JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN
‘Our family’s trips orbited around a crammed station wagon that, 10 minutes into our voyage, stank of hard-boiled eggs, salami and feet’
Acouple of days after he’d returned to Montreal from his sixth-grade Christmas vacation in Las Vegas, my friend Lenny had me over to his house. Along with the dice key chain and the Circus Circus dealer’s visor, Lenny had brought back a black velvet poster of an ace of spades that he’d taped to his bedroom wall. He told me he’d won the poster at the hotel’s kiddy crap table. The lucky event, he said, inspired him to change his middle name to “Ace.” He was now Lenny Ace Rosenblatt.
Possessing the middle name Stuart, I’d always considered middle names a baptismal act of gratuitous cruelty, not something one had control over. Now that Lenny was Lenny Ace, he held himself differently. He took to calling his mother “Toots,” and when he walked to the kitchen freezer to get us Fudgesicles, he did so like a hustler on the make.
From that point on, one thing became clear: Vacations changed people. Our family vacations changed nothing. Worse, they offered solid proof that our lot was immutable. Under no circumstances would I be able to dodge the Stuartness of my fate.
Our family’s trips orbited around a crammed station wagon that, 10 minutes into our voyage, stank of hard-boiled eggs, salami and feet. Shoulder to shoulder, we drank scorching cans of cherry soda on our way to some motel with the prefix “Econo” in the name. Once there, we’d sit on the edge of the bed watching cable TV, eating more boiled eggs and basically enduring the itchiness of our own company in a location an hour and a half away from our home. And then we’d return, rundown, sweaty and a little appalled by the onions and litter box smell of our home, an odour one only became fully awakened to after three days of fresh air on the open road.
Vacations are on my mind because as my radio show draws to a close for another season and people ask me what I’m going to do with the time off, I’m compelled to say, “travel.” But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve stopped feeling the desire for it. At this point, past the mid-point, I feel like an armchair is more appealing than an airplane ticket.
If I were the titular Hobbit, the book would not have been sub-titled “There and Back Again” but merely “There.” Once at my destination, I’d mumble something about how my dogs were killing me, and find a nice retirement community where I could live out my days among the Orcs.
The world might be run by Aces but it also needs its Stuarts, those who will hold down the fort, boiling eggs, while the spoils of the world are conquered.