The End of Summers

"Only kids get summer vacation?" one of our children marveled years ago when they realized our jobs extended beyond June.  

Now I can tell them that summer vacation exists, even in adulthood.

When my children were barely seven years old my wife proposed sending them away to camp, I was not a fan.  After all, I had done the math.

If we followed her sleep-away camp scheme, we’d lose almost a full year of growing-up time.

A seven-year camp lifespan times seven weeks, that's 49 weeks of no kids.

"We only have them for 18 years," I pleaded.  "Why give away a year of it?"

I soon learned we were not giving them away as much as bribing someone to take them to a land of lakes, mosquitoes, bunks and friendship.

Once the inevitable happened and I lost the argument I told myself there was value for the children in shipping them off.  What I failed to grasp was the value for the adults.

With the children staggered in age we only lost one the first year, then another, and soon we were staring down the barrel of seven weeks of undiluted childlessness.  

A thought scarier than sending them in the first place.

There was trepidation as we packed everyone off with last minute checklists, snacks for the flight, runs to the local airports, final day tantrums, misplaced articles of clothing and then -- all was quiet.

Walking through the door that first evening I was transported to my grandparents' home, a place where lights remained off in the mostly empty rooms, un-dented couch cushions, entire carpeted rooms with nary a footprint.  

On the dining room table sat two glasses of wine, a  bowl of vegetables, two lonely plates and a piece of tin foil that housed two sad little pieces of grilled fish.

What was this minimalist, vegetarian spread?

"I didn't want to waste a serving piece," my wife said.  "It's only us."

There would be no more meals at home.  

This was our introduction to the joys of adult summer vacations.  We discovered a world of late liquid dinners, trips to the beach and middle-of-the-week movies.  We reveled in the guilty pleasure of completing long-delayed projects or reading a book.  And we were not alone.  Friends who rarely left the confines of Montgomery County were suddenly never home, everybody wanted to stretch.

Even the interruption of visiting day brought new joy as the heart actually grew fonder over the missing month.

That was 6 years ago.  

Now we are on the other side.

This year we got barely two weeks of kid-free time.  Summer jobs, high school sports, teen tours and college visits overlap for short periods.  Our endless summer was reduced to one night in Naples Maine, before rushing to pick up another child in another city. 

The trumpet blew at this year's camp visiting day, signalling the end.  The sound kicks off a Pavlovian reaction of tears, hugs and clinging children.  This year the tears were ours. Summers are coming to an end. 

In a Foreign Land: Homeland

In a Foreign Land: Homeland: The interactive map on the seatback in front of me is an education.  Flying to Israel from Istanbul the city names illuminate as we pass o...

Homeland Part II--Good Borders Make Good Neighbors

Sometimes a neighborhood turns bad.  Sometimes it always was.  

There is much to contrast between Israel and Turkey.  But their mutual complaint is about their "tough neighborhood," they say with a roll of their eyes.  

The Israelis love their neighborhood, just not their neighbors.  Every street corner, every road and hillside has a Biblical antecedent.  On a visit to an Army base the driver explains the area is called Herodion, where King Herod stopped on his rush from Jerusalem to Masada.  His Mother's carriage overturned and he feared she was dead.  To show his gratitude that she survived he built a town to commemorate it.  It ultimately became his burial plot.

At the last minute our visit with the soldiers is altered by the recent kidnappings.  We switch to a bullet-proof minivan because you don't know what it will be like down the next block.  We stand on a hilltop with soldiers pointing out the Palestinian and Israeli overlapping neighborhoods.

The soldiers, men and women, explain their day.  In Washington people show off their wall of fame, photos of politicians they've met for a moment.  The man (boy) in charge of this base shows us a picture of two Israeli F-15 Jet Fighters flying over Auschwitz. "We are not just the protectors of this land, we are protecting the Jewish people," he tells my children.

The flight from Israel to Turkey is only 90 minutes, but when you land at the Istanbul Ataturk Airport the two worlds collide. Woman in Burqas mingle with tourists in shorts and tanks waiting at the Burger King. The expensive jewelry stores glisten, the Hermes scarves stack neatly.

But baggage claim brings it all together as our luggage from Tel Aviv rests on the turnstile alongside flights from Baghdad and Najaf.

Turkey shares a border with Syria, Iraq and Iran.  Israel's border partners are well-known, but no less volatile.  When you ask about the contrast and concerns they all say with resignation, "This is the Middle East."

But how they deal with the internal and external threats is illustrative:

• In Israel my kids notice the doorman at the King David Hotel wears a taser on her belt
• In Turkey, thousands of daily visitors to the Blue Mosque, their most traveled tourist destination, has no security, no metal detector, no bag check.  The only thing strictly enforced is the dress code.
• At Ben Gurion airport they ask you numerous questions about why you were in Israel. The usual stuff like "were your bags with you all the time" preceded questions like, "what Jewish holidays do you celebrate?"
• There were 4 security check points before we got to our gate on Turkish Airlines, including one at the front door, where we sent our suitcases through an x-ray machine before we were even let into the air conditioning.

