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On getting away
Kathleen and I will take a couple of days off this week. Some time to sit on another shoreline and watch life drift by. Sleep in another bed. I will bring a book— but likely won’t open it. We will dine out. Maybe on a waterside deck. We’ll exchange stories and memories collected over 31 years. Watch the day fade into night.
I am looking forward to it. To the break of routine. To the restoration one seeks from a change of scenery. Spending time without an agenda or appointments. But I am a bit wary, too. I’ve never been a good vacationer.
I think I would be a good hobo, however. When living in the city, my route walking to work took me past the lawns of the Manulife building on Bloor near Mount Pleasant every morning. Studiously manicured and trimmed to within a millimetre of its root stub, these lawns were impressive and inviting. Shaded by large maples and other species, I figured this is where I would sleep every night if I were homeless. So soft, flat and welcoming.
I see vacationing as a short-term hobo experience. You have the freedom to do nothing, to build nothing, to achieve nothing. Just exist. But it is harder than it seems. The truth is, there is tremendous pressure to experience, to do, to discover. And I freely acknowledge the rewards in these pursuits—but when I see visitors at 5:30 a.m. loping up Wharf Street toward the Millennium Trail away from their vacation bed, or loading up a bag of golf clubs in their sleek sedan, I am unconvinced that it is better than the work I do every day.
Vacations have another significant flaw. They have an end date. A hobo can wander aimlessly for decades. No commitments. No demands. But my vacation ends on a certain day. So while I look forward to the break for weeks in advance, as soon as it is underway, I am instantly mourning the fact that it will be over soon. Each day closer to the end.
I console myself by recounting C.S. Lewis’s observation that the pain of parting is connected to the joy of the experience—that the two feelings cannot be separated. That good can only be understood through the bad. Lewis was talking about human relationships and the grief of losing someone close, but I think it fits a lot of scenarios— even the more mundane, like vacations.
Vacations also require shifting duties and responsibilities—so that the machinery of your life continues to spin in your absence. People must be notified. Schedules adjusted. Preparations made. Emergency contacts arranged. The bits that get overlooked must be fixed upon return. The anxiety it engenders potentially erases the point of the vacation.
Then there is superstition. The last time we went away was in March of 2020. We had barely set foot in Belfast—preparing to watch a Giants game in which a former Dukes player, Curtis Leonard, was serving as a celebrated shut-down defenceman—when the world began shutting down due to COVID. The Giants’ season ended the day we arrived. We didn’t see a game. Justin Trudeau ordered us home. The airline company demanded extortion rates to get an early flight back. Then two weeks of quarantine.
Another vacation decision, however, brought us to the County. In 2000 we rented a house on Adolphus Reach on the other side of the ferry. We had never taken three weeks of vacation in a row. It required superstructures of organization and planning to pull this off. We loaded computers, modems, printers, scanners, fax machines along with luggage, foam noodles and inflatable swans into the minivan.
The first week was spent working. Intently. We set up the gear and acted as though we were still at our desks in Toronto. Meeting deadlines. Turning around copy. Managing folks 200 kilometres away.
The second week we eased up a bit. I let the staff in Toronto figure things out on their own. I was available for calls and telephone meetings, but I was beginning to decouple from the fray. In the third week, I decided they were on their own. I awoke to my surroundings. To the place around me.
It was revealing. People here went home at 5 p.m. Saw their kids every day. They mowed their own lawn. Painted their fence. Changed their oil. Weekends were their own. Folks were living their lives.
I enjoyed our life in the city—the challenges, the competition, the adrenaline of the deal flow. It was exhilarating. I was not yearning for anything else. I was readying our resources for the next transaction. The next challenge.
It wasn’t until that final week on Adolphus Reach that I realized that this existence—rewarding as it was—had largely displaced the more prosaic aspects of life. The following autumn, Kathleen noted that 11 weeks had slipped by in which I hadn’t seen my children awake at home. She would bring them to the office on Sunday mornings so that we could go out for brunch. It is how we managed.
Increasingly, in quieter moments, my mind kept drifting back to Prince Edward County. To the dads pushing their kids on a swing on a late afternoon. To neighbours stopping to chat on the main street.
Three years and one false start later, we purchased a home in Wellington. Technology had improved sufficiently that it was easier to work and commute to the city by 2003. But then the opportunity to buy the Times came along. We had to make a decision—half city-half County or full commitment. We opted for something that more closely resembled real life. I have no strong conviction that one path was better than another—but this one still feels right to me.
Leaning again on C.S. Lewis: “The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.”
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