Category: Seasons and Holidays

Telluride Daily Planet, Monday, March 29, 2010

Martine, another of the French cousins, was bragging non-stop about her nine weeks of paid vacation just prior to being fired from her administrative job in Paris. Before that little karmic dart popped her bubble, all I could think about was if she didn’t shut up about it, someone might actually have to put her in the fire.

It had truly become excruciating, that sharp turn of the conversation (usually at the cheese course) to faraway places, the names of which she would somehow wedge, noun-like, into day-to-day life. Once the pallet of photo albums was inevitably wheeled in, all I could do was pray the pictures would be allowed to speak their own thousand words. That she’d just eat her triple crème, flip the pages, and point.

But, come on. Two full months of paid vacation? You can live a secret life in two months. Grow arugula. Take a literal slow boat to China. Fall headlong and drown in the deep well of a love affair. In two months, you can even learn to use your cell phone reasonably well.

Or, if you’re the type, you can ration two months into a year’s supply of long weekends. Of late mornings, cinnamon toast, crosswords, baths — a soundtrack sweet enough to muffle the whitest noise of nine-to-five. Fifteen hundred and twelve hours, simply put, is a lot of quarters to drop into the vacation-o-meter.

So, given these bloated statistics from the other side of the pond, Americans are likely to feel deprived, or, far worse, falsely deprived. Isn’t it better to feel rich, blessed and swathed in the white light of leisure? Which begs the question: What is leisure? What’s a vacation? Are its increments minutes, days and weeks? Moments out of time? Events? Epiphanies? Trips taken? Sights seen? Lines drawn? Fantasies? Are photos units of vacation?

Not sure, is my answer to all of the above.

Chances are, your idea of vacation has something to do with your childhood. I can count the number of vacations — by today’s standards — my family took on three fingers. Because of the military and moving so much at the beginning of my father’s career, eventually, my parents simply stopped wanting to budge altogether. Vacation was dinner on the patio, looking out over Lake Washington, Mt. Rainier, and Mt. Baker — a big beautiful living mandala for the third-eye of our family. Vacation for my dad was his shop, and for mom it was hydrangeas, dogwoods and azaleas in the garden. For me, vacation was sunbathing on my deck and listening to my transistor radio — lying there dreaming of being someone who went to faraway places on vacation.

Thus, one wonders just how broad the concept of vacation is: isn’t 15 minutes in a fast car listening to the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince a vacation? Could standing outside sipping coffee at 6 a.m. looking at Venus in bare feet in the summertime possibly be considered a vacation? How about a deeply felt fantasy version of that, indulged in the middle of winter in the middle of a day at work? And what about on the other end of the spectrum: are Martine’s nine bloated weeks fully appreciated or merely used like hoarded Get Out of Jail Free cards in a real, live game of Monopoly?

Sour grapes, right? Oh, maybe. Because at the end of a long winter, I’ll take a 63rd of nine weeks of vacation — a single day of possibility, liberation, adventure and of rest. One day of big-happy-sigh mode. One day of unchaining my heart, getting it on a leash, and letting someone walk it. Right now I want the fast car, I want Venus, I want tickets to Prince, and I want enough cash and imagination to brand it permanently onto the fleshy core of the present moment. I feel like having a tantrum this very second.

Instead, in a moment of grace, I flash on a word a German friend used one day while pointing the ember tip of her cigarette down at the brick pavers of our patio. The one currently buried in five feet of cement-like snow, snow so dense a glacier is forming.

“You know Balconia?” she asks. I shake my head.

She takes a drag. “Balconia,” she says, “is vacation — on your balcony. Right here. It’s your own private spot you can go to without leaving. That’s what we call it in Germany. Balconia”

Oh that Balconia — of course! A tiny but magnificent vacationland where even half an hour of leisure has health benefits. I’m already feeling them, in fact, just thinking about it.

I toy with the idea of trying to explain this place, just across the border (any border), to Martine. Would she know what I was talking about? Your guess is as good as mine.

