One of the things that amazes me the most about parenthood is how often my children tell me that they are bored. The lack of something to do seems to be a common lament, and while I have some hazy memory of days of having nothing to do, that certainly is not the case now. I suffer from the opposite problem: There is always something to do, even if I don’t exactly want to do it. Someone has to scale the smelly slopes of Mount Laundry and go to work and mow the grass and unload the dishwasher and pay the bills and feed the dog. And at the end of the day, that someone — and by someone, I mean “me” — collapses into bed and tries to read a book. The effort is sincere, but the progress often is not: A few pages in, I find the words blurring and an entirely different plot swirling in my dreamy mind, until I am awakened by a book falling on my face. Knowing that this happens not every so often, but every night, is a strong incentive for never buying a hardback book, lest I suffer a broken nose.

But Chris and I are on vacation this week, and I have made it my mission to cultivate a little boredom. There is a lot to be said for the highlight of your day to be meeting a friend for lunch. There may be even more to be said for snacks on the porch, overlooking the ocean, precisely at 5 p.m., to include some good cheese and fig preserves and crackers. And there is possibly everything to be said for catching up on all of the reading that it is nearly impossible to do in daily life.

I still manage to read a fair amount, but oh how I miss the focused reading of my younger years. I try to read vicariously through my children, but that is a fool’s errand. They read for school, and rarely for pleasure, and they are probably tired of finding books on their beds with a note telling them that I thought they’d enjoy it. What does a 47 year-old woman know of teenagers?

This is a fair question. Lately, I’ve wondered what a 47 year-old woman knows of life. Books used to be so simple, so free of entanglements, in my younger years. On this vacation I have read The Catcher in the Rye; Manhood for Amateurs, a collection of essays on fatherhood by Michael Chabon; and (so far) half of Wild by Cheryl Strayed. The combination has been a potent one-two-three punch. I last read Catcher three decades ago, where I felt to the bones Holden Caufield’s raging against phonies and crumby situations. But as I shut it yesterday, I was overcome by sadness for Holden’s parents, having lost one child to leukemia and finding themselves losing another to a massive nervous breakdown. Manhood was a good follow-up, with its assurances of the inevitable failings of parenthood and the fumbling occasioned by having no idea of what to do at any given moment. (My biggest surprise in becoming a parent was realizing how much my parents must have hated to discipline me; I always assumed that they loved it. My second biggest surprise was the dawning realization that my parents had absolutely no idea of what they were doing, either, and spent massive amounts of time winging it. Chabon’s essays capture the latter feeling to a T.) And Wild has broken my heart. I found myself at snack time — oh, sacred snack time! — bawling over the author’s account of losing her mother, the raw pain of a heartbroken child. (I ate more good cheese and fig preserves to console myself, trust me, but I still had a good cry.)

This was perhaps not the smartest trifecta of books for vacation, where (if I’m being honest) I came to try to forget my parenting obligations. I had all of these great notions of being my own person and doing exactly what I wanted, unabated for an entire week. And then the calls and texts came, carrying requests for girlfriend advice and laundry pointers, updates on the time with grandparents and cousins. And beyond these deliberate intrusions have been the little, constant reminders of my children. Prior trips, snippets of conversations, funny memories, outlandish clothes, my daughter’s newly pink hair, and even my nagging them to read — they all play in this continuous highlight reel in my brain. All with this doomsday clock ticking in the background: my son leaves for college in about a year, where he will no longer be physically present in my day-to-day life.

I could really use some more snacks right about now.

On the whole, it is good. I am pleased to report that I have let myself get a little restless,  a little bored on this vacation, and that I have largely done what I wanted. But it all feels a little bittersweet, since what I apparently want to do is stop the clock and have more time with the kids while they are young. To fold their clothes and pack their lunches and listen to their problems and know that they will be walking in the door after school, waiting for me to get home from work. In a lot of ways, this whole summer feels like a practice run — our son has been gone, and for most of the time, it’s been Chris, our daughter, and me — and this vacation seems like a harbinger for when even she leaves home. I remind myself that it’s no good to miss them in advance, and to squeeze every drop out of our family’s last year together.

