This is getting awfully complicated.
My wife has children in British Columbia and California. I have children in New York, Vermont, and a dot on the map of Central Pennsylvania that sounds more like the name of a school than the name of a town.
We also have siblings. Mine are in Dallas and Denver. My wife’s are in Houston and various parts of California.
Exes are part of the mix. So are in-laws.
Therefore: My wife is heading in one direction this week to be with her daughter and her sister. I’m heading in another direction to visit friends while my children spend Christmas with their mother and the in-laws.
Then, my children and I rendezvous in New York and fly west to see my sisters. After that we return to JFK, pick up my wife at LGA, and spend New Year’s Eve in NYC.
When friends inquire about my holiday plans I can tell that my synopsis of all these comings and goings makes them sorry they asked.
Except, maybe, the ones who aren’t going anywhere and feel totally vindicated.
If it were only the year-end holidays that had us dashing to and fro we could probably cope. But already we’re trying to figure out where and when we can see our families in the year ahead.
The number of moving parts involved calls to mind the New Yorker cartoon – now the title of a book — where the business exec is trying to arrange a mutually convenient time for a meeting.
“No, Thursday’s out,” he says on the phone. “How about never – is never good for you?”
Never is not good for us. We’re one of those freakish families that actually enjoy each other’s company. Or is this more common than is commonly thought?
The trope of the dysfunctional family was a necessary corrective to the idealizations of old movies and Norman Rockwell paintings. But not every family get-together is a demolition derby, either.
In the case of my own clan, the challenges are more logistical and budgetary than emotional.
Things were simpler when my parents were alive. Once their traveling days were behind them, the default holiday move was to gather at their place. Their proximity to Florida beaches was a pretty good sweetener.
That, it must be said, was before exes and in-laws, so things would have gotten complicated in any case.
To get to really simpler times we’d have to go back to when I was a kid. In those days, visiting the relatives at holiday time was a matter of crossing the Throgs Neck Bridge from Queens to the Bronx. (As a future editor I thought for certain that Throgs Neck was an egregious misspelling of Frogs Neck.)
In my family, the great spreading out began 40 years ago this week. On Christmas Eve, 1975, my crazy parents loaded up a burnt-orange Chevy wagon and fled disintegrating New York with their son, a December college graduate, as co-pilot.
The trip west was epic: High winds shredded the roof tarp in Joliet, Illinois, where I showed my wide-eyed parents a ditch that sheltered me for a few hours during my hitchhiking days.
A tire blew out in Colorado Springs. The Chevy balked at 8 below in Flagstaff, Arizona.
We have pictures of us on the rim of the Grand Canyon. We look cold.
In California, my parents briefly panicked. What had they done? They were middle-aged, middle-class people. Now they were homeless, jobless, and friendless.
They squared their shoulders and settled in. So did I. One of my sisters had already moved to Denver. The other one soon joined her. We’ve been hopping on and off airplanes at holiday time ever since.
Fortunately, air travel has gotten a lot better.
Hahaha, as Dave Barry would say. It has, in fact, gotten way worse.
Here are two modest proposals for improving the air travel experience:
- Get rid of the overhead bins. Make everyone check anything that won’t fit under a seat. People hate hanging around the baggage claim, but when a plane lands what I want more than anything in the world is to get off. Waiting at the carousel is infinitely preferable to waiting in the aisle. Which brings me to my other idea:
- Redesign the jetways so that we can get on and off via the front door, the back door and, if there is one, the middle door.
Alternatively, we could all “stay home and rest up” – my family’s stock mock response to the hectic pace of modern life. Want to chat with your near and dear ones? Call. Want to see their lovely mugs? Skype.
Except, we mammals are a touchy-feely bunch. How would we tickle each other on Skype? How sit on each other’s laps? How dance? How hug?
So we drive and we fly.
