Kate of Late

A fresh dip in the road more traveled

METAPHORICALLY speaking, the road to the family vacation is full of potholes.

This won’t come as news to any parent who’s ever spent a “holiday” crammed into a vehicle with squabbling children. Still, set aside the navigator’s inability to read a map, sibling rivalries, covert pinching, crushed iPods, parental mood swings, car-sick dogs, and unsuspected allergies to bee-stings, and you’ve usually got yourself a good time. Planning for that good time, however, can be a giant headache.

I could have told you that even before I read it last week in the National Post. Surprisingly, it took a gathering of 5,000 academics at the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences to bring out the hardcore vacation critics. They’ve concluded that “the escape value of holidays is diminishing, and becoming just another stressor in increasingly demanding lives,” wrote the Post’s Anne Marie Owens.

In Saskatoon, Owens wrote, a sociology professor called Susan Shaw from the University of Waterloo would reveal her findings that “Family leisure was not seen by parents as simply having fun together with their children, but as a highly significant part of child-rearing through which children would be exposed to a range of positive developmental influences and would learn lessons important for their success in life.”

We Baby Boomers ruin everything. Not content with overburdening our own lives, we have to stick a meddling finger into everything our kids do, too -- especially in their time off. According to the Wall Street Journal, many parents today deliberately take their children to un-kid-friendly places in an effort to groom them into whatever they’re not.

I can’t say I’m guilty as charged there. My modus operandi when planning a trip is to try desperately to avoid conflict by letting the children (one a mean-ager, one a mad-olescent) have a lot of say in what we do. This approach may sound frighteningly laissez faire, and actually, it’s sheer luck that so far, it has worked. The potential pitfall is that in my house, we are divided -- two of us love to plan, the other two prefer to remain oblivious until we get to our destination.

Last year, we were all in agreement that a trip to Maui would be fabulous. It was our first trip off the continent together. My son, 12, is a person who needs to know what to expect and doesn’t enjoy surprises. I like to foresee and forestall boredom and discontentment by knowing all my options and choosing the “best” one. So Bart and I happily pored over the guidebook and numerous websites beforehand. In my case, each time I opened the book (Maui Revealed, highly recommended) there was something new to be discovered, mostly because I’d forgotten whatever I had learned the time before. Unlike mine, Bart’s brain is not yet packed with useless information about whatever happened to Penny Marshall, so he actually retained a lot of useful information for later.

Stanley and Petunia, however, will only plan in certain highly personal situations. Stanley is incredibly well-organized in all barbecue-related capacities. He spent several years hauling equipment and ingredients all over Western Canada as he promoted his cookbooks at classes, stores and events. But when it comes to family holidays, getting him to commit is an exercise in reiteration. I always wind up blowing my top in frustration at his non-response, and then forging ahead doing the bookings on my own.

Meanwhile, 16-year-old Petunia perpetually has her own agenda, about which she is remarkably tight-lipped. Last summer, neither one took more than a cursory glance at the guidebook or the typed notes I had made about where we were staying, what vehicle we were renting, what we’d be doing, or what there was to see on the island.

The great treat was that nobody complained about, or objected to, my suggested activities and everybody had a wonderful time. Still, it does prove that what sociologist Shaw found was true -- much of vacation planning falls to mothers, who do most of “the organizational work, the cleanup work and the emotion work of facilitating positive experiences.”

I don’t claim to be hard done by, though. In Maui, as always, Stanley was more than happy to foot the bills, shop for food, and cook dinner every night, so it was hardly a one-way street. Once we got there, my “important work” consisted of reading the novels I found in the rental condo one by one, washing the beachtowels, and taking whoever needed stitches to the clinic.

I find planning a vacation to be a wonderful experience, as long as your group is small and acquiescent. Combing through possibilities is one of the best distractions from real work that I can think of. Earlier this year I began scheming about a summer trip to the Baja Sur and enjoyed many delightful online tours of its hotel rooms, beaches, and landscape. I bought three guidebooks and cross-referenced their comments with those found online.

I was all ready to commit to a condo I’d found on e-bay when I heard from two sources that you’d have to be insane to vacation in the Baja Sur in the summer. One person who goes there frequently at other times of the year claimed it was so hot the one time she went in July that she broke out in blisters on her legs and under her arms and walked around awash in sweat.

We abandoned ship on the Mexican plan as we didn’t want to spend that much money to be miserable and unsightly -- that, we can do for free at home. I must say, though, that I was sorry. In my mind I was already there, strolling dreamily through Todos Santos with a small mariachi band wafting behind me and refried beans on my breath, and vice versa. My son, too, was sad to leave his fantasies of death by Mexican shark behind for the time being. At least now we both know the Spanish word for shark is “tiburón.”

Lately I’m focusing on the idea of L.A. and its more urban delights. This time, I’ll borrow the guidebook from the library rather than buying it  -- just in case the trip doesn’t pan out. I’ll let my reveries centre on going to Mexico later, in March, along with every other Canadian who can afford it. Then, one wet and weary day this winter, I’ll start planning for the Baja Sur again.

My guess is, contrary to sociological findings about mothers and their awful vacation stress, I’ll relish every warm, transporting moment. 

A Child's Christmas in West Vancouver

(With apologies to Dylan Thomas.)