Turkey is a sprawling country across two continents, and their worries are not about Israel, but the influences of their fellow Muslims.  It is a fiercely proud place whose bright red flag with a crescent and star flies from every hilltop.

It is a land of earthquakes, carpets and kilims, where 90% of the people are Muslim, but Burqa's are officially banned on constitutional grounds of the "secularity of the state."

In Israel all the Army bases are Kosher and celebrate Shabbat.

When people emigrated to Turkey in the early-20th century they were told to pray wherever they could, a Mosque, a synagogue or a church, as they were all houses of god.  That is no longer the case.  A city of 15 million people has 3,000 Mosques, 250 churches and "only 2 or 3 working synagogues," according to our guide.

Both countries are divided, some reaching for the future with others pulling it into the past. Israel is a place rooted in its history, but has embraced a future that gave way to a start-up nation of businesses and board appointments.  Modern Turks wrestle with their progress as well, more worried about whether their neighbors will quash it.

While countries can't move, people can.

France is in the midst of a record migration of Jews to Israel, who have had enough of their neighborhood and are getting out.  

“I love France, and this is my country, but I am disgusted now...In Israel there is an army that will protect us. Here, I can no longer see a future for my children," one French Jew told the New York Times before leaving home.

Homeland

The interactive map on the seatback in front of me is an education.  Flying to Israel from Istanbul the city names illuminate as we pass over or near them.

It is a history lesson, geography quiz and newscast: Allepo, Hommes, Damascus, Baghdad.  Tripoli looks so close to Beirut.  As you approach Tel Aviv the Bible comes alive, Beersheba, Nazareth, and then reminders of the wars, Aqaba, Suez.

Jerusalem is hopping at 11:30 on a Saturday night, old and young, religious and secular, Jews and Arabs walk past the Nike store, the World Cup blares from every restaurant.

Crowds of young people stare into televisions big and small watching France vs Honduras.

On the first day Yad Vashem is swarming with tourists.  The last time we were here the kids were too young to go.  Now they tell us about all they learned from their secular schools and how they didn't focus on the Jews.  "A lot of what Hitler wanted to do was about the purity of the Germans, killing the Jews was only part of it."

The soldiers who sit next to us with their Uzi's tilted across the table take on new meaning.  They are only 18 months older than my son who is disappointed about eating his hamburger without cheese, since we are at a Kosher restaurant.

The King David Hotel and the Old City don't disappoint, they look as we remember or as the postcards remind us.  It's hot in the market at Machane Yehuda, vendors screaming, a woman sneezing on the basket of cheeries fondled by every passerby.

The kids ask why the Falafel tastes so good, and the hummus?  There are no answers, like the mystery of New York bagels, I tell them.

You hear about the three young boys who were kidnapped from the settlements, but still the tourists shop, the markets open, the buses run, the flags fly.

 

More Than a Day at the Races

We were running late. 

The traffic from JFK was solid the whole way. Before getting to Belmont we had to find a Howard Johnsons in Queens, which housed our tickets.  But these golden tickets only got us through the front door, if we could reach it. 

Stewing in the back of a steamy cab we dug into the racing sheets.

“Hey dad, look, there’s a horse in the next race from Maryland,” he said.

“That’s a sign,” I told him.

I had prepared a day of teaching my son how to handicap based on facts, but it turned into a day of patience, luck, intuition and inevitably betting on losers.

Seven minutes to post time.

Looking out the cab window nothing but cars and people, the grandstand half a mile ahead on the other side of the track. 

“And look at this,” he said, “the horse’s name is Ben’s Cat.”

The blood drained from my face.  My hands sweaty. 

My son has a friend named Ben Catt.

“That’s our horse.”

We leapt from the car and ran.  Past the people in pastels, the broken bourbon bottles and cigar butts. 

“Dad, you run ahead, I can’t bet anyways.”

I pulled out my phone and with three minutes to go I could see the security team waving their wands over every whale belt, horse pin, and powder green hat.

My son and I had made a deal, we’d bet every race, ten bucks a horse.

“You need limits,” I told him.  “Never dig into your pocket for more money.”

I pull out the cash, sprint up the escalator to the window where I place my bet with a minute to post time, as Josh falls in behind me, the winning ticket in my hand.

“Did you bet the ten bucks?” he asked.

“I bet the whole thing,” I said, doing the calculations on what it would mean to our $100 if he won.

We settled in the back, and they were off.  

“So how much do we win?” he asked after the horses crossed the finish line.

