My youngest has us up on our feet after dinner in Hawaii. He’s ripped my father-in-law out of his chair, somehow without incident. He’s arranged us all in a circle.
Now all of us in the circle must assume a tree pose, close our eyes, and repeat after him.
“Keep calm like Master Fang.”
“Take a deep breath…” Here we must inhale like we’re trying to vacuum the hundreds of nearby geckos up into our nostrils.
“And…”
Now we must break this meditative zen very suddenly, scissor kick our legs, and, chopping the air, yell, “HI-YAH! HOO-YAH! HA! HA! HAAAAA!”
It’s not enough to do the sequence once. We must go around the circle, taking turns leading. Anyone who doesn’t execute the lines or moves precisely is made to take it from the top. We are eleven people, only two of whom have any formal choreography training (excluding my stunning 7th grade jazz career), so it’s back to the top with us many times over.
My son peeks out of his half-scrunched eyes. He doesn’t like what he sees. He wants my husband’s bent leg higher on that planted leg. He wants his brother’s eyes closed. He wants his sisters louder on the refrain.
He learned this sequence from a cartoon, by the way. He is PJ Masks certified.
As with all the magical moments my youngest creates, he’s not trying to do something super memorable here. He’s not thinking — you know what would be touching right now? You know how I could make everyone tear up and laugh at the same time? You know how I could make everyone stop for a minute to appreciate how uncanny and beautiful it is that we can all be here together, teetering on one leg?
No, I think he’s just thinking — honestly, what’s so hard about this? And seriously, why can’t my family get this down?
And the rest of us aren’t thinking — wow, this is unusual.
Sure, it’s the first time we’ve done this particular routine, but not the first time we’ve done something like it. With a resident instructor who’s ungoverned by what’s scripted or likely in a day or in a life, we circle up, we dance, we sing. A lot.
But this time does feel extra uncanny, extra beautiful. It is a not-small-at-all wonder that we’re all standing here in this circle in the middle of the Pacific. In this found time where my oldest could join and my high schoolers wouldn’t miss much and my youngest could happily extend his holiday break. Where, after a December filled with health touch and gos up and down the roster, the full list has made the trip.
Back home, the rest of the world has resumed spinning. The disorienting liminal time of the holidays is over. It’s the first week of January, when everyone circles back on the things they tabled in mid-November.
But we are on an island, with all four kids and all four grandparents, ignoring the world for another week, closing our eyes, taking deep breaths and assuming Master Fang poses.
One lazy afternoon a few days into our Hawaii stay, we’re standing in the little lagoon in front of the little beach shack where all the little people order their little Pina Coladas.
We are living in a postcard, and this is all pretend. Everyone here is happy. No one has any problems, least of all us. Our stressful and illness-riddled December has been sun-soaked out of us. I haven’t received an email I’ve considered relevant to this tropical life I’m living in days.
It is the most back-to-business week of the year. But we have dipped. We’re in a lagoon. Dipping.
We’ve left our rental house towels and our phones in a pile back on the sand because while we’ve been told we cannot use the hotel beach chairs — mahalo! — the ocean’s for everyone — aloha!
Someone walking towards shore says someone else spotted a tiger shark beyond the inlet, beyond the rocks. Outfitted with only my brain, the rest of my thinking capacity tucked in a towel back on the beach, I’m not immediately sure how dangerous that is. Tiger sharks are bad ones, right? They certainly sound bad, named for a big cat and all; but then again, so are leopard sharks and my brain does somehow recall that those are some of ocean’s least menacing?
We look out past the rocks where that shark prowls (…or swims around friendly-style, answer pending). We are happy for the safety of the inlet. I mean there isn’t a gate or anything — the water’s all contiguous and that tiger shark could always swim right in. Like Google will later tell us: tiger sharks like shallow reefy waters. Oh and, yes, they are super dangerous.
But right now we don’t want to think about sharks! We’re on vacation! I suggest maybe we need little Pina Coladas from the little beach shack. As I turn to walk back to our pile of towels, my older daughter turns and starts waving at a some-amount-of-months old baby
“Oh, my gosh, Mom, LOOK at that baby. She is so cute.” My daughter has caught the baby’s attention and now the baby is smiling, flapping back as babies are paid to do.
