That End-of-Summer Feeling
My daughters just spent more than a week in LA visiting their big brother. Mary and I did not go, and I have to say I was a little jealous. They were going to Tiki bars, a Dodgers game, the beach, restaurants I had never heard of and places that apparently everyone in LA but me knows are cool. Meanwhile, Mary and I were getting the pictures.
There is something pretty great about having three adult kids who actually want to spend a week together. A friend recently told me that Mary and I must have done something right because our kids genuinely like being together. He talked about families close to him where he could see “fault lines” between the kids as they became adults. Our own kids have told us we're a little odd because a lot of people they know don't particularly want to hang out with their parents, much less travel with them. We do. We like being together.
That doesn't mean our kids don't piss each other off. They do. They piss us off too. We are not the Waltons. But when the three of them go off together, I don't wonder whether they'll get along. I just want to know what they're doing.
Fortunately, they tell us. We get the “taking off” text, followed by the “landed” text. Then the pictures start. A dish they're about to devour. A very cool bowling alley. The beach. Dodgers game. A market. Drinks. Friends. Some place that I am apparently supposed to recognize. They don't disappear for a week and show us the pictures when they get home. They want Mary and me involved while it's happening. I love that.
Then came the In-N-Out Burger picture.
I knew exactly what that meant. Vacation was over. They were coming home. And I hate that feeling.
It made me think about summer vacation when I was a kid. In 1974, my parents loaded Paul and me into the car for a four-week trip out West. We each got to choose places we wanted to see. I chose Disneyland. Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon were in there too. Four weeks on the road. My dad called into work once from a pay phone. Once.
My mom gave each of us a roll of quarters at the beginning of the trip. If you started an argument in the car, you had to give a quarter to everyone else. At one point my mom had finally had enough and threw at least a dollar's worth of quarters at my dad, Paul and me. She basically announced that she didn't care what this argument was going to cost her because she was going to say what she had to say.
My dad had his moment too. One night he started going on about how all he did was drive, unload the luggage, sleep, load the luggage back into the car and start driving again. He wasn't entirely wrong. Four weeks together in a car was a long time, even for a family that liked being together. But what the hell, he could stopped for mom when she wanted to see the largest meteor crater in the USA but we were on a "schedule."
But eventually we pointed east and headed home. The trip was over. And waiting at the other end was school.
I remember that feeling too. Suddenly there were school supplies to buy and a trip to Marshall Field's for clothes. New notebooks, folders and Ticonderoga No. 2 pencils. Then you walked into the school and got hit with that smell.
Old wood. Waxed floors. Textbooks and pencil shavings. The cafeteria had its own smell. So did the science lab. The gym had those red rubber balls that smelled exactly like you would expect a red rubber ball to smell. Chlorine from the pool. Chalk dust. And whatever industrial-strength chemicals they used to clean a school in the 1970s.
And Voban. Does anyone else remember Voban? Some poor kid on the first day would throw up and the janitor would come out and dump this stuff all over it. Nothing said elementary school quite like walking down the hall, seeing a pile of Voban and knowing somebody had already had a pretty bad day.
Schools had a smell. They still do, but those old schools really had a smell.
I can walk into one today and I'm right back there. It is a little like the smell of a nursing home, except it takes you in the completely opposite direction. One makes you very aware of how old you are. The other makes you eight years old again.
Going back to school was a strange combination because you hated what it meant. Summer was over. No more vacation. The days were getting shorter. But then there was all the preparation. School clothes. Supplies. Finding out who your teacher was. Seeing kids you hadn't seen all summer. Walking into a new classroom. And maybe seeing somebody you had a crush on who somehow looked completely different than they did in June.
My daughters aren't going back to school. They're coming home from LA and going back to work. My son stays in LA and goes back to his job. Nobody needs a new box of pencils. Nobody is heading to Marshall Field's for school clothes. But seeing that In-N-Out picture brought back exactly the same feeling I had when our car finally pointed east in 1974.
Something really fun was over.
There is another part of this that is harder for me to admit. They had this trip without us. They made their own memories. There are jokes and stories from that week that Mary and I aren't part of. I used to be the kid in the back seat on the four-week vacation. Then I became the dad taking my own kids on vacations. Now my kids take trips together and I'm sitting at home waiting for the pictures.
That went pretty damn fast.
But I keep coming back to what my friend said about the fault lines. My three kids flew across the country because they wanted to spend a week together. They went to the beach, ate great food, went to a Dodgers game, found Tiki bars and probably did plenty of things Mary and I didn't hear about.
And all week long, our phones kept lighting up with pictures.
About Greenland Sharks
Greenland Sharks is a Chicago men's group who value friendship, experiences, and the long swim. Just a crew that shows up. No speeches. No name tags. No nonsense.
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