Time marches on. There are books to be read. There are things I remember, and more things that I am going to remember.

ALC

Chris and I are going on vacation next week, and I am practically giddy with excitement. For the third year in a row, we are going to a little shack right on the beach at Saint Simons Island. When I say “little shack,” do not think I’m being modest and conjure up a charming, perfectly decorated jewel box of a cottage — oh no, it is actually a little wooden shack with a bedroom, a bathroom, another room, and a small porch that overlooks the ocean. We have planned full days of nothing, punctuated by barbecue, fried seafood, and cheap beer. (What is it about middle age that makes one food-obsessed?) During the heat of the day, I will sit on one of the two chairs on the porch and read one of the many books that I will bring until I get sleepy, and then I will take a nap.

The little shack is a far cry from vacations of yore, when Chris and I would go to splendid resorts in the Caribbean, days packed with windsurfing and scuba diving and snorkeling and boating. My greatest regret from those trips is that I decided not to go to Europe for vacation and elected instead to vacation with Europeans. At a resort in Saint Lucia — with a cottage bigger than my law school apartment with its own small pool, and a thatched shelter of our own right on the beach — I overheard a young boy announce loudly in a posh British accent, “I just adore holiday on Bali!” Oh, I feel you, Nigel. At an old Rockefeller resort in St. John — with a tabby shower featuring conch shells in the walls and a private garden just outside our door — there were no room phones, and lacking cell phones then, intrusions from the outside world were handled with a perfectly typed note on heavy linen stationery. On that vacation, Chris ripped open a creamy envelope to read, “Please call the office, sir. It is urgent.” (It wasn’t.) But those vacations are but a memory, and I attribute their absence to two things: my son and my daughter.

My children have not been a money-making proposition. When they were small, Chris kept a tidy stack of one dollar bills in a drawer.  While it made him look like he frequented strip clubs at an alarming rate, he actually doled out the money for the children’s school lunches, fees, rewards, bribes, and snacks at the pool. As the children have gotten older, the face value of the bills has gotten higher, to the extent that it is impossible to get a away without at least a $20 loss. In the technological age, it is shockingly easy to part ways with money. It begins with a text (Mom, I need money), continues with a quick jaunt to online banking to transfer funds into one of their accounts, and ends with a direct hit to the parental fisc. (Frankly, I would prefer more ceremony in the dissipation of my fortune, and I occasionally threaten to flick $20 bills from my hands and yell “Make it rain. MAKE IT RAIN!,” as my children scramble for the falling bills.) But they are lovely and grateful children, unfailingly polite, and they always say thanks. And I am (almost) always happy to oblige. It is a pleasure to provide for them. But still — things like fancy Caribbean vacations are dim memories.

There is a memory from one of those vacations that is not at all dim. I revisit it often, in fact. Chris and I had rented a motorboat to explore St. John, and in one of the bays, we stopped for a moment to check a map, get our bearings, have some water, and change drivers. Near us was a large sailboat. As we sat in our small boat, an older couple, probably in their 60s, jumped over the side and into the water. We then saw two parcels thrown in rapid succession from her hands, and one from his, and plop, plop, plop, their bathing suits landed on the deck of their sailboat. And for a moment, the couple swam naked and happy in the deep blue sea, sometimes floating and sometimes bathing and almost always laughing, until they sauntered up the ladder onto their deck and wrapped in towels.

My 28 year-old self could hardly believe it. They were naked! And other people could see them! And this didn’t bother them one bit. Clearly, I was not in Moultrie any more. It was the first sense I got of the sheer relief of growing older, with its loosening of care and its love of pleasure. And in the almost 20 years that have unspooled since that moment — two decades in the blink of an eye, the snapping of fingers — I have thought a lot about the joy of traveling light with your companion to a beautiful place, how simple true pleasure can be, and the comfort of feeling stripped down to your essence.

