Funny what I remember from that vacation back in August of 1991: snapshots with Mickey and Goofy, the way the palm trees bent low over the hotel pool. But mostly one image: my dad, ever the news hound, stationed in front of the hotel television, watching as the Soviet Union crumbled.
Mikhail Gorbachev — the guy I then knew as the old dude with the weird birthmark — stood stone-faced in front of television cameras, his uncertain future behind his eyes. I remember my mother actually yanking my father away from the TV set, saying something about only being able to keep a 10-year-old away from Disneyland for so long.
There we were: the American family on vacation.
And on this day, August 24, 1991, my folks had achieved what so many others craved: the living, breathing image of the American dream. As a family of four — one boy, one girl — we piled into a red minivan, carving down the California coast, spending the night in a modest hotel across a palm-tree lined boulevard across from the Happiest Place on Earth. From our hotel window, the tall spires of Sleeping Beauty’s castle twinkled in the distance. I was 10 years old.
My Vietnam-era parents — the country girl and city boy, who married young after he returned home from the war, whose charm and cool heads found them success, who transplanted the family from east to west coast — were driven by the idea that optimism and loyalty and hard work would get them everything they ever dreamed of.
I’ve thought a lot about that 1991 vacation recently because, it seems, that the rare times I’ve actually gone on vacation in my life, it seems something absolutely major, something not just life-shaking to a few people but to an entire culture, has occurred.
Like when my husband and I awoke in a Sedona, Arizona bed and breakfast, a USA Today flopped on our doorstep, headlines shouting of prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, shaking us out of our comfortable fog, making us remember that we lived in a world where more people are dodging bullets than eating cottage cheese pancakes.
And just this past weekend, it happened again. We weren’t exactly on vacation, but we’d taken a few days off to drive my recently-deceased aunt’s car — packed with family photos and office supplies and the tiny remnants of a wonderful woman’s 65 years — 1,300 miles to our driveway. When again, it happened. A 22-year-old kid — who, it turns out, was pissed off because he’d never gotten laid — decided to go on a shooting spree in his California college town. He drove a BMW, taking aim at people buying sodas in convenience stores, at young men and women walking casually down the street. After supposed years of feeling ignored and rejected, of being the last picked in this internal kickball game, he chose to spill blood to make the world pay attention.
I know: there’s nothing connecting these events to my going on vacation.
That’s obvious. But in my head, I can’t help but find some irony in it. Why is it that every time I choose to forget the world, to drown it out in jacuzzi bubbles and 70s-filtered Instagram photos, it feels like I’m reminded by the world that relaxation is a first-world luxury?
Maybe it’s just a reminder of how hilariously #firstworldproblems it is to try and detach from humanity. That for us to turn off our smartphones, to drown in a new book, to rent a room with a king sized bed, to even subscribe at all to this idea of vacation, we’re just reinforcing this American fantasy that everything will be OK.
It’s a fantasy no different than the ones my mom and dad were trying to show us at Disneyland — where everything is happy and perfect, where the reality of being shot as you walk down the street is so distant you almost forget it was ever there at all.
Leah Sottile is a journalist, fiction writer, casual radio producer and music promoter. Her work has most recently been featured by Al Jazeera America and The Atlantic, and has appeared in several other national outlets. She is the founder of Volume, Eastern Washington’s largest music festival, and lives in Spokane.
