What I Did Over Summer Vacation

Not a lot, honestly. 

That’s not true—just not what I had in mind to do. I had great plans for a sabbatical project and some travel and a last hurrah of a summer before my institution converts from a quarter system to a semester system next year, and we go back to school in mid-August, rather than late September. 

I did do some writing. I did do some reading. But everything else went haywire. 

My mother passed away in April. It was a long time coming, and I expected it, I think, every day for the last six years or so, except the day it happened. I have been dreading phone calls for years, especially from anything looking medical, but for some reason, this time when I picked up the phone, it was the farthest thing from my mind. I actually was thinking, “Oh, it must be time for a quarterly review.”

“Hello, Ms. Baker. This is ______.  I’m calling to inform you of your mother’s death.” 

First of all, who says that? Shouldn’t she ask me to sit down, or say she has some bad news? Eesh. I did sit down. Abruptly. The breath I let out was a sigh and a moan and a balloon fluttering around in my chest. 

No. Not now. Not like this. When my father passed away, I was a thousand miles away, and I got the call that if I wanted to say goodbye, I should come right down. I couldn't, of course, but they tried. Where was that call this time, when I was twenty minutes away? 

This time it was over in a moment. Years of anguish, as she battled Paranoid Schizophrenia, winning some days--losing ground, most days. After years in her convalescent hospital, after more than a year on hospice, and after being completely blind and not particularly noticing, she had only clothes and a few stuffed animals in her possession. I donated them to the convalescent hospital. They didn’t even need me to come down. 

All there was left to do was wait for the death certificates and the cremains, both of which would be mailed. “Thank you. Have a nice day. Very sorry for your loss.”

I have been responsible for my parents for the last ten years. Dad had dementia and passed away a year and a half before Mom. Because I had been mourning them for so long, I thought it wouldn’t hit me so hard. It didn’t hit. It sucked. 

It sucked the life out of me--all my energy, all my emotion. I couldn’t think or feel or cry or yell. I watched more tv this summer than I have in the last ten years. And those things I said I’d do—I forgot what they were. All my plans involved thinking, and I just didn’t have thinking in me. 

I read novels. I watched Netflix. I filled my head with other stories, until I was ready to tell my own. I’m ready now. And being ready to tell my story means I’m ready to work again. I’m ready for the fall quarter. I’m a chapter away from that book being done. I’m taking a fiction writing workshop and looking for an agent. 

There are stories to be told about my mom now, and I’ve started spinning some out for my kids. That will continue, now that it makes my heart swell, rather than deflates me, to talk about her, now that she is an exhalation, a soul free in the ether. Deep breaths, deep breaths. Life flows on.   

“I’m going on an adventure!”

This spring I’m on sabbatical. It’s my second, and I continue to have mixed feelings about it.  Especially during finals week, when my charming students are their most charming, fussing mildly about whether or not I’ll be at graduation.  This sort of thing compounds my regret.  That, and I really miss teaching. 

But I’m going on an adventure.  It’s not a literal journey--that was last weekend, when I dragged everyone out of bed at 5:00 on a Saturday to drive three hours in to the desert to see the Superbloom at Anza-Borrego State Park. I’m often kicking my family into that sort of adventure.  Let’s drive a thousand miles to Yellowstone! Let’s take a train to Seattle! They’re lucky this weekend was only a day trip.  But it was beautiful. We took lots of pictures, and we took a long look at what happens when the best circumstances happen in the least likely of places.

My sabbatical will not be that kind of adventure, though.  I’m not going to London to work in the British Library or to Paris to look at Unicorn tapestries, or even on a journey to the Lonely Mountain, like Bilbo Baggins, whose quote I stole for my title.  I’m going on an entirely mental adventure; the farthest I’m planning on is a café with wifi and good tea, and maybe a library or two.

I’m starting by giving myself the gift of reading some books I’ve been putting off.  It is the eternal plight of the English major never to have enough time to read what we want to.  I do have the enviable position of assigning books I want to read for class, but that does take away a little bit of the self-indulgent delight of reading something just because it’s cool. On my bookshelf next to the comfy chair, there is a modest pile that will prime the pump, as it were, and put me in the mood for writing my own fiction. 

Then the real adventure begins.  I have great plans.  Finish one book, write supplementary teaching materials and a book proposal, and start the reading and drafting for the next one. It’s a good time to start a new project, what with the world waking up and showing its most brilliant colors and tempting us to believe things can be more beautiful than ever we thought.  I hope it inspires you to do something brave too!  Happy Spring!