Dad's International Sponge Circuit

(8:24:45 AM)


Been off the air for a week. A promise to myself, to write daily, and post daily, broken. Ah well, probably break it the next time I bury a parent, too. Big whup. Back at it today. Weirdly, I’m actually in Delaware, ground zero for the TeaBagger Effect, personified in Christine O’Donnell. And I could vent on that for a week or so, easy.
But my wife and I are here visiting friends, making parents’ friends into personal friends, after my father’s funeral at Arlington. I haven’t looked at the net since I posted pictures of that event, largely because every time I got to the point in the day I wanted to write, Dawn had tuned into the ‘This American Life’ site, put on the headphones, and gone to sleep. Beats hell out of sleeping pills. But since we only brought one netbook with us, I end up having to just relax, read a book (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, 5 stars) or go for a walk. Vacation. I’d almost forgotten what it was.
It’s amazing how, in just a few years, Dawn and I have gone, as a couple, from two or three multi-week vacations a year to having to sneak a week on the DelMarVa coast, using my Dad’s funeral as an excuse to get away. We’re both to blame for the change, Dawn’s school and my annoying political habits, and we’re both also subject to the duties of children to their aging parents, which have been sudden and large for both of us over the last five years. First Dawn’s, then mine. And of course, the ‘for better or worse’ clause makes hers mine, and vice versa.
Nonetheless, this scheduled but unstructured avoidance of responsibilities, this vacay, has been relaxing. A chance to remind us of how well we vacate together. Little things remind us of other vacations we took in the early years of our marriage. Conversations with all the people, friends as well as relatives, that came for Dad’s memorial, inspire us to make a better effort to get back on the travel habit. We’ve never seen Asia, or Africa. Dawn’s never seen any of England, and, well, there’s a lot of America we’ve each seen without the other, and want to share. Crested Butte, for example. And the Montana cabin Dawn built.
The folks we’re visiting (I’m at their dining room table at this moment, only one up. No, not any more, Bob just walked past to go get the morning papers,) are off in a few days for a three-week trip to Paris, perhaps my favorite place on the planet. While there, they’ll visit friends of my family’s, friends I’ve known since I was 11. These friends met those friends at our wedding.
Make friends. Travel. Introduce your friends to one another. Meet their friends, and pay attention to them, because you can learn about the world from them, and maybe you can see the world from their perspective first-hand.
My dad jokingly referred to this as his ‘sponge circuit,’ built of brothers of his, of my mom’s, professors from the many universities my dad had attended or taught at over decades, and of course, friends from politics and from the war, WWII.

Build your own sponge circuit. Go sponge of those folks for a few days. Let them come sponge off you. It’s a better, more authentic experience than hotels and travel brochures. It’s the original social network.
And it beats hell out of sitting at your computer, reading Facebook.

Done for now. The beach calls, and I must answer…
(8:55:03 AM)(9:04:16 AM)