I look over and, sure enough, the baby is cute, as babies are paid to be. It’s got the requisite fat, Pillsbury-folded legs. It has no teeth. It has wispy little hairs in that stage where the hairs are not quite sure of their job yet — Adornment? Head protection? Future harbingers of a good or bad day?
The baby’s mother bends over it in the shallow water, steadying it from face-planting in the water, stopping it from eating a fistful of sand.
Truly, humans are born so doughy, half-baked and incapable, cuteness our best and only survival skill for all those many early years.
“She is cute,” I’m barely willing to concede this because I know something about this baby: this baby is false advertising. “But I’m telling you, that family’s been up since 5am…”
Here it feels like I should have a cigarette to draw on deeply and then flick with disregard, rolling my eyes at falling for an adorable baby of all things.
“Okay, Mom. Okay.” My daughter keeps smiling and waving, rolls her eyes at me.
“Seriously. When we came here when you guys were little, you woke up before coffee shops even opened. It was exhausting.”
“God, Mom. Fine - we get it. But I mean she is just cute…”
And this is just it: toddlers look nice on vacation but they are some of the least relaxing people you could ever hope to travel with. I prefer them in my periphery, like hired extras I can coo at at the craft table between takes, and then return to the work of my scenes — joking around with my optimally-aged kids who are funny, engaging and often conversationally surprising, who enjoy some batches of time to themselves, who apply their own sunscreen, who don’t eat sand.
One day at the pool, I glance over and see one of the kid’s snap maps flash on their phone. I see quickly the overwhelming density of those little emoji-ish people in the Bay Area, piled on each other, clustered all around our home at home. I think of how weird it would’ve been to have had this visual while growing up, seeing how every person you’ve ever met or might meet, or has met the people you’ve met or might meet, sits in relation to you at any given moment, the concentricity of your social circles in full view.
As a teenager, I only ever thought about where my best friend was — two houses away — and possibly where the boy I liked lived, but I never thought of it in this aerial way, their position as compared to my position. I think I just pictured them in their family rooms, as if they were miniatures installed in shadow boxes and I was peaking in.
Now kids have to live with such a different perspective. I stare off at the ocean, thinking about the lost liberty of out of sight, out of mind. How a kid never gets to just be an island anymore. Even on this island, the one we had to fly over the ocean for five hours to get to, I see one little figure on the map, just a little ways down the coast.
“Who’s that?”
“I don’t know — I don’t know her.”
I don’t dwell on why you would ever need to know where someone is if you don’t know them in the first place.
I just think, “Perfect.”
Because here we are safe — no one’s getting tangled up in any of that messy massy map. Because vacationing with older kids is like a benign form of kidnapping. Without your kids’ friends around, you rank as one of the most interesting people here! When you are your kids’ only social option, you are their best social option!
Will they be dining with you? Of course!
Would they like to play cards? Sure!
Will they be out late or driving around? Nope!
Now this is relaxing. This is a vacation.
During our make believe week, we do all the things we never do at home, we do play cards, and read books, and ride bikes, and take walks, and sit in a variety of variably reclining chairs for long stretches, just looking around.
This is such a nice way to live — we need to do these things more often in our regular lives, I think.
But I know we’ll get home and we won’t. And anyway, I know it’s the away-ness that makes these things special. At home most of these things would be considered boring by most of the people here. At home when you stare off into the distance for a long stretch, people start asking you what’s wrong.
The pool is not crowded so we each sit in a minimum of four different chairs over the course of the afternoon, optimizing shade and umbrella coverage. The pool has rules and inadvertently we break them all. No eating, no drinks other than water, no noise, no playing on the lawn. But there I sit, eating pita chips, drinking a Pina Colada, listening to my youngest narrate his pool time, and watching my older son and dad throw a football on the lawn. No one seems to mind.
The days pass slowly. The 2 o’clock hour lasts and lasts, but not in a bad way; not in a will-this-class-or-meeting-ever-end way; in a gentle, wow-it’s-still-2-way, like the sun wants to hang right there forever, like we and it are suspended. I think of all the times I’ve wished I could stop time, freeze my kids at an age, in a moment and I think maybe I’ve done it. Maybe the answer was always right here in Hawaii.
When darkness does eventually fall, it feels more like a promise than an ending. And we understand: the sun does need a break, it can’t actually hang there forever.