Telluride Daily Planet, Monday, December 7, 2009

Dear Santa,

I’m worried, favorite superhero of mine. Because yesterday when I flashed on your face — which I do quite often during the holidays — my mind’s eye went directly to your mustache, and sure, it was white all right, but in place of those infamous soft whiskers was a handle-bar polycarbonate swirl from pre-Pixar days. It was plastic!

And as the mind’s-eye cam panned, the rest of you came into focus, and it was all red, white and black polymers as well, and some of the belly paint was chipping off revealing a bare-bulb light source (?!) beneath. That was when I realized you’d become one of those three-foot light-up Santas, a front yard escapee, dragging a cord and power strip behind you.

What kind of mixed metaphor would you call that, when Santa (you), who looks a lot like Freud (or vice-versa), wanders off dragging his disconnected source of power behind him? Well. Anyway. Even though it’s been about 42 years since my last letter to the now melting polar ice cap, I’m compelled, at this point, to write. Make you real again. In my mind’s eye.

Let’s see, where to begin. Well, first of all, I mean, wow, you’re a survivor. I think part of the reason you really are a superhero and not just quasi is that you’ve endured all manner of brutish assaults on your dignity, identity, and place in history. You’ve been in beer commercials and flamingo parades and cast as countless drunks in red fat suits. You’ve even survived being a character in actual superhero comic books, which you probably even had to drag down chimneys and deliver at some point — which must have felt like being in an Escher drawing or a Borges short story. By the way, do you read fiction or nonfiction, or is there no distinction where you’re from?

I guess one could argue at least we haven’t forgotten you, however perverted our focus. You continue to spawn novelties year after year after year, from mugs, acrylic sweaters, and doormats to corn-syrup confections, screen savers, and giant light contraptions hoisted onto house fronts. I mean, you name it. Personally I think it should be your face on a brand new nickel: you’ve influenced more people than any buffalo, and you seem to be just as much in danger of extinction.

Hey, remember my father? Resolutely opposed to anything remotely smacking of what he felt was the willful suspension of disbelief? Remember that spindly seven-foot Christmas tree we bought every year for $1.99 — that he’d immediately cart to his workshop and reconfigure by drilling holes into the trunk and sticking other branches into until the illusion was one of perfection? Do you remember me lying under that tree, staring up at the little gazebo-shaped ornaments with propellers that twirled if you placed them directly above the old-fashioned lights? Can you feel me lying there, willing you into my heart?

Though superhero historians might lump you in with the Rider archetype (mounted upon either powerful vehicle or animal, or, in your case, both), I continue to see you more as a Mentalist, gifted also with superpsychic empathy. Deconstructionists might continue to argue that you are the anthropomorphized version of the amanita muscaria mushroom, the polka dot red and white one that humans ingest in order to see men and reindeer fly across the dark void. But we both know — obviously, right? — that children see this (you) without chemical alteration of any kind.

A couple of years ago, I saw something that made me feel like you made me feel long ago. I was in our little Town Park, schussing along quietly on my cross-country skis, on one the outer loops, not far from the river. I looked up and saw a lynx and her two cubs about 20 feet away. Luxuriant white-furred bodies, long legs, and fringed feet. They were punching through the deep snow silently, calmly, utterly at peace with their surroundings and my presence, which did not disturb one fiber of the quantum field. They stopped and we all stood there, deep inside the magic and beauty of the world. So in the spirit of this letter, I’m asking for the lynx metaphor this year. That feeling. The same one from under the tree.

In parting, I’d like to thank you for tirelessly saving humankind year after year, even amidst all our ruthless consumer shenanigans. People don’t realize how important it is that that children grow up believing in belief. We forget that children are holding the world up and that you are one of the pantheon of spirits in turn holding them up.

Thanks for doing all that. Here’s what I promise to do in return: I’m going to turn Sigmund Freud’s mustache to plastic — in my mind’s eye — and you back to jolly old flesh and blood. Should be good for both of us.