Lots of winters, I’ve been lucky enough to join in the migration unique to a certain subspecies of Los Angeles native where flocks of family units pick up and move five hours by oversold mechanized bird west to an abbreviated hyphen of sand in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. But I don’t mean to sound dispassionate or cynical or something, because the nagging concerns of existential meaning1 that the previous sentence might appear to have summoned kind of just slink away when that first warm blanket of air wraps you up in the middle of December, when the roars of leaf-blowers and the 101 have been traded for the soft lapping of the sea, when you first pull up to the shining white sprawl of a resort where everything from the photocopied New York Times crossword puzzles waiting at breakfast to the pool waterslide helps aid in the dissolution of whatever negative thoughts might be careening around between your ears.
Never mind that the concept of vacation as escape is turned into this sort of farce due to the feeling that all inhabitants of Southern California who travel to Hawaii during the holidays end up staying at one of three hotels within half a mile of each other on the western shore of Maui and hyper-image-conscious businesspeople/kids/vague acquaintances bump into their peers all week long, except that all the judging here goes on while everybody is half-naked. Never mind all of that; it’s totally possible to ignore the Dark Side of this scene and just chill out.
Yesterday I opened a “letter” from my mother; a perfect example of
her eccentric idea of correspondence. Bereft of card, signature, or,
God forbid, “Dear Daughter”, the envelope contained 3 newspaper
clippings – each annotated with her inimitable, looping script. To the
first clipping, a review cautioning that a new kid’s hardback called
“The Graveyard Book” may be too dark for sensitive children, my mother
had added “This sounds good!” A study exploring the effects of the
color red on both attention span and anxiety prompted this commentary:
“You know I made all red things for your cradle and crib! How to
create an obsessive compulsive?” And of course my personal favorite,
an interview in which Nadya Suleman, the recent mother of octuplets,
asserts that she wanted a family to help combat depression. In this
article the words “children” “cure” and “depression” have all been
manically underlined. Radiating a giant arrow, the newspaper’s indent
points to my mother’s own thickly inked phrase: “What an idiot!” She
may not write much, but it sure reads loud and clear.