One Xmas was so like another in those pre-HDTV years around the sea-town corner that I can never remember whether it rained for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it rained for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six. Experience with West Vancouver tells me it was both.

All Christmases tumble down into the sluice of memory. It was on the afternoon of Xmas Eve, and I was sprawled on Mrs. Rothenberger's leather ottoman, waiting for aliens, with her son Jordan. It was raining. It was always raining at Christmas. December, in my memory, is grey as England, although there were no gryphons. But there were aliens. Patient, cold and callous, our blistered fingers bandaged, we waited to kill the extraterrestrials. Dead-eyed and non-English-speaking, armed with a never-ending assortment of grenades and guns but no motivation that we could understand, they lurked behind walls in our Halo game until Jordan and I, hopped-up on eggnog lattes, hurled our own bombs at them on the gloomy dust-free screen of his giant TV.

We were so silent and intent, like blind people speedreading Braille as we manipulated the plastic buttons that snuffed out our oppressors, that we never heard Mrs. Rothenberger's first cry from her yoga studio at the top of the garden. But soon the voice grew louder. “Fire!” cried Mrs. Rothenberger, and she beat her Buddhist gong.

And we ran up the wet grass, with our wireless Xbox controllers in our hands, toward the yoga studio; and smoke, indeed, was pouring out of the building, and three sweaty people in workout gear were repeating profane mantras, and Mrs. Rothenberger was predicting that she and her students would be horrendously taut by New Year's Eve if the studio were not saved. This was better than all the aliens in Halo standing on a wall in a row. We dashed toward her, and stopped at the open door of the smoke-filled room.

It smelled intensely of cinnamon incense. And there, standing on his head in the middle of the room in a dhoti, was Mr. Rothenberger, a red-headed movie producer who led the chanting on special occasions, which caused his face to become more and more flushed until it seemed it would erupt into flame from the effort. He was saying, “A fine Ex-mas!” and smacking at the smoke with a yoga mat.

“Call the fire department,” cried Mrs. Rothenberger as she beat the gong.

“They won't be there,” said Mr. Rothenberger. “It's Ex-mas.”

“Don't be so cynical, John,” she said. “Has yoga taught you nothing?”

“Do something,” he told us, as we were standing there pointing our controllers at the fire but somehow not putting it out.

“Let's call the police, as well,” Jordan said. “And the ambulance. And Mayor Goldsmith-Jones. She likes fires.”

But we only called the fire department, and soon the fire engine came and two tall men and a muscular woman brought a hose into the studio and Mr. Rothenberger, who was making himself and Mrs. Rothenberger triple espressos, got out just in time before they turned the hydrant on. And when the firefighters had put out the spicy blaze, which had smouldered in a silk pillow on the floor before it lit a pile of hemp thongs, Jordan's aunt, Miss Rothenberger, came in out of the damp garden and stared at the brawny crew. Jordan and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three firefighters in their gleaming helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving hemp, and said, “Do you have a recipe for tofurkey?”

Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were cottages in West Van, and only white people, except for the Indians who were there first, it rained and rained.

But here a small boy says: “It rained last year, too. I drank the rain and my brother drank the rain and I knocked my brother down and then we went to Delaney's and had two hot chocolates in a row.”

“But that was not the same rain,” I said. “Ours blew in from the typhoons of Asia and the hurricanes of Louisiana and the monsoons of India, it wrenched trees and houses up into the thunderclouds pressed against the North Shore mountains and set them down in Haida Gwaii the day before the previous Tuesday.”

“Were there postmen then, too?”

“With sodden hoods and streaming cheeks the postmen came, and postwomen, and delivered packages of water and then dissolved into mist before we could even offer a 'Merry Christmas.'”

“And were there presents?”

“There were the useful presents -- new Hummers and motorized snowboards and trips to Bora Bora.”

“Go on to the useless presents.”

“Clothing with no logos; knock-off purses; biographies of wastrels from Paris Hilton to Lindsay Lohan. And a packet of cigarettes: you put one in your mouth and you stood propped against the wall in the vestibule of an Ambleside restaurant and you waited for seconds for someone to call the police to arrest you and put you in jail, and just as they were about to cuff you, you smirked and ate it. And then it was family dim sum catered in the guest pagoda, and fireworks.”

“Were there uncles, like in our house?”

“There are always uncles at Christmas. The same uncles. Some of them snorting coke in the washroom, others urging their new wives to model the Victoria's Secret lingerie they ordered for them while they were still married to their previous wives. And a few surly teenagers, not wanted in the kitchen, nor anywhere else for that matter, sitting on the very edge of their chairs text messaging insulting remarks about their relatives to each one of their thousand equally trapped and unfairly encumbered best friends.”

“Was there music?”

“Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle threatened to play the accordion, an Acadian got out the spoons and began clattering. My sister put on Jessica Simpson's Christmas album, ReJoyce, and I began playing the spoons to that, and she whacked me on the head with the Lindsay Lohan biography and everybody laughed. And then we both went to Lions Gate Hospital for reasons no one can remember and then we went to bed. I put on my iPod and started listening to Dylan Thomas reading a real poem called A Child's Christmas in Wales. And because I have the abbreviated attention span of anyone born after 1973 I fell asleep almost instantly, well before he 'said some words to the close and holy darkness.' And on I slept.”