Our Vacations Now

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A story told on 9/8/25 at "Is This a Thing" at O'Shaugnessey's Pub, Chicago

We’ve been fellow travelers for over four decades. That is we’ve lived together, brought children into the world, co-signed mortgages, bought cars, shared recycling duty, all that. And in 45 years there’ve been a lot of vacations.

Camping trips,

Road trips,

European trips

Get-away-from-Chicago-in-the-winter trips.

A lot of them. We’ve been lucky. I was born and raised on the east coast where people didn’t travel far, or at least my family didn’t. Insular, Yankee: Everything you needed was right there on the east coast.

And then I met him, and he was a wanderer. When we were first together his idea of travel was to wake up in the morning and say, yo we’ve got three days, let’s go. And we would. It was by motorcycle back then. Around the state of Michigan, through Canada, out west, through eastern Europe. Not in three days, that last one. That took some planning and lasted 2 months. But still. He loved to travel and he taught me to. So unlike my childhood, where vacation meant long periods of boredom and whining about not having anything to do, vacation came to mean travel, movement, discovery, adventures both welcomed and not.

My partner is sick now. We don’ t travel all that much anymore.

He’s fought the good fight since he was diagnosed with renal failure 43 years ago and we’ve had decades of reprieve thanks to the blessings of two transplants (sign your donor card). The last one gave out about six years ago and he’s back to being tethered to a machine, and now the years of medicine and interventions and protocols, all that tedious hospital and doctor stuff are taking their toll.

And this year, he seems to be losing more of the ground he’s fought so hard to hold on to. It’s a kind of slow erosion: one system after another malfunctioning, tiring out, no longer responsive to all the earlier miracles that made our lives full and fruitful for so long.

Because we are at that age: retired, some money tucked away and houses emptied out of kids and responsibilities and all, many of our friends are busy taking long planned trips to Asia and Europe. Or they are hiking mountains and swimming in faraway oceans. And when the talk turns to what to do in Budapest or what the best day of the week is to snag a tent site at Yellowstone, we turn mute. We are glad for them for sure, but some jealousy is inevitable.

Later on, when we’re alone, we turn to each other and tell stories: that massive starfish we sailed over while in the Abacos, the Picasso museum in Paris, the sunsets on the beach in Costa Rica where I left my Chacos and they were swept away by morning.

Now, in the evenings, before we sleep, we tell each other these stories. We go on vacation.

Let me take you along on one of them: our first. We were in college so not a vacation. A break. Spring break. We decided to drive down to Key West .Or rather he suggested it and I said yes, the first of many yesses despite my inbred anxiety about how will we do it, where will we stay and always, we don’t have enough money to do that. Never mind, he would say, let’s just go and we’ll figure it out.

So. March 1981. Ann Arbor to Key West. He had a beige square back VW with many many thousands of miles on it. And no heat. I packed a bikini and not much else and piled on a couple sweaters under my impossibly cool blue jean jacket. I was 21 after all and newly minted in love with the man I just knew, was absolutely rock solid sure was my soul mate. After all, I’d known him for 9 or 10 weeks by then.

We took off in the Michigan darkness and it was cold. And being from the east coast I was still getting used to Midwestern distances. You can drive through Massachusetts in 90 minutes. Connecticut in 45. So Ohio was a revelation, let me tell you. I didn’t care. So no heat, not even a working radio, but we put-putted southbound down those freeways and 18 or 23 hours later we opened the windows to that blissful southern air: moist, sweet and tangy at the same time flowers and pine.

And about 50 miles north of our destination we pulled into a 7-11 for coffee. Maybe it was a Kum n Go. Probably a 7-11. The plan was to split a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup and a cup of coffee and gun it to our final destination.

Then the square back didn’t start. Nothing. Not even that click click click that tells you the starter works but the battery’s dead. It was two or three in the morning. Sunday. He was carrying his pop’s AAA card and we had a couple hundred bucks between us. Just kids as Patti so famously penned. The tow company AAA connected us to said they didn’t come on Sundays. What? AAA? The whole point of AAA was anywhere, anytime.

We spent all day Sunday in the parking lot of a 7-11 .

We opened the back hatch and laid down together and napped throughout the day. We ate cheese crackers and grapefruit juice.

During one trip to the bathroom I sat on the toilet and made myself a promise: I would not say it first. I mean we were both flying drunk on each other in that impossible to describe way that new love feels like. Now might be a good time to confess, if you haven’t caught on yet, that I’m a romantic. My teenage crushes were ferocious and frequent. I was a supercharged girl who would fall in love at a raised eyebrow or a dance move, even the rip in a pair of Levis.

But I knew I was in a whole other league here and I didn’t want to blow it. I would not, could not, say it first, even though it was oozing out of my pores: love. I love you. I’m in love with you. But then that dreaded pause after, waiting on a reply? My pores couldn’t stand that.

So I went back to the car and stayed quiet. He was sitting in the open cargo space smoking a cigarette. I joined him. We started making out. We were doing a lot of that. I laid back on my side. He spooned me. I smelled him, already locked in on his particular pheromones.

He mumbled something into the back of my neck. I couldn’t hear the words, just felt his breath on my skin.

What? I said

I’m in love with you he said.

We did get to Key West. We camped on a deserted islet with a couple of other wanderers, danced in the streets to music coming out of the bars because we couldn’t swing the cover charge. We ate conch chowder from take out windows. Swam in turquoise waters ringed by white coral beaches. Throughout those 3 precious days, I picked wildflowers and stuck them in the sun visors of the square back.

All the way home I sang to him over the sound of the engine. Every song I could conjure from my East Coast upbringing: Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor, Livingston Taylor, Kate Taylor! But it was Carole King who I sang on repeat: “Where You Lead,” “I Feel the Earth Move.” I didn’t sing her biggest hit: “It’s Too Late.”

Because it wasn’t.