Summer Vacation-less Blues

I didn’t grow up in a vacationing family. My parents were working, trying to build a business, renovate a house that had been slated for demolition before DC’s historic preservation movement got underway. They’d send me like an emissary to visit my mother’s side of the family, less frequently my father’s — probably because my paternal Uncle Bob was a worse drinker than my father was by the time I could be counted on to notice and remember. (Lucky for me, my father got sober by the time I was about 3 so I have no memories of him as an active alcoholic.) So I’d spend my summers going from Brooklyn where Aunt Reggie lived to Far Rockaway to see Roz and Hy; to Poughkeepsie with Hannah and Hymie and Port Jervis with Sally and Sol. We made the trip up to Port Jervis as a family once that I remember, probably a few more times that I don’t but throughout my childhood and adolescence I was the family traveler. I’ve got a photo of my father trimming my mother’s curly hair in the backyard on Beach Drive, evidence that we were all there together at least once. I’d write long letters home that told tales of how crazy my mother’s family was.

So it wasn’t a big shock for me to find myself in a marriage that only rarely included vacation travel. My then-husband’s cousin lived in Hawaii for many years and we never visited her. Like I did as a kid, I’d trek up to New York with our small daughters to visit my mother-in-law who somehow never managed to go grocery shopping before we arrived. Her rent-controlled apartment on West 95th Street smelled of weed and vitamins and the narrow window in the bathroom was always cracked open just a bit because you couldn’t control the heat. Barry was back in DC running a business, or trying to, so he couldn’t be counted on to travel.

There was a handful of years when we’d made friends with a quartet of gay men — Nick, Jay, Peter and Dave — who owned a beautiful house in Rehoboth, Delaware, inherited from Jay’s family. They lived down the street from us in DC and Nick worked for Barry for awhile so we had a week to ourselves at their beach house. In return, we’d assiduously clean every inch of every room including the sleeping porch. Barry would sport wads of cash for the week and we’d shop the outlet malls, consume Grotto pizza, funnel cake and ice cream; he’d accompany our girls to Funland and I’d relax on one of those wooden boardwalk benches, people-watching. We could pretend we were like any other vacationing family.

Now being single again for many years, I’ve struggled to plan vacations and haven’t mastered the art. My eldest daughter treated me to a trip to Barcelona a couple of years before the pandemic. We talked about going to Greece for my 70th birthday but that was in 2020. We might make it to Greece one day, but meanwhile the Summer of 2023 has been vacation-less, even though so many people are finally traveling again. It’s been hard to hear about so many trips taken, sights seen, even the stress of air travel or long car rides with children, bouts of food poisoning from unfamiliar cuisine. Clients of mine are planning to go to New Orleans to see Beyonce. A neighbor took a bike trip in France (not something I’d ever do, but still…) The couple who comes to clean my apartment once a month had to miss our July date because they went to Mexico. And so on…

It’s not that I don’t relax, I absolutely do. In fact, I pull a lounge chair out my front door, plant a tall ice water or iced coffee in the cup holder and plant myself in the sun with a book, magazine or newspaper in hand. A neighbor stopped to say hello the other day and let me know she’s “never here in the summer” but spends most of her time in Shepherdstown where “it’s not so hot.” Ah, the voice of privilege. Yes, I’d like to get away a bit more than I do, but actually I love my work (especially now that I work part-time), enjoy my walkable city and don’t really mind the heat. DC summers have been infamous long before we started worrying about climate change. As the end of August approaches, I’m recovering from my chronic bout of vacation envy, helped by the salve of gratitude for all that I have right here at home.