Archive Columns: Personal

Vacation

              It used to be I could set down What I Did On My Summer Vacation without a lot of worry.  Lately, it’s a tough one though, let me tell you.  Right off the bat, “vacation” is probably the wrong term here, implying as it does, the notion of vacating as say, with the French, who close up the epicerie and head down to some place clever where they drink pastis in the morning, have salade nicoise for lunch and then lie around naked in the afternoon.  Looking from the terrace, you can just make out the prow of the ketch, and in the evening… oh never mind.

              Not that we didn’t vacate at all, mind you.  We spent a few days in western Maryland but that was back in June when I hardly deserved it, given my year-to-date output, and then for a week we went to the Outer Banks.  This was in August when I deserved it even less.

              Like many, I look upon the vacation as a sort of reward for accomplishment, something to be earned after a period of hard work.  This is not an unusual concept but it is a difficult one because it puts the good vacation virtually out of touch for a person like me whose main work is cocktail piano playing, and whose secondary work is writing-when-the-mood-strikes.

              It’s not my aim to get into economics here but the problem is this: people are not drinking nearly enough these days to sustain my main work at former levels.  This state of affairs has been developing for some time now.  For awhile, before it became critical, it produced a mood conducive to my secondary work – writing – and in the period of 1979 through 1994, I produced some 226 articles.  Of these, all but four took as their theme that Americans should be drinking more.  (The other four were humorous pieces.)

              This was a fairly good era for me, but soon everybody started writing about Americans not drinking enough and linking it – without attribution, by the way – to the general cultural decline.  Inevitably, editors grew weary of this song and eventually my writing-when-the-mood-struck began to suffer as the mood in question no longer appeared marketable.

              Naturally, given this, the vacation thing has gotten strained since, well, the income figures I’m staring at here didn’t allow for a really proper vacating and my output is such that I couldn’t claim to merit much in the way of a rest.

             Take away a background of work and some modicum of accomplishment and the whole thing fails.  Your typical vacation piece, if you’ve noticed, is usually by some columnist trying desperately to unwind in a quietly tasteful New England coastal town.  The particular insight of these pieces, as they are traditionally assembled, is to convey offhandedly to the reader that the writer is possessed of a laptop and a modem and an insanely frenzied and productive life.

              Well, mine is not a productive life.  It features sporadic forays into a moribund industry, in fact two moribund industries, followed by moods that don’t so much strike anymore as just lie around all day.  Don’t think I don’t hear the neighbors.  My, they say, doesn’t he spend a lot of time walking his dog?

              Well, it is not an arduous life, I grant them this, but it is not without its exertions.  I take great pains to avoid reading vacation columns, for example, though elements of the genre pop up everywhere.  The other day, an editor apologized for not rejecting me earlier saying she wa s just so busy and only able to read my manuscript on the train and I thought well, if she could just work in a bit about her cellular phone, her facsimile machine, and the tranquil shock of birdsong on a Cape Anne summer morn, she’d pretty much have her own vacation piece done right there.

          I also thought that if she would relax and have a couple of martinis after work as God intended, then maybe some of us in the cocktail piano/writing-when-the-mood-strikes business could be fashionably frenzied too .  Of course, I didn’t say these things.  I thanked her for her valuable time and then walked the dog.

              Anyway, since I was already conditioned to a regimen of leisure, my brief sojourn to a coastal town this summer did not shock my system.  I regret to report that, having not been wound for quite some time, I was not desperate to unwind.  Since there were other adults around, I planned to make a long distance phone call or two for appearance’s sake.

              Then I thought, yes, but to whom?

              So the vacation theme doesn’t seem possible right now.  You can do some thinking while walking the dog – on the value of busy-ness, both as an income producer and a diversion, on the provenance of the kid’s next tuition check, on preparing your torpor for winter – but by and large, dog walking doesn’t lend itself to the vacation form.

              What you want for a vacation piece is a sudden and anxious cessation of the frantic followed by the usual wistful ambivalence.  Barring that, a stretch of intense productivity in an exotic locale.  Spain would have worked nicely.  I picture myself there, sitting at a sturdy wooden table in a shady part of a garden.  I would have my lemonade and my tablet.   I would be writing something, but I cannot think of what.

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