make fun of people from Michigan as they guessed Motown tunes in a cafe.  Then we’d separate for a while so we could do whatever we wanted to do on our own.  We’ve found a nice complimentary system for vacations when we can do this–spending time together and apart.

Well, as we left the show, we agreed to meet on one of the upper decks.  It was the last night in Italy.  That port was Messina, the one closest to Silicy and Taormina.  We spent that day walking around, me trying to look stern about not staying long in stores and Dawn trying, well, to do the opposite.  She looked at bags and hats and clothes.  We walked the streets, ate gelato (a practice at least one of us engaged in daily), and listened to music outside a large church near a city square with five hundred other people.  We stopped into a hidden restaurant.  I asked the woman at the door for a menu, made the decision to stay, and Dawn came in.  We asked the woman if she spoke English, and the look answered us before she could lie and mutter that she knew a little.  We thought to order by piecing together what we knew from Spanish but then chose to indulge only from the course of dishes spread on a kind of buffet table.  When Dawn asked something, the woman’s “Oh, Dear” became a joke between us, one that I’ll tell again and again.  I have no idea what we ate.

That night we passed through the last unseen Italian islands in the dark.  The decks were crammed with people.  The cruise director and the captain had promised to alter the route a bit so we could see the island of Stromboli.  It looked as if 4000 passengers lined one side of the ship to see the island, to get a glimpse at one of the world’s active volcanoes.  Me and Dawn decided to meet at a spot she’d found earlier that week, at the front of the ship.  Floors 5-7 were relatively quiet, and we were betting that most of our fellow travelers were cramping on the upper decks on the ship’s starboard? side.  We were right.  The forward portion of the vessel wasn’t empty, but we had more than enough room to ourselves in a quiet corner.  Quiet until some lovely father brought his three children, one of whom loved to say things.  She asked questions.  She made statements.  She talked about dinner.  She pointed out all the little boats around the island and wanted to know about all the 200 people on Stromboli and why they hadn’t moved since they lived under a volcano.

I looked at Dawn with that pre-parental expression, the one that’s not quite an eye roll.  I softened quickly.  One of us said something about Bryce.  He was soon to ask us a million questions about things too.  But that night, Bryce was in Chicago, having just seen his Grammie leave so that his Grandma could take her place.  It would have been about time for his afternoon visit to the park if the schedule was followed as customary.

John, the director, came on the speaker system.  Everyone quieted, even the little girl, as he told us what we knew–that we were at the island.  We stood on the front of the ship listening to the slapping of waves in ours ears.  I imagined those citizens of Stromboli, and I asked Dawn some of the same questions that little girl asked her father.  As we approached, Dawn mumbled something about going to get our camera.  I said it was too late.  We were upon the island, beyond the long wide rock it took so long to get to, and across from the volcano.

The sputtering red and orange took our collective breathes.  The kids were silent during that first bump and spray of color.  Red and yellow splattered and rolled downward.  After a while I wondered if what we saw was just for us.  It was timed too perfectly.  I told my wife that the islanders must have been pressing the big button on the side of the mountain because a ship was passing.  I also thought about those ruins of Pompeii we had seen and wondered why we were all so excited to be so close to a volcano.  Nonetheless, we saw five or six such eruptions in those too-brief moments.  They were dramatic and gorgeous and awesome.  They made me think about the greatness of God and about how many times God had seen what for us was a first.

We had been to a state park on the Hilo side of the Big Island with Karlos and Michelle four years ago.  (Incidentally, I could still move to the Island in a week if proper conditions existed.)  That day we traveled around the crater.  We ran along the edges of these huge rocks.  But we only saw steam.  We closed our noses to the smell of acid and sulfur.  We followed Karlos, running toward the red and orange, well past the STOP HERE signs.  But the lava was too far.  We were losing light.  Our wives were slowing down but still hardly complaining that they were wearing flip flops and not good shoes for volcano hopping.  That evening we went to the restaurant there in the park for dinner, somewhat disappointed.

I thought about that disappointing trek from 2007 when me and Dawn stood there whispering near Stromboli.  I love the Dodsons and would probably go anywhere with them.  But that night as we looked at those brilliant sprays and stretches of all those colors, I couldn’t think of one other person in the world I’d rather be with than my wife Dawn.  We took no pictures, though we bought one from the ship.  It’s the equivalent of a big rock with droplets and squiggles of fiery orange and yellow and red.  It’s a good picture, but I hope I can keep the images in my head for as long as I live.  I wouldn’t mind remembering those little children for all their noises either.

by Michael

Good Memories, pt 1

As I said yesterday, these posts will focus on my scrambled thoughts as I remember good memories from our vacation.  I’m writing toward a new practice, a habit of paying attention to good things rather than my most natural tendency to hold to the bad.  Most of these memories will be good, though there are a few not-so-pleasant moments littered through the last two weeks.

The point of the post today, for you who like points to posts, is to plan a vacation.  Or a getaway.  Or a break.  Or a series of dates.  Or a significant time away from normal life.  The getaway, break, or vacation will give you an opportunity to nurture your marriage.  Of course, you could do this with a friendship or a significant relationship with some modification too.

I’m somewhat of a planner.  And traveling is important to me.  I like to do it.  You could say that I value it.  We started planning this last vacation a couple years back.

