On a Saturday morning, I know I can count on my dad to be in his upstairs bedroom at the Sullivan’s Island house, propped on a pillow doing the crossword puzzle. He’s up there on Fridays too. And Thursdays. Not Sundays, though. He golfs on Sundays. Every now and again, I’ll be surprised to round the corner into the parking spot underneath the house on a crossword puzzle day and find his car missing, but more often than not, there’s the Prius, where it’s spent most of its life for the last fifteen years, a laundry basket in the back seat, golf clubs in the trunk, an empty Gatorade bottle resting in the cupholder, ready to be refilled. To say my father is a creature of habit would be more than an understatement. He is monk-like in his predictability. I think it drove my mother crazy. To me, it’s a comfort. I like taking the steps up to his room and finding him in his spot on the bed looking at me expressionlessly over his reading glasses. I can tell by how still he sits how long our conversation will run.
“So, you need something to do,” he said to me when I walked in on him this past Saturday.
I turned my gaze toward the pile of newspapers lying next to him, so he wouldn’t see me laugh. “You’re such an asshole,” I said.
“Well, I’m just saying,” he said lowering the Saturday puzzle. “The kids are out of school, you need something to do, and so you’re thinking, ‘We’ll spend the summer at the beach.’” It was the second day in a row we’d come out to the house, and he was teasing me, a little shit-eating grin spreading across his face. It’s not our custom to visit on back-to-back days, and I think he was half surprised to see me, but, at the same time, half not. He knows I love the familiar nearly as much as he does.
The day before, our friend Chris from the neighborhood met us out on the beach with two of his kids before joining us on the porch. The boys wandered on the sandbar looking for shells and marine life and then did run dives off the bar’s steep ledge into the tidal pool. Betsey brought Maddux out too, and he and Cartter and Scotty swam back and forth across the pool, Scotty alternating freestyle with head-up breaststroke, Cartter throwing in a few butterfly strokes for good measure (“That was a good workout,” Scotty said when we left). Chris was taken with the bar formations and the size and depth of the tidal pool. It’s roughly 100 by 200 yards, and in the middle of that expanse, I don’t know how deep it is, only that I can’t stand. “This is amazing,” Chris said. “It’s like there’s a lake and the ocean.” We were wading out into what his four-year-old daughter called “the real sea,” looking out at the pelicans on a bar farther out. Chris loved the view from Dad’s porch too. He’d just returned from a family trip to Dollywood and had spent some of the morning selling it as an easy getaway, and I’d been explaining to him how I’d really prefer not to make the effort of travelling this summer. Finally, sitting on the porch staring out at Dad’s live oaks and the real sea, he got it. “Sometimes, doing nothing is a pretty good play,” he said.
I’ve been feeling the pressure to do more than nothing since late winter. For months Danyelle and I talked about making a trip to the west coast to see the redwoods in July. We talked about going to Michigan again like we did two summers ago and visiting Mackinac Island this time. We talked about Boston and Maine. We talked about a lot of vacations but never got around to actually planning anything, mostly because I dragged my feet, not-so-secretly wanting to just spend the summer here running swim practice, going to the beach, and enjoying a nice long trip to Sapphire at the end of July.
There’s a certain amount of guilt associated with this desire. I look back fondly on our trip to the Midwest two summers ago, and I have a handful of wonderful memories made during family vacations when I was a child. Even as I write this, I’m tempted to go online and buy plane tickets to some exciting destination and surprise Danyelle and the boys, thereby reassuring myself that I’m a good dad and that my family won’t resent me in a few years. But it’s so much easier to keep my money, skip planning (I don’t even have a “real ID,” and my passport is expired), and avoid the interruption to our regular lives. I like our regular lives, and I get a little bitter about the expectation that we go on some bourgeois vacation.
According to Cartter “everyone is going to China this summer.” He told me this on a bike ride home from his friend’s house. We’d watched the sunset at the nearby boat landing on Shem Creek and stopped off for a swim in Chris’s pool on the way home. There, Cartter and Scotty played with their friend Bennett and Bennett’s older sister and her friend. A warm breeze was coming in off the marsh at dusk as we rounded the bend onto our street, and when I asked Cartter who he meant by “everyone,” he named two of his classmates. Obviously, part of the problem with doing nothing this summer is not having anything to brag about when school starts up again.
