After our five hour plane flight back to the mainland there will be no more morning coffee on the lanai, looking out over the beach at Waikiki; no more rushing to the elevator to see who gets to push the button; no more little chocolate starfish on the pillows at night; no daily interaction with the maid who comes in to make our bed and speaks no English, but cheerfully smiles and laughs and nods.
These hardly count as significant sacrifices, but as we pack in silence, each detail of the life we’ve constructed away from home begins to seem fragile and dear. Every vacation develops its own distinctive rhythms and patterns and in-jokes. During this trip, we derived disproportionate merriment from my son Danny’s inexplicable obsession with a restaurant called “The Chief’s Hut” in our Outrigger Reef hotel. With his limited eight year-old reading skills, he pronounced it “The Chef’s Hut,” and begged to eat there each time we passed on the way to get our car.
In the last hour before departure, I grab a final chance to splash in the ocean. Ironically, the weather has turned cloudy and windy for the first time since our arrival so the beach is deserted as I swim out past landmark rocks and coral that have become intimately familiar. Like most other American families, we spend too much on our vacations so at the conclusion of the adventure we can’t avoid asking whether the return finally justifies the investment.
Of course it does, but not because of added sleep or extra sun, or glorious sights or glamorous accommodations. The true benefit from family trips comes from the rare experience of unity they provide — the shared purpose and focus that flourishes during these brief breaks. At home in Seattle we are all busy with the separate agendas of our lives — my wife and I with work, our 14 and 11-year-old daughters with school and its demands, my son with his single-minded determination to dodge school’s demands. On family trips, however, we confront common challenges — discussing endlessly which beach to visit, which hike to take, when to allow shopping hours (for the girls), or where to eat breakfast or dinner. The intense debate over such fateful decisions gives them a momentous cast, fixing them in memory. My children may always recall the henna-haired waitress on Saturday night, with the gaudy tattoos on her legs and shoulders.
The importance of such recollections came home to me six months ago when my mother died, and I sat with my three brothers for the traditional Jewish week of mourning. We gathered at her house from our respective homes in four distant cities and talked over silly details from our family vacations. These trips represented only a tiny fraction of the time we spent with my Mom as we grew up and yet she always seemed more vivid and alive, more herself, in the time away from home and schedules and normal life.
I remember particularly a complicated trip in the summer of 1969 when I had just graduated from college and didn’t intend to interrupt my own busy life to connect with my parents and younger brothers. They flew to the East Coast from California because of a conference my dad was supposed to attend, so I reluctantly agreed to hitchhike from Connecticut to Boston airport to meet them for a few hours. Once we came together, however, I got involuntarily caught up in the vacation spirit, and went along to an overcrowded cabin on a New Hampshire lake. I used a sleeping bag next to my brothers like the old days at home, when we used to share rooms, and the boys treated me like some visiting celebrity.
That turned out to be our last family vacation because my parents divorced a few years thereafter. Yet even without that knowledge, the goodbyes felt wrenching when the trip wound down — I remember the unstoppable tears of my youngest brother, then eight, like my own son today.
Each vacation builds its own quirky little world, quickly assembled, intensely inhabited, fully flowered, then vanished without a trace — except for the slides and the nostalgia. The experience prepares us for the journeys and farewells we all will inevitably endure, for the homes and adjustments that may nourish us longer than hotels — but always require their own check-out times.
Going home to Seattle from our days in the Hawaiian sun, it’s not just the prospect of hours in a plane, or the Northwest chill that makes our emotions tender and raw. It’s the knowledge that our expensive and precious time traveling together will always, inevitably, end too soon.
Michael Medved hosts a nationally syndicated daily radio talk show that focuses on the intersection of pop culture and politics. You can visit his website at www.michaelmedved.com.