So I think that my upcoming vacation, the one in a little shack by the ocean, is fitting for me these days. There is not a lot of pretense there. It is clean and comfortable, and the pleasures are simple: sleeping when I am tired, eating when I am hungry, reading, walking, swimming in warm water, drinking cold beer. Traveling light with my companion.

ALC

P.S. — Several of you lately have taken the time to speak with me about the writing and offer words of encouragement. Thank you! It means a lot to me.

I tell my children that they will understand just how much I love them when and if they have children of their own. I am confronted with the truth of this statement on a daily basis, and now that they are teenagers, I sometimes feel that I should call my own parents and apologize. I hear my younger self echoed in some of the things that they say to me, and I remember saying those things to my parents, and I cringe. But instead of a blubbering call to mom or dad, barely eking out the words “I’m sorry,” I call and say things like “I’m fine,” and “how are you,” and “things have been pretty quiet lately.” In addition to regular calls, I send cards on holidays and the occasional gift.

I screwed up on Father’s Day this year. I blame Congress, the body that set Mother’s Day on the second Sunday of May and Father’s Day on the third Sunday in June. Apparently our elected representatives in the early days of the 20th century cared nothing for symmetry and order, for if they had, Father’s Day would have been on the second Sunday of June. It is a trap for the unwary, albeit the unwary who are a little type A. So I hustled to get a card in the mail in time for June 14, and I called my father and left a message and received in return a text message congratulating me for being the first (by far) of his children to wish him a happy Father’s Day. Which is actually on June 21.

To be fair, and taking the long view, I was the very first of his children to wish him a happy Father’s Day: I am the oldest of three, and with my July birthday, Dad first started celebrating Father’s Day in 1969. I remember early gifts — socks, hankerchiefs, and (my favorite) soap-on-a-rope, as if my father could never keep up with soap in the shower or feared a prison stint. Perhaps the high point in gift-giving came when I decided to scuplt a clay “likeness” of his face during arts and crafts in sixth grade. It was a “likeness” of my father if my father had been the missing link. It was enormous and round and heavy and functioned for a short period of time as a door stop, until some mysterious and wayward accident took it completely out of my parents’ room. I still have not been provided with a satisfactory explanation about its disappearance.

The “likeness,” the socks, the hankerchiefs, and even the soaps-on-ropes hardly seem like fair tribute to a man who fostered my love of sports, would amuse me by standing on his head, gave me my sense of humor and my coloring, and in one boiled peanut and clenched jaw-filled afternoon at an abandoned airfield, taught me how to drive — on a four-speed manual transmission, no less. More so than anyone else in this world, my dad assured me that I could be whatever I wanted to be when I grew up — even a girl for president, dad? Yes, even a girl for president — and took me for exactly who I am. Before free-range parenting was all the rage, he took me on trips with him, and while he attended meetings, set me loose and let me explore. When I got married, I barged through the church doors like a bull out of chute, only to have him pat my hand and tell me to enjoy the moment. On the walk, I teared up and wondered if my father had several other (secret) daughters that he had married off before me. He knew exactly what to do and exactly what to say. (And my favorite photograph of him is one after the wedding, where the sweet sadness and the clear ending of a chapter in his life are apparent.)

But one thing that was not apparent to me until recently was the virtue of his advice. If you complained about a situation or a person to my mother, she was immediately on your side, proposing changes, calling for instant action, and decrying unfairness. This was rewarding, what you wanted to hear. But dad would always hear you out and listen and suggest how to navigate the situation in which you found yourself. (A few weeks ago, on one of our regular calls, I was telling dad about everything that was going wrong right now, and he gave me this advice, cadged from his favorite surgery professor: All bleeding eventually stops. And this was just the right thing to say.) When I hit 23, he declared that I was old enough to start saving for retirement, so I did. His advice on happiness? You are the captain of your own ship. He stressed the fleeting nature of life, and having been a country doctor for a number of years, he knew how illness, disease, and tragedy could set in when least expected. He told me not to be afraid of change. And through the years, I have seen my dad happily marry my stepmother, change careers, change states, change how he lives. At 70, he lives a life that makes him very happy, spending most of his days tramping around his farm with two crazy dogs, chopping wood, planting a garden, harvesting food, driving a tractor, going to sleep tired, and waking up every morning to do it again. I think it is great.