For me, the cost-benefit analysis of traveling is different than it is for the rest of my family. For one thing, I’m unmoved by bragging rights when it comes to travel: when my eventual best friend Matt Gruca came to my school in seventh grade and blabbed about his Italian vacation in Latin class, I thought he was an annoying gasbag. For another, I’ve been lucky enough that I’ve always preferred to be where I am than to go somewhere else. During summer break as a kid, I loved body surfing in the morning sun at the beach on Sullivan’s Island, reading in bed with the cat lying on my chest after morning swim practice, and riding bikes to dinner with Mom and Dad and my sister. Mostly, I was thrilled that I didn’t have to go to school. Almost anything would have been better than that, but spending my time at the beach and the pool and reading in my air-conditioned room was heaven. There wasn’t anywhere I’d rather be, except maybe Sapphire where we would go every year. Cartter says we always go to the beach and the pool, and he wants to do something different. He’s tired of the water park too because his mother has taken him and Scotty (and friends) twice already. Good thing we bought the season pass. Hearing these grass is greener type complaints from him during our bike ride home following a perfect evening, I told him that he sounded like Greg Heffley, the whiny protagonist narrator of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series.
I probably shouldn’t take Cartter’s whining too seriously. He’s not so much a wimpy kid as he is an occasionally grumpy one, and his professed discontent was probably just the product of a mood (Danyelle and I suspect he was hankering for a sleepover). He’s obviously enjoyed the beach and the pool, and since the grumpy bike ride, he’s expressed great enthusiasm about going to the water park with his swim team buddies. He’s even reluctantly enjoying the summer reading that I’ve assigned him so far. He’s near the end of The River, the sequel to Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet, in which a group of scientists want to recreate the protagonist Brian’s harrowing ordeal in the wilderness. The scientists plan to use the experiment to educate others on what to do if they find themselves in a similar predicament. A stupid premise, and one whose inanity was not lost on Cartter. Cartter said he prefers it when Brian is alone. One of the scientists accompanies Brian back into the wilderness, and Cartter complained that this scientist is “happy all the time.” During one report he told me the scientist (Derek is his name) got struck by lightning and fell into a coma. When I asked Cartter if he was glad about Derek’s misfortune, he said, “Kind of.”
The kids have also enjoyed some cultural enrichment since school let out. After my disturbing bike ride home with Cartter, I had an angsty conversation with Danyelle about my guilt at not scheduling a vacation to serve as a definite place marker in the kids’ memories later in life. My solution to this guilt was to book brunch reservations at an upscale restaurant called High Cotton near the peninsula’s French Quarter and to buy seats at a chamber music concert at the historic Dock Street Theater for the next day. An appropriate outing for two children, the eldest of whom has just recently gained the ability to make his own grilled cheese, and both of whom so prefer the top of a muffin to the stump that they don’t even bother peeling away the paper. After we got home the next day, I asked these two refined young boys to write about their experience in the broader context of their summer so far. They complained that the Brahms piece was too long (It was the best piece by far, but even I was a little restless owing to the horribly uncomfortable balcony seat), and they maintained that they enjoyed the eggs benedict and chicken and waffles they ordered at High Cotton. Scotty said that the balcony seat terrified him because it was high in the air but that the music soothed his fear. Cartter revealed that sunburn was the reason he was anxious not to go to the beach again, and both said that their summer was “pretty good” so far and “about what they expected.” Thank goodness they aren’t total ingrates.
Even though we aren’t taking them to China, I am proud of the effort that Danyelle and I are making to ensure their time away from school is a veritable paradise. Every day is filled with friends and activities, and we endure their laughing hysterics and their yelling arguments with little to no intervening. One evening we played salad bowl with them, and they littered the word bank with butts and boobs and vaginas, an act which they found so hilarious that they had to grab themselves to avoid wetting their pants. I thought this was very encouraging. With any luck, they’ll grow to acquire their father’s and grandfather’s appreciation of life’s monotony.
The Raging Elitist 