But...That's Not a Vacation

My sister-in-law is a very smart girl.

First of all, she reads "My Masonic Apron," which only goes miles to prove that very point, as well as to illustrate deftly that she is a lady of a most discerning literary palate.

On Friday, she returned from a trip to Morocco with two of her friends. She telephoned her mother to let her know that she had returned and, when she heard that my wife and I were staying at her parent's house from the 25th-28th, she asked to speak to me.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi," I said, as one does in these situations.

"What are you doing there?" she asked.

"Well, um, we're... um... on... vacation," I muttered as three dogs collided into each other in a noisy, furry hurricane on the kitchen floor beneath my feet.

"But... that's not a vacation," my sister-in-law observed.

Having now successfully lived through it, I can wholeheartedly agree that, no, it isn't.

We tried to keep it sane. Really, we did. Instead of staying at this house of massive insanity and emotionally stifled instability, we positioned ourselves to stay, with one of our dogs, at "the cottage," which isn't really a cottage at all. It's a crappy two-bedroom house with hollow-core doors and a vom-yellow dishwasher from the Johnson administration that my mother-in-law purchased for, well, I don't know. For some reason. Day One went reasonably well. However, that funny little blizzard came to say "hello" on Day Two, and it necessitated an absolutely terrifying drive from Providence, R.I., to the cottage in Fall River, M.A., to collect our belongings, and our dog, and bring all back to the crazy house so that we wouldn't be stuck at the cottage with nothing to consume but pickles, napkins, and our own feet.

Being a conservative fellow with a preservation instinct carefully honed by years of being attended to by a neurotic Jewish mother, I have only been in precious few circumstances where I truly believed that death could come at any moment. The drive to and from The Cottage was one of those times. The roads were incredibly treacherous, the visibility was, well, who are am I kidding-- there wasn't any visibility, and my wife was, um, close to hyperventilating in the passenger seat. The scariest bit, I have to admit, was the last stop sign before arriving at The Cottage. It's where the road you're on T's into the road that runs directly parallel to the river. The one that was, at that moment, absolutely tempestuously roaring. The one into which, had I not been traveling at 7 miles-per-hour and had our car not been equipped with anti-lock brakes, we would have plunged into, frozen in, and drowned, making for a very un-Christmasy obituary.

But we didn't die.

We didn't go to Heaven, or Hell. Just the Purgatory of my in-laws' house.

The place where you are not permitted to be sad, or angry, or disappointed, or even in a slight funk, where feelings of even the slimmest negativity or reality are mitigated and negated to death. Where the cure for the mopes is baking cookies at 1 a.m.-- for nobody in particular, just because that is what must be done. Where you must be forced to go skiing even though you have just spent half-an-hour digging a two-inch-long splinter out of your toe and can barely walk.

Where you have to be as cute and as quiet as the window curtain fabric.

If we had been having any fun up here, I would have felt inordinately guilty about the fact that my father was lumbered back in Pennsylvania with caring for our other dog that we left behind but, as I told him in a text message, "There is no fun happening up here."

And as he so artfully put it in a text back:

"Think about all the people who had great xmas day only to find out they can't get home... winter is shit... The same every year ...Just b safe."