The Provincial Towns You Jog 'Round

When I was in high school and college, I obviously got a spring break, but I never once took a "spring break." It was risky and more than a little work to break into the locked classrooms and continue attending classes, but it was worth it just to avoid triggering my social anxiety by accidentally having a good time in a crowd of people. Plus, even though none of the professors would show up that week and none of the lights were on, I did learn a few important things, like how campus security are really, really reluctant to use the guns they carry. Well, if you're a white kid at least.

My own kids don't seem quite as afflicted as their old man. I've seen them out in public, talking (out loud!) to people in groups larger than two, so they're already way ahead of me when I was their age. By the time they get to college, I'm sure their spring breaks will be the typical ones I used to watch on MTV when I was a teenager. This was the early 1990s though, when everything was so XTREME and the handheld camera work so forwardly aggressive, I once got syphilis right through the TV screen. At least I think it was through the TV. Public transportation was also kind of a crapshoot back them, epidemiologically speaking.

While they're still not total slaves to their biological procreative imperatives, I've been using spring breaks to whisk the boys off to exotic locales throughout these United States in an effort to further their educations as human beings, broadening their horizons by exposing them to different customs and accents and cultures and subcultures, mostly by trying to figure out what kind of weird shit passes for pizza in these places. I'm astonished by the variation and most of it is fine, but just a quick shout-out: get your shit together, Detroit. It's not culturally significant just because you cut it into squares. Chicago goes out of their way to try to sell us all what is essentially a tomato birthday cake and call it "pizza." That's the bar. Step your game up.

We're going somewhere this year, leaving in about a week. Most of the prep work is done. Now I'm in that phase where I don't really have anything left to do, so I feel like I've forgotten everything. It also dredges up a lot of anxieties about doing it wrong, or missing out. I'm still haunted by New Orleans, where we went two years ago. We were there for four days. We did a lot of great things and it's an indelible memory, but I can't help feeling we missed a lot. Sure, we saw the French Quarter and the French Market. We watched the Mississippi loll past us and empty into the gulf. We saw Spanish moss and stilt houses on the bayou and ate alligator,* all the things you're supposed to do. But mostly I kick myself for not seeing the Lower Ninth Ward or the Garden District or a former slave plantation. I'm an historian by training, so I know that you haven't actually learned anything about a city if you don't leave slightly angry and depressed.

If I'm honest with myself, though, the anxiety isn't about the time I have on the ground in any of the places I visit. It's in realizing that, with my oldest one a junior this year, heading toward the last summer he'll have as a high school student, it's all the time that's running out, on my time with them as children, on the state of our relationship as it is, and the culmination of a process that will definitely end with him (and the other two within the next four years) moving out and leaving me here alone to die. Eventually. Not just from them moving out. That would be a touch melodramatic, even for a Catholic.

No, this spring break is a chance to really savor all the notes and flavors of fatherhood at the close of its first (infants) and second (kids who will not leave me alone) stages, standing under the transom of the third (kids who leave me, alone). I've seen them develop into the proto-men they are, intervening where necessary, observing where prudent, and from all of this, if I've taken away one thing from the experience, it's this: MORTALITY? NO, THANK YOU.

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*It had been killed and cooked, of course. Ironically, the chance to eat the live ones cost extra. I assume for insurance purposes.