Before we had a baby, before Dawn got pregnant, we talked about how we wanted to celebrate our tenth year anniversary.  We wanted to do something big.  We wanted to stretch ourselves, save up, and have a grand time.  We couldn’t do what we really wanted which was to copy some friends who a few years ago spent a month on a different continent.  But we could stretch.  So we talked about what we wanted to do, and even though a little boy got made and delivered since those first conversations, we committed to acknowledge, in some way, that we were a we.  That we existed as a married couple.  That we were together.  To be honest, we had our challenges conceiving, and affirming who we were outside of the parenting thing nourished us in ways that we haven’t always seen.  So we determined to go on a cruise.

We’ve cruised before, done what I call the local cruises, the popular one to the Caribbean.  We cruised the year I graduated from seminary, too, because that was my gift to myself after getting another masters degree!  We also decided, in planning this last vacation, that we wanted to return to an early desire to see Italy.  I had a dream when we were engaged at 22 years-old that we’d honeymoon in Italy.  I was young.  I was, in a word, foolish, on many fronts.  I thought about a lot of things for us, but I didn’t think that going to Italy at 23 years-old when you had a mortgage and a construction project called a fixer upper was impossible.  It didn’t become possible in those early years either really.  So we took smaller trips.  We saw family.  We drove to many places.  We went on those ships that I mentioned and saw the Caribbean and parts of Mexico.  I used honorariums from speaking engagements and payments from work-for-hire contracts to make sure we were traveling together.  One reason why we got married young was so we could see the world together, so we saw what we could.

When we planned this time, it was a similar experience.  I started saving money, even though we couldn’t really afford it.  We were blessed.  I cut up portions of my second and third incomes–income that I never count until I have a contract–because my primary income is restricted to relatively fixed expenses and giving.  We agreed on an itinerary, a mix of France and mostly Italy with enough Spain to keep us interested.

Dawn started looking into logistics.  We struggled, waiting for the best time slot.  Back then, Dawn was considering school.  I had a small frame between my supervisor’s sabbatical and the start of my next calendar year in the VFCL program at GETS.  We waited as late as we could because my coworker’s decision wasn’t exactly made.  I knew when my teaching responsibilities would start.  We really could only go at a particular time because of both calendars.  Dawn looked at flight plans after I came up with a window of dates.  She reserved and purchased our tickets.

We decided easily that the boy was staying when the cruise line said he would cost the same amount of money we would.  We thought they were joking.  They weren’t.  We struggled with the matter of leaving him–for about two minutes.  I mean, we are a couple and this was our anniversary celebration.  We are not alone as a couple anymore so we were thinking that including the boy wouldn’t be all wrong.  And yet there was this voice of wisdom speaking.  Why not find a way, if it was possible, to leave the kid.  To leave him and to remember that we were separate from him.  To say our goodbyes and to have that be some shared meaning between me and the wife.  Of course, we are parents and that reality is hard to get away from.  But we are something else, a reality that’s easier to lose sight of as a couple.  Everyday we attend to him, naturally and necessarily, but there is this other thing called a relationship which needs attention too.

We met with our mothers about staying at our home one week apiece, and I texted a few people to secure supplemental childcare.  The week before we left, I went grocery shopping.  I picked up enough apple sauce and wipes and diapers to last for a month.  Just in case, you know, we couldn’t get back.  In case we decided not to come back.  I washed all the clothes in the house.  Dawn bought her textbook and read her first week’s readings.  I finished two contracts so I wouldn’t have them hanging over my head.  I looked over the syllabus for the fall semester and thought through what September would be like.  I did as much work as I could at the church to leave things well and in the hands of my colleagues.  I had a few more meetings than I thought wise.

We talked to friends about Barcelona and France and Italy.  Alan told us about the architecture in Barcelona, leaving me mad that we weren’t just going there.  His eyes widened when he spoke, and he relived days where he ate bread and salami while sitting in a park in front of some building.  I imagined him drooling while he ate in that park, though he wasn’t drooling exactly as he told his stories.  We ate with Libby and Omar who helped us figure out what to see if we only had so much time, which was true, because it was a cruise and not a land-based trip.  Libby wrote up a three-page cheat sheet and sent it to Dawn.  She gave us more direction than any guidebook.  She gave us guidebooks too!  Omar told me to wear a fanny pack to keep our euros hidden from people pick-pocketing.  I refused.  I told Dawn that I’d simply wear my I-grew-up-on-the-south-side-of-Chicago face.  It seemed to worked.

I wrote up the first draft of the cheat sheet we intended to leave our grandmothers and to our friends.  We left explicit instructions to call us only when the boy was hospitalized since calls to the ship would be $10/minute.  We had full confidence that Bryce would cooperate and not injure himself.  We packed.  We dreamed.  We talked about what we wanted to see, where we wanted to go.  We did something that a counselor I worked with during the early years in our marriage called “planning a future together.”

It’s a powerful thing to plan and map out your future.  Of course, you make vows to a spouse about a vague future, but planning it is a second strategic step.  It adds to the vow or the pledge the particular means and the specific steps.  We were doing very romantic and relationship-strengthening work: looking at those next tomorrows and saying how we, together, would face them.  Before us was a delightful series of dates.  They included easy travels, long lines which we greeted with smiles and gladness, and a lot of words we didn’t understand.  Those tomorrows included sumptuous meals and great servers and questionable taxi drivers.  It would be wonderful, a little messy, slightly nerve-wrecking, and glorious.