Book Review: Vacation

Soooo… we went on a cruise.  There was a lot of music but also a lot of time between flying there… waiting to board…hanging out in the room and reading before bed.  Lots of time to read.  I finished a 2016/2017 book “The Underground Railroad” which deserves its own review but I had also picked up for the trip a book appropriately called “Vacation” by a woman named Deb Olin Unferth.  The book had been recommended by a podcaster I follow who does the “Welcome To Nightvale” and “I Only Listen To The Mountain Goats” podcasts and he said he picked up  this book a couple of years ago after he moved to New York and he thought he could write.  Then he read the book and realized, “Oh… I can't write at all and I have a lot of work to do.”  I thought, that as very high praise and ordered it immediately and I was not disappointed.

The book takes place at various points in NYC, Syracuse NY, Coney Island NY, Panama and various sad, SAD places in Nicaragua.  It involves two (at least) shitty marriages and more than a handful of deeply and profoundly damaged, mundane, confused, vaguely interesting characters.  It also has a guy who untrains dolphins.  Untrains is not a word.  Good for Deb.

The concept of the book is unremarkable.  Two somewhat damaged people find each other and get married.  He thinks he has hit jackpot and she is just looking for something and hoping it is him.  It turns out not to be him.  She discovers (or thinks she discovers) something about his past (relating to his cartoonish head) and sees it as betrayal and goes off the rails with her own abhorrent behavior.  He doesn’t know what happened but discovers it, and ultimately leaves her to find an old college chum (who his wife might have been following around for 4 plus months). The chum is supposed to be in Syracuse (but is not) and then he follows him to Nicaragua (where he isn’t) and loses his job trying to get to the beautiful… Corn Island.

There is another character… the daughter of the untrainer.  Searching for her father...

The story is beautifully, cleverly written.  Occasionally it verges into the dreaded “look mom no hands” cleverness with language that only comes from people who have spent too much time in writers workshops but there are some brilliant lines, brilliant dialogue and some pretty deep introspection on life, relationships and the treadmill we are all secretly just barely able to teeter forward on each day and know falling, and not breaking our neck or a list a wrist… until we do.  It was a GREAT vacation book and I will now go see what else she has written and try and consume that as well.  I think, there is a possibility she might be a great writer.  It is also an easy read at around 200 pages and that is hard to beat when on Vacation.

Spoiler Alert! It does not necesarily end with sunshine and roses.

Soooo… it has been a long time since I have written anything.  There are a number of reasons…

1. Travelling a lot:

A. Solano Beach California

B. Whitefish Montana

C. Minneapolis MN

D. Mountain View Arkansas

E. Arcadia Michigan

F. North Padre Island/Corpus Christi

2. Working a lot.  A good economy is bad for those of us in the countercyclical world and this damn 9 year recovery that Donald Trump brought us (yes, he was working on it long before elected) has made making a living a little more challenging.

3. Still hoping to perhaps be a judge and writing about politics is career limiting in that regard.

4. I have been reading a lot, “Turtles All The Way Down” by Jonathan Green, “Mrs. Fletcher” bt Tom Perotta and several others I am not recalling on this Saturday afternoon.

That means that I have a lot bottled up inside me that I would like to vomit out regarding national politics, sexual harassment/abuse, national politics, international politics, the NFL, race in America and lot of other things and the good news is that you don't have to hear about it.  Instead this little bit of emptying myself out will be devoted to becoming a grandpa at 56.

This is seriously just such a nice thing.  My son and his lovely wife Lydia presented the world with a little girl named Julia this fall...during the eclipse.  I immediately bragged tomy friends that even the sun had to hide because Julia was so beautiful.  It was an awesome day and other than a little scare sending her to the hospital with a fever, it has been better and better everyday.  We are really lucky because she is living here and Sandy now gets to watch her 3 days a week since Lydia is back to work and it is just so awesome it is embarrassing.  

This is the first thing in my life that I was expecting to be awesome and it is so much better than I expected it to be.  I mean I am the perpetual glass is ½ empty guy.  I expect things to be bad and than I am pleasantly surprised, over and over again when they are better than expected.  I know I am lucky but I prepare for the worst and expect it and then sometimes it does not disappoint.

But this… I was really thinking that this was going to be great.  I have always thought that being a grandparent would be the low hanging fruit of happiness.  I really loved being an uncle because that seemed like a good job but being a grandparent, I expected so much because this was going to be MY grandchild.  Now it is embarrassing because I do not remember being so excited about my own kids.  That was too stressful. They were my responsibility and it seemed like there were so many ways to screw them up.  SO MUCH RESPONSIBILITY!  Who needed that?  It was hard enough just to pay attention and jump through the hoops, much less actually enjoy them.  But this…

This is coming at such a nice time in life.  I feel so lucky that we started having children so relatively young that I can just kind of soak this up.  There are problems...one of them is that I (and to a lesser extent Sandy) are basically acting like this is our achievement, our accomplishment… and of course, we have nothing to do with it… and that is a fact.  The second one might be that we are forcing ourselves on Jon and Lyd a lot because we love to see her.  I think sometimes it might be too much and...I would prefer not to miss this up if possible.

In any case it slams home the blessings of family.  I am so lucky, we are so lucky so when I am looking at this year, right now it seems pretty certain to be the best one of my life.  All because of this little girl who is just learning to roll over and likely does not even recognize me. And the nice thing about it is even though I know she will have ups and downs and all the problems that the world has to offer that it is still likely to get better and better.  And who knows, maybe there are even better things to come. Not a bad attitude for a glass half full guy and a great way to look forward to 2018.  For all my friends I wish you the same experience