So here you go, Dad, almost 47 years in the making, and courtesy of two teenagers of my own: I get how much you love me, and it is almost overwhelming. I am sorry for my selfishness and the many unkindnesses often unique to children, and I am paying you back by letting my children take me for granted until they, too, have this epiphany. While I may not have truly gotten your advice when I was younger, I now appreciate the long view: Your advice prepared me for getting older, and (as I always say) you’re older a lot longer than you are young. I listened, I learned, and I find myself telling my children many of the same things.

And more to the point on this Father’s Day (which is this Sunday, not last Sunday), I promise never, ever again to render your “likeness” in clay or present you with soap-on-a-rope. It’s the least I can do. Instead, I have taken your advice once again: You always told me to use my words, so I have.

ALC

I am on a Greyhound bus right now, and I am delighted to report that the man next to me does not smell like a stew of boiled cabbage and dirty diapers. Instead, he smells of Old Spice deodorant, Dove soap, and clothes laundered by someone who cares. It is good that he smells good – we are sitting very close – and as I write this, he nudges me and smiles. I smile back, since in addition to smelling good, he is very handsome. And he is my husband.

We are coming back from Atlanta, and we are taking the bus for several reasons. It is cheap, and so am I. It requires neither of us to drive Interstate 16, a 167 mile section of interstate that runs entirely intrastate from Savannah to Macon, a boring boondoggle of a road apparently due to the efforts of former highway commissioner Jim L. Gillis, for whom it is named. I once asked a long-time Georgia politician about Gillis – namely, exactly what had he done to deserve his name attached to such a dull stretch of highway? – and after explaining Gillis’ residence in southeast Georgia and role in Georgia’s transportation history, the politician told me this: A cat can’t go to the bathroom in Treutlen County due to all the asphalt. (Is it true? Who knows. But what an explanation!) And the bus is an adventure, and I love an adventure.

I have learned a few things about buses on this trip. The driver honks briskly, exactly twice, when he leaves a station. If you are running ever so slightly late, and the doors are shut, don’t bother. I watched a confident, smiling man in Savannah approach the bus, wave his ticket at the driver, and practically knock on the closed doors. Whereupon the driver threw the bus in reverse and drove off. The man no longer smiled. I watched a frightening looking man chase the bus onto a busy road in Macon, trying to hit the bus with his suitcase, and the bus continued on. No dice. On both legs of the trip, there have been screaming babies and that person who talks too loudly on the phone. There has been disdain – Seriously. You’re taking the bus? – most notably from my mother, whose voice sounded as if she’d smelled something bad. And there have been stories, so many stories of people who have ridden the bus through the years. Jamie told me about the 18 hour bus trip from Augusta to Mobile to a funeral. Tanner amused me with a tale of his last bus trip, when he sat next to a man who over the course of several hours spoke very seriously, convinced of the fact that he was the archangel Gabriel. And another friend told me of riding the bus as a teenager after his parents’ divorce – that’s how they arranged visitation, and that hardly seemed fair to him at the time.

But on the whole, the bus offers the hum of wheels, the chance to write, the ability to sit in companionable silence next to Chris – all while bearing in mind the real reason I’m on a bus: Chris and I went to see the Rolling Stones in Atlanta last night.