“For coming in fourth?  Not much,” I told him.

Facebook is awash in endings, graduations, leaving home.  I don’t care what Webster says about commencements, they are not beginnings. For parents they are only endings.

But when our oldest was born we won the birthday lotto as the calendar gods made him miss the Kindergarten deadline.  So while many of his friends are high school graduates heading off to beach week, he is just a rising senior.

Under the gauze of his final year in our house, lots of things become "once in a lifetime" opportunities, including the possibility of a triple crown winner.

So we flew to New York, and managed the traffic and ran to the race and placed the bets, and survived the disappointing horses.  We cheered our hearts out for Chromey, as the locals call her. 

And we got stuck on the train platform for three hours and missed our flight home and made friends with some Arkansans and walked through Manhattan until we found a place to eat and watch the end of the Rangers game deep into double overtime.  And the next morning we were back at the airport and then home again 24 hours after we placed our initial bet on Ben’s Cat. 

We were wrong about the horses.  But right about the opportunity.

A Camera in Canyon

"Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. What you can do is to keep it for your children, your children's children, and for all who come after you..." 

--Theodore Roosevelt

"Dad, can I borrow the camera?"

It was like hearing the roar of a Tyrannosaurus, this sentence emerging from extinction.  We are in the depths of the Grand Canyon, just south of the Colorado River, seven miles into a 10-mile hike.  My 13-year old and I are trailing the rest of the crew, save for our guide who intentionally staggers behind.  

There are so many things about the sentence that grab me, not the least of which includes the fact that she spoke to me.  We have a fine relationship, but she's 13 and I am, well, her father.   But here along the Havasu Canyon there is nothing to do but talk, spot the occasional waterfall, eye the hikers who come and go, the sad mules hauling crates of groceries to the village, or backpacks for those unable to carry the load.

And so she speaks to me. 

And the sentence fills me up.  She asked if she can borrow "the" camera.  Not a camera, because in this wifi-ravaged section of the world there is only one camera and it is a camera.  One that you hold with two hands (no selfies), that zooms in and out with buttons labeled W and T.  Okay it's not exactly a Nikon and my pockets aren’t filled with yellow boxes of Kodak film, but for a moment we are back in time.

It is a question I asked my dad dozens of times as a kid.  Sometimes I probably got an "Okay" and others I may have been warned against the shrinking number of pictures in the roll.  Similarly, I warn her there will be no outlets and she needs to be careful how long the camera is on and how much battery she might use.  Make sure not to look at all the pictures because it's such a battery suck.

She excitedly snaps a shot of a distant waterfall.  The kind of photo that won't mean much in a day or so, nobody is in the picture, the distance too great to be memorable.  

But it was what we, as parents, wait for, the reason we take these trips.

Our days in the canyon are filled with moments like these, that mean little to the kids, but everything to us.  Watching them play cards in the day's fading light, the songs they sang along the trail, the games they invented as the miles of endless rock passed by.

There is this need within us to go back, not to a happier time, but a simpler one where our days are focused on fixing the next meal, the footing on a narrow pass, the depth of the water, warmth at night.

We pay money to leave our expensive lives and spend time in a place that escaped civilization.  

We meet a park ranger who brings us a jar of goo. He tells us about how the tree was struck by lightning and as they removed it he discovered the treasure of a honeycomb.  "Have a taste," he says with infectious enthusiasm.  And as we share a spoon with this tribe of travelers, we wonder how we could get this excited about our jobs?

Then we take seven hours to walk the miles out of the canyon, past the waterfalls, through the Indian reservation, around the rock formations and then up, up, up the narrow pass to the safety of the plateau, where we load our car.

An hour into the drive we hit a hotspot and everyone's phones begin chirping, lights blink, the car fills with voicemails and Snapchats, we clog the chargers.  Our children's eyes no longer lit by the golden sun of the canyon, but the green glow of their screens. And then they are gone, back to the future and into their world, and so are we.

Forty-Seven

So this is 47.

The plans were all set.
Flights to Utah, lift tickets, reservations, dinners with friends.
And then the snow came.

School was cancelled.
Then the planes.
We re-thought the weekend.

Then they opened one runway.  And our plane arrived.  We plowed through Georgetown and a foot of snow...
But we missed it.

So we stopped for Chinese food.
Just me and two of the kids.
Jessie fell on the ice.  She laughed hard.  Her brother harder.

We were the only people in the restaurant.
They made us sit in the corner "in case a large party showed up."

So in the morning we drove to Deep Creek Lake.
And knocked down the world's biggest icicle.
Bought groceries.
Ran on the frozen lake.

The kids had time to ski.
I made time to write.

The ski lift ticket on my birthday read:  Feb 15, 2014 -- Adult Twilight.

I hope not.