Our long dinners are for lore sharing, a review of shared history. We talk about the other times we’ve been on vacation — the time we lost my younger daughter on this island; the time my older son got lost on this island; the time we handed my youngest a gecko on this island, and, unsure of what this small, squiggling thing could possibly be for, he tried to rip it in half (toddlers!).
More and more, these stories have a retrospective feel, like something’s over, completed, done. It makes me sad if I think too long about it.
So I don’t. Because, again, I am on vacation!
Besides the grandparents are telling stories too.
Not all of them are new, some are favorites from the family soundtrack, played again and again. Some are so ambient to me, I assume my kids — who are also so ambient to me (they’ve been with me always?) — have heard them all too. But they haven’t. Many are new to them. And the familiar ones feel kind of new to me too, because while I’ve heard them before, now I’m listening.
My dad is spinning tales of his bygone shenanigans, the kind of simple and adorable trouble that no one gets in any more. Today’s kid trouble is all real and far-reaching and high stakes. You could sneeze the wrong way and completely ruin your future.
Meanwhile my dad skipped a college final to go buy a race horse with this friend two states away, and rather than cap the stupidity there, he rode in the back of the trailer with that horse for the whole multi-hour trip home, barely hitched to the borrowed pick up truck his best friend drove.
I’ve known this one, of course, but on this telling, I’m watching my forever-rule-abiding mom nod along and newly wondering how these two people ever got together.
It reminds me I’m unlikely. We all are.
Another evening, my father-in-law offhandedly mentions that he and my mother-in-law have seen MLK Jr speak live. More than once. It’s really not even the main point of what he’s saying, but we stop him.
“You what??”
“Oh, yes — we heard him few times at the church near our house in New Jersey when we were first married. Incredible. Incredible speaker. Incredible man.”
Even my husband had never heard this before. My in-laws had probably considered it ambient fact, something that of course their son knew. How could he not?
There’s so much actual history embedded in all these personal histories.
You can never know enough, never listen enough.
This is why we need islands.
Departure day feels more somber than usual. Something is passing and I’m not sure I’ll get it back. It’s not the same as leaving one of our younger family vacations, back when we were tired enough to want to return to bedtimes and structure, and confident enough that there were bountiful more vacations to come.
Like infinite blocks of time would always be available, like these kids were ours or something.
Now each vacation feels more exquisite and rare, less duplicable. I don’t want to leave Hawaii and this soft air and this stronghold I have on my kids’ time.
Back home it is raining harder and longer than it has since Abraham Lincoln was president. The basement is probably flooded. The kitchen is probably overrun with ants. Commutes to school and work this week will probably be dicey.
More than two hours before landing in San Francisco, the pilot starts warning us. Our approach will be bumpy. We should use the bathroom now. We should buckle up. We should stow tray tables and not expect anything of the flight attendants who have already affixed themselves to their jump seats.
We should be so lucky to land, seems the subtext.
But land we do.
We deplane, claim our millions of bags and ride home in three separate taxis because it’s pouring and this seems the fastest way to move our mass of people. The scene on the curb is hectic enough to make the premise of Home Alone believable. I hope my youngest really is in my husband’s cab? I mean I saw him get in, didn’t I? I did. I saw it. But that doesn’t mean I won’t text my husband, just to be sure, just to remind my husband I’m a little bit crazy and I’m back to it! Vacation’s over.
The ride to our house is far scarier than the flight. Here on land we are careening and weaving and, it seems, trying hard to hydroplane. I worry about this car. I worry about the other two cars filled with my people. Back on the mainland and scattered already.
The headlights of all three cars convene at the driveway like we’ve arrived at a crime scene. We all run for the door dragging rollies, and get into our house that has that closed-up weird smell and is kinda cold and is unrecognizably clean as it always is when it’s not forced to contain us.
Within minutes of piling inside, my oldest grabs the car keys. She needs to go see a friend who leaves for a semester abroad the next morning. She needs to say goodbye. She won’t be late.
She goes back out into the rain.
And we are home.
Jen.
What a fabulous vacation you had! Thank you for sharing this slice of time with us and helping us to remember to slow down and savor these memories!
As always Jen I love this. And, as always, it hits all the “familiar notes” of special time with family when you can all just enjoy being together! Never long enough…but so special when it can happen! My best to all of you!