THE MEASURE: Summer Vacation

by Phil Repko*

I honestly do not know if I have shared this piece with anyone. I will have to ask. However, it is two years old, and I feel the need to insert a few updates into the existing article. NEW thoughts will be in italics, just so it’s obvious where interjections, asides, and rude interruptions needed to take place.

For most of my 40 years in education, summer vacation rarely meant a vacation. Raising three children on a teacher’s salary and the earnings of a self-employed hair stylist (part-time, because, well, who could afford child care?), meant the summer was a chance to take care of responsibilities that weren’t manageable during the school year. Sure, there was free time, and lots of afternoons playing in the park with the three youngsters during the end of June until late August. But August meant football camp, and that ran right into basketball season, and well, those jobs were necessary because paycheck-to-paycheck was always more than a bit stressful --- and you know what I mean.

So, summer vacation meant afternoons at North End Pool for a few years. It also meant hot, sweaty, and weekend-draining lacrosse tournaments throughout the 2000s/2010s. On the other hand, summer vacation meant mornings in the weight room with the high school and junior high school football, basketball, - and later on – lacrosse players. In younger years summer vacation called for enrollment in graduate courses, often starting in late May, to earn the required credits that simply were unattainable during a regular school year. Coaching two sports and trying to be relevant in the lives of three young children, as well as remembering to be a husband, son, uncle, etc. made life scattered.

We did tag along on other people’s vacations sometimes. One summer, we made it to Avalon with my sister-in-law and her family. My sister and family invited us to Fenwick Island, and my brother and a slew of others made it to North Carolina twice in the mid-2000s. Those jaunts were appreciated: hot, skin-frying weeks in sun and sand where the post-beach shower and reclining in the A/C frosted family room of some summer rental was a type of spiritual ceremony.

But the last six years have been the best of the summer vacations. Except for two family ventures to Lake Ariel – up in the mountains of PA – summer vacation has meant Julie and I, along with all three kids and their increasing number of grandkids, getting away for one week in July or August to get reacquainted with one another.

We have been fortunate that our children and their families have stayed within striking distance year-round, but texts, phone calls, birthday parties, and the like are not the same as spending a full week with one another. To be sure and honest, our dysfunctional elements are uniquely present each vacation week. We have been consistently flawed during these getaways, since someone will be guilty of being bossy and inconsiderate, while someone else will be overly-sensitive, and then the next offense will be the fool who tries to ‘fix’ whatever acrimony has manifested itself in the land of sun and sand. In other words, some one or the other, or even a group of us will certainly find a way to create a family hiccup. Some in the past have even been worthy of ‘reality tv’ status, except that these haven’t been scripted and no one is over-acting. (Over-reacting, sure.)

But here’s the thing: each year, since I am the one who tends to see the children and grandchildren least often, pop-pop gets a week to make connection with the grandkids. Having graduated from crazy uncle to loopy pop-pop, the young ones are sometimes hard-pressed to tolerate the old man’s quirks and idiosyncrasies, and a week of saturation in goofy-land goes a long way toward navigating the rest of the year. I must insert here that I have done better with seeing the grandkids through the year this past year or so, primarily because the series of recent housing adjustments has put the families just a little closer together. Presently, only one of the three families is more than 20 minutes away, and that trip is rarely more than 30 minutes. From my perspective, the change is big.

During the family SUMMER vacation, Pop-pop makes breakfast. Pancakes, and eggs and sausage, and fruit. Lunches are a la’ carte, In addition, we each take turns cooking a dinner for all. Once during the week, we go to the boardwalk and eat terrible food.

Once each week, we have a ‘formal’ sit-down meal at a respectable establishment. Now, since we have been doing this, we have always included at least one very young child, so respectable may be a misuse of the term. Last year, for example, someone ordered a “Bucket of Seafood” as his/her entrée`. Of course, watching infants eat is far beneath respectable, so there is that as well.

The ‘extended family’ vacation is highly recommended.

Why? Well, ten to fifteen years ago, five of us lived together, and then the young ‘uns rightly grew out into independent lives. However, it is sweet to take a moment, perhaps on Wednesday of vacation week, and play a game called “count our blessings.’ Dragging the utility cart, filled with buckets, shovels, tents, sunglasses, sunscreen, hats and cover-ups is only one small part of the experience, although the one doing the pulling through the hot sand, flip-flop hanging on by a thread, feet burning, children crying, may be inclined to disagree with the characterization of any part of his torture as a small part.

Instead, the family inclusive sojourn does this number of things simultaneously. We remember how cozy it was to live together with people we trusted and loved, even if we didn’t always get along. We live in the moment when we get the chance to reconnect with one another, whether it’s in the midst of a kayaking afternoon, or during a late game night session after the children have finally conked out from sensory overload. We also imbibe the present and envision the future as we look to next year’s trip, with children constantly and chronically in the process of growing into the next chamber of their experiential nautilus.

On my summer vacations --- I slept more soundly if still not enough. I ate too much, though I promised at each turn to do a better job with that. I hugged my sons and daughter, and their respective spouses, and all the grandkids, once a day for a week. I truly believe that this getaway is a prescription for peace – of mind, of heart, of soul. I/we turned off our alarms, and suppressed to whatever extent we could, our annoying habits and attitudes.

No family is an island, entirely of itself. But for a short period each year, we may pretend that we are a fiord, or a sound, or some other kind of estuary. Maybe a cove or a land-bridge. Isthmuses are nice too, or we might want to feign being a peninsula. Or two.

The point is never really what we do on our summer vacations. The point is that we take time, that isn’t really ours, since it’s bestowed by a higher force, and finite to a degree that we cannot foresee. My summer vacation is an act of defiance, where we tell the world we shall single-handedly make it stop and conform to our will. In our minds, if not in fact, our summer vacation is fuel for the future, a refreshing drink for the present, and a bubbly toast to the past.

Our 2023 vacation is drawing near, in mid – August. The bell is tolling and we all hope to heed its call. Remember, you need not ask for whom the bell tolls.

Post-script: Since this was composed and conceived, we have made it to Bethany Beach, Delaware and to Lake Ariel again. We are on the cusp of a trip to Ocean City, MD in a few days, and the important updates are these: since this project of the extended family vacation was initiated, we have added grandchildren on a relative pattern of one-to-one correspondence. This means the grandchild tally is 8 at the moment – and likely to stop there. However, when we started this experiment in 2019, we did not conceive (no pun intended) of the continued expansion.

This little post-script diversion may distract from the bell-tolling artifice above, so I will remind without implication – make the trip, plan the vacation, cancel everything to make the visit fit, or last longer. Time is the most valuable and least negotiable commodity. If you don’t go to see the grandkids now, you will have reduced the limited number of interactions by one – each time you decide to forego or to postpose, or to reschedule. DO. IT. NOW. Time flies. It also evaporates, resolves itself into a dew, and disappears forever.

* Phil Repko is a career educator in the PA public school system who has been writing for fun and no profit since he was a teenager. Phil lives with his wife Julie in Gilbertsville and is the father of three outstanding children, two of whom are also poets and writers. He vacillates between poetry and prose, as the spirit beckons, and has published his first book of poetry “Pieces of April” and is currently working sporadically on a novella and a memoir.

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