Four days ago, Chris and I celebrated our 23rd wedding anniversary. I got married when I was 23, meaning that I now have been married for half of my life. It is a marker worth celebrating, and celebrating in grand fashion. Yet traditional lists of anniversary gifts are no help for the 23 year mark. For the first ten years, Emily Post or the wedding industry (whoever the heck that is) or someone’s bored grandmother had compiled a list of suggested gifts to match the years, oddities like wood or paper or cloth or copper. (Frankly, I would prefer some flowers, a meal, a nice bottle of wine, but no one asked me.) The list grows silent from years 11 to 24, resuming on the 25th anniversary – the silver anniversary. Left to my own devices, I declared the 23rd anniversary as the Rolling Stones anniversary, which explains our current circumstances.

I am a Stones fan in the way that everyone is a Stones fan: I know every word to every Stones song I hear on the radio. They have been a band longer than I have been a person, and going to a Stones concert seems like a rite of passage that I somehow missed. Neither of us is getting any younger – the Stones are in their 70s, I am in my 40s – and if there was ever a time to go, that time was now. When I discovered that they would be four hours away, three days after our anniversary, I – shameless opportunist that I am – told Chris that this was how we were celebrating. And I don’t quite recall if Chris agreed or if Chris simply didn’t protest, but the die was cast.

It has been a good year in our marriage. A few years ago, we hit a point in our relationship that I can only describe as a patch of black ice. You know it’s on the road, you hear about it, and you deny its existence until it’s almost too late. Indeed, everything seemed to be rolling along just fine, until we found ourselves skidding wildly out of control, unsure of where we would land and whether we would survive. As things careened along for too long, I found myself thinking, “If I can just get out of this alive, I’ll . . . I’ll . . .I’ll . . . .”

I had no idea how to complete this sentence.

Help, as it often does, arrived in the most unlikely of forms: Friedrich Nietzsche – an unmarried man with strange personal relationships and insanity occasioned by syphilis, that Friedrich Nietzsche. But he wrote that it is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship, that makes unhappy marriages. I am (apparently) a slow learner, for until I read this quote, it had not occurred to me that marriage is, in many ways and perhaps primarily, an uber-friendship. So I talked to Chris, and we beat our passive-aggressive swords into plowshares, and declared a detente. At first the friendship campaign involved a lot of bicycle rides around the neighborhood – what else do best friends do, especially at the beginning of summer? – and then blossomed into gardening and hot tubbing and football watching and many acts of unconscious kindnesses. I feel more like the best version of myself these days, and I think Chris does, too, and I realize now that I was a complete moron not to figure out the importance of marital friendship without the aid of some long-dead philosopher.

So thanks to Nietzsche and bike rides and the Greyhound bus, Chris and I went to see the Rolling Stones, a band that is a singing, playing, strutting testament to the power of longevity. The concert was a spectacle – the costumes, the stage, the crazily talented back-up singers and musicians, the fireworks, the fans. (A spectacle of the fan variety sat directly in front of us: a very pretty girl in her early 20s and a plain-looking man who was at least 50. At first we thought that he was her father. Then we realized that he was her daddy – and seemingly very uncomfortable about it.) It was a fantastic business proposition for the Stones – with every $11 beer and $40 T-shirt sold, I could practically hear the meter whirring, the coins in the register, the calls to a broker to buy another Caribbean island. It was a lot of fun – tens of thousands of people singing “woo, woo” during “Sympathy for the Devil,” dancing in the aisles, cheering, clapping, smiling. And at the heart of it all were four mates in their 70s, guys who had played together for 50 years, whose moves may have contracted over time, who may take a little longer to recover between concerts, but whose joy at standing on a stage together was apparent. The Stones had survived death, drug habits, strong personalities, creative differences, and the disco era, and here they were.

And there we were, Chris and I, maybe not the same people that we were 23 years ago – really, are any of us the same people that we were 23 years ago? – but having survived parenthood and business ownership and houses and dogs and bills and all the slings and arrows of a long-term relationship, happy to be standing there together, celebrating our Rolling Stones anniversary.

ALC