Every year for 17 years now, we drive less than 2 hours across alligator alley from Ft Lauderdale to Naples on Florida's gulf coast, for occasional family vacations. Here I am again on a spring break getaway vacation with Elizabeth and our three kids, now ages 17, 16 and 11. We tend to stay in the same Naples resort - especially since Elizabeth is big on family traditions, and by now, the kids are hooked on the place. What's a little bittersweet, though, is the fact that it's all so fleeting. Just the other day, it seems, they were in portable playpens that we'd haul in the suburban, and then with the cribs you'd order with the room, we'd have both babies in dueling cribs while we pretended we'd gotten away from it all. The portable playpens on the beach and all the Coppertone and sunscreen later, we'd try to read a book or write about their lives in those store-bought book journals ... and now 17 years later, I have few memories ... except for the fact that I do know we did that.
The enormity of the financial pressures to make it all happen - perhaps coupled with the fact that I killed too many brain cells, clouds most of whatever memories remain. Thank God for photos and all those journals I kept- therein lies the elusive memory, all the "precious moments," memorialized for all posterity, and I suppose I'll have to wait until I slow down enough to read those keepsakes and remind myself of what they did and said, what we all did and laughed about as a family, the real deal...
Sitting here along the gulf while Elizabeth sleeps aside me on her towel - listening to the laughter of other children playing in the sand around us, and hearing the sounds of the waves washing ashore just a few feet away, make me wonder where it all went and why it blew by so fast.
Thank God for those journals, as my mental archives are nowhere near as good at retaining much at all anymore. I can almost hear the good people like my wife and my mother both saying, "Be here now, and quit thinking about what you can't remember," but for whatever reason right now, I can't help thinking about the relative meaninglessness of life, aside from the love we have for one another, and of course the Father's love for us, and how we might show all this love to one another as often as possible.
Then I get to thinking, "Why is all this so obvious to me here and now, two hours away from my typical routine and reality?" "Should I really need to spend a bunch of money for beachside cottages or family getaways, to come to grips with this huge and better reality?" Regardless, I then make a vow to myself: I commit to hugging my kids more often, dialing in to whatever little things they're doing, remembering the names of their friends, whatever it takes, to "be here now." When they were little, I was so busy videotaping and photographing and chronicling their activities and lives, that I may have missed the real moments that I was attempting to capture - and who goes back and looks at all these photos and videotapes anyway?! It's sadly true that I may not have experienced those moments the way I could have - but no more.
I put away the camera and its focus feature and lock in with the better lens, my own mind ... and I commit to focus and enjoy the experience. God willing, I'll get to create and enjoy these new memories even more ... and when they're out of the house (seemingly before I blink!), there will be plenty of time to go back and read the old journals and get all melancholy again - or better yet, I'll type up the old scripts and put 'em in a legacy book for each of them to have as keepsakes for their own kids one day. That shouldn't be bittersweet; instead, it'll hopefully just be sweet.
© 2007 John P. Contini
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