We may live in an age of speed, of online banking and next-day shipping and intercontinental texting, but surely nothing beats the rapidity with which a person who has just been on vacation gets redevoured by regular life. Speaking as one such person, my head is still spinning. A short time ago, I was traipsing along ancient streets in a foreign country, breathing foreign fumes, thinking foreign thoughts.
That brief novelty was followed (as it is for most of us if we are lucky enough to travel), by the long and aching experience of an economy class return. A matter of hours later, the alarm was dinging, children were stirring, and the great machinery of quotidian family life was chugging back into motion.
As I staggered downstairs, already back in the traces, I caught sight of my suitcase, still unpacked. Clearly, I had in fact been away. But there remained no whiff of foreign fumes, whether of espresso or gelato or even diesel.
“What’s for breakfast?”
“I need a check for the camping trip.”
“Can you pick me up early on Thursday?”
“Will you sign this permission form?”
“I don’t know. OK, just a minute. Probably, but let me check the calendar first. And yes,” I told everyone in turn. My fellow traveler and I exchanged a jetlagged smile. The coffee pot seemed to chortle at us, as it burbled and steamed and emitted a nostalgically Italianate fragrance.
“What? We’re out of eggs!”
“I can’t find my backpack!”
“We need to bring 24 cupcakes to school tomorrow. For my class.”
Children whose parents have been away tend to be extremely bouncy immediately after their mother and father return, and it’s lovely. But since normalcy is what children crave — and what they miss most when their parents are away, even more than the parents themselves — once they have ransacked your pockets for chocolate they have every interest in putting the whole you-being-gone episode behind them as swiftly as possible.
Thus the experience of being speedily transported back into normal mode is not just a product of renewed contact with the dreaded to-do list or an unweeded garden. If you have children at home — and, I’m guessing, if you work in an office — you’re also surrounded by people who would like you to get on with things, please.
What is a returned traveler to do? You can tell your adventure stories once, but they’ll soon bore everyone but you. You can show people your photographs, but, really, you can’t expect them to get the same thrill from a hilltop snapshot of a distant city as you do, with the garden where you took the picture still in your mind’s eye. All forces, really, conspire to drive your vacation experiences too soon into the vault of memory.
There is a way to get a bit of time to think back on your travels, though I don’t recommend it. Once you’ve loaded everyone into the car that first morning back, make sure that you have a flat tire. Then, fortunate traveler, will you find yourself with an unexpected hour to scroll through memories and photographs while a nice man at the shop repairs it.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
