Vacation Lag

People used to laugh at me when I told them I'd spent my vacation, a week in July, reading detective novels in my balcony. But I used to laugh at them when they came back weary from Thailand and points beyond.

The problem with active vacations (hadn't had one in four or five years) and international travel vacations (not taken for at least a decade) is that you end up needing a vacation to recover from the vacation.

Then everything back home feels a little weird.

If you go to the southern hemisphere, as I did, you get a short period of summer, then return to the frigid north. Last weekend I went from 90 degrees Fahrenheit going into the airport at my departure point to 26 degrees F coming out at the other end. That's a 64-degree difference!

This is all to suggest that the wisdom of staying home is ever more evident.

In a minimalist lifestyle, one would read in the balcony for a few days off in summer. Go for trips on tour buses through one's own city. Go to bed when one is tired on Dec. 31st and wake up at one's usual day-off wakeup time on Jan. 1 -- which I have actually done a number of times.

One would sell one's car and walk more. One would buy more produce and cook more. One might get rid of one's cell phone (I still don't know how to answer mine, anyway).

Ommmmmmmmmmmmm ....

My Beef with Al Qaeda

I don't call them terrorists because, frankly, I am not particularly terrified of dying. As to the twin towers of the World Trade Center, loss of life aside, the buildings were a blight on the New York City skyline. So, no, my complaint about Al Qaeda is quite different.

Having just come back from a numbing 12 hours of international flight, my beef with Al Qaeda is that they've made one part of life stupidly annoying: air travel.

The stupidity isn't really their fault, of course. For that we have the stalwart men and women of the "war on terror" who are forever closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.

• 19 Al Qaedans commandeered four planes in one day? Ground all planes.
• A Brit nut tries to set fire to his sneaker on a plane? Force everyone to take off their shoes.
• Other suspected malefactors carried some kind of explosive fuel instead of cologne or toothpaste? Ban all liquids, including especially legitimate aftershave and duty-free foreign wine.
  

And so on ... per saecula saeculorum, amen. When will they start catching, trying and meting out deserved justice to the miscreants, instead of the sheepish rest of us?

The Last Time

A longtime cyberfriend announced that today she would be walking out of a classroom for the last time. She's retiring from work as a university professor. The first thought to strike me is how rare it is that we get to know that we are doing something for the last time.

There are probably hundreds, perhaps thousands, of important activities that we ceased doing without our noticing that it was the last time.

The last kiss received from or given to a certain lover, relative, friend. The last time you fed at your mother's breast, if you did at all. While most people remember the date of their last cigarette or bottle of booze, I'd doubt they recall the actual puff or sip that was their last.

Then there are those events that you may have anticipated without knowing. I distinctly remember wondering, for no reason, whether I was seeing my father for the last time on the last moment I saw him, hale and hearty, walking to his car. At the time I regarded my thoughts as oddly morbid and told no one. Several days later he was unexpectedly dead.

Yet I don't think I can recall the last lucid conversation I had with my mother. It's all very random, as folks say these days.

Think of the many lasts still ahead. When will you last go out to the movies or drive your car? Or breathe your last breath?

Do we need to be aware and know? Or is there some hidden beauty in the way parts of life simply slip away?