En Vacances

A vacation something

Last night in the shower, I was thinking that my present situation is fulfilling enough to sustain me through approximately 355 shit days. My present situation is that I’m in Leucate, a small windsurfing town in the south of France (the west-ish side of the coast, since people ask/don’t know WTF Leucate is). I am here on holiday. This maybe sounds to Americans like a pretentious way of saying I’m on vacation, except that 50% of the people I’m on holiday with refer to vacation this way, which makes the terminology feel to me like the metric system: a decision the rest of the world made that I can either ignore or Lean In to while I’m here. I am trying, this year, to Lean In — when I came to Leucate for the first time last summer, I knew how to say “that’s life” in French but not the number five. This year I can count to ten (though “four” is a bitch to pronounce and I’m not sure I’ll ever really get the hang of it).

The reason my ten-ish days here are worth an almost-year of shit is because of the people I’m with. I met most of them here, about a year ago: friends of friends who, at some point, divorced the last two words. Just friends now. We talk about what I’ll vaguely call The World. Three are French, one is British, two are from New Jersey, one from Maryland. We are all similarly invested in discussing whether the world is on fire. To talk with people who are not from America but who know the right questions to ask — about gun culture, or police brutality, or this circus of an election cycle — feels like A Great Un-Gaslighting. It’s like America knows it has something stuck in its teeth, and Europe is like, “I see it. A little bit to the left.”

I am on my second Vacation Book, But What If We’re Wrong? by Chuck Klosterman, and in it there’s a chapter about the future of football. The quote I’m about to re-type has little to do with football when removed from its original context, but in the wake of Brexit and in anticipation of the American election, it’s relevant:

These advocates remind me of an apocryphal quote attributed to film critic Pauline Kael after the 1972 presidential election: “How could Nixon have won? I don’t know one person who voted for him.” Now, Kael never actually said this. But that erroneous quote survives as the best shorthand example for why smart people tend to be wrong as often as their not-so-smart peers — they work from the flawed premise that their worldview is standard.

Invoking this quote suggests that I think I’m smart, which makes me feel dumb. I want to throw that out there. But it’s true that — however smart or not-so-smart one might actually be — it’s jarring to realize your worldview is not standard, however reasonable or nuanced. Naturally, having my worldview validated by non-Americans — who I want to say are more objective than actual Americans, maybe because this also jives with my worldview — is satisfying. It’s more satisfying than being validated by a Twitter echo chamber for example, because Twitter is a curated experience where I can filter out dissent or, really, anything I find objectionable. (I don’t particularly consider a website with a 140-character limit as *the* place to entertain opposing viewpoints, though some might disagree.) In contrast, I cannot curate the opinions of the people I meet. What I’m saying, I guess, is that when I first met these friends, I could’ve been walking into a Thanksgiving dinner with someone else’s racist relatives. I did not know how thoughtful or charming or funny they might be (they are all of these things, so much so that my actual shower thought was, if I never again saw the rest of my friends for some terrible reason, I would be content with the seven who are here. These feelings are not exclusive to this friend group, but they are top of mind at the moment).

This is not the primary reason I’m fulfilled. Only a small portion of the trip has been spent on debating The World. We’ve also played numerous games of Complots and Blokus, for example. Two days ago, we had taco night and a beer pong tournament, which take on a certain level of camp here. (If you’re wondering, the Americans faced off against the Europeans. My team came in second, against the other American team). And three days ago, we discovered a small praying mantis. (We have not come to a consensus re: its biological sex and so have been calling it both Manta and Manny somewhat indiscriminately. I will be calling her Manta for whatever this is I’m writing because I like being a woman, and I also like the idea that Manta might someday grow up, fuck her mate, and rip his head off.)

On the first day with Manta, I coaxed her onto my dress, which had a sort of hibiscus vibe and so was an approximation of her natural environment. Later, when I removed my dress, she fell to the bathroom floor and I thought that was the end — but the following day, with several Manta sightings reported, I retrieved her from the bathroom floor and brought her back outside. She eventually got lost in my hair, which I can’t blame her for because it closely resembles a nest right now. I couldn’t find her after that and worried about crushing her to death in my sleep but went to bed anyway, and a cute thing happened — when my “roommate” turned off our bedroom light, Manta came tumbling out of my hair, scrambled down my face, and ran directly toward the one source of light in the room: the phone in my hand. THIS THRILLED ME. I placed Manta in a small glass vase with a plant clipping and she remained there through the night. In the morning, I brought the vase outside and filled it with new clippings: lavender, other plants I don’t know the names of. My friends and I were worried that she hadn’t eaten and so we murdered a fly and placed it in the vase. Nothing. Next we covered a leaf in jam, hoping she’d catch a fly herself, but that didn’t work either. Finally, we added a hardly-live fly to the vase. We worried all this doting might make her inept at surviving on her own, but were proven wrong hours later when she went missing. I had gone down for a nap and when I woke up both Manta and the fly were gone. She resurfaced later, looking longer and older and kind of meh re: human interference. I couldn’t even get her to climb on my finger. She had developed, in the span of hours, the disposition of a rebellious teenager. I haven’t seen her in over twenty-four hours.

Manta represents something important to me: time. The eight of us on this trip each participated in sustaining her, discussing her, killing for her. I see a lot of bugs in Los Angeles, and I don’t give them much thought. I don’t name them, don’t track their whereabouts or eating habits. This is an endeavor I would only undertake on vacation. Manta is privilege.

Or is she just luck? The delineation is murky for me in this context, because vacation is not something I ever thought would happen to me. Especially a France vacation. My mother has never left America. I’m assuming my dad has, as I’ve seen his old passport photo. (In it, he has all of his original teeth, which means it was taken before I was alive.) My little sister went on a cruise with her friend’s family once, I think, but I’m not sure where the cruise went (or if this actually happened). We are not a people who go places. Almost twenty years ago, we took a one-night trip to Hershey Park and we once spent a week in Cape Cod, a trip I’m pretty sure was financed by one of my aunts. That’s it. That’s vacation for my parents. I would be shocked if they ever had so little to think about that they found it viable to spend three days babying a praying mantis.

When I was young, my dad went to night school to become a computer programmer. By day, he was a doorman for some ritzy Manhattan apartment complex. I do not remember any of this, just water-logged programming books littering our bathroom. He was in his forties at the time. I thought he was younger, because I was younger, but in truth my dad was already a three-time father, a one-time stepfather, and at least ten years older than I am now when he began programming.

My dad became a dad for the first time at twenty, when he was in college, and I never really considered the consequences of that. I understood it was financially difficult to be a young parent, but I mostly understood it in terms of other people’s lives. Not my dad’s. My dad was just my dad, not someone who had to work whatever jobs he could to feed my sister and then, much later, me. It’s lucky for my family that my dad’s favorite job is Dad, because he never resented us for delaying his career. There is no way to prove this, but I imagine that if I’d become a mother at twenty, I would not be in France right now. I would not be a lot of things right now.

There is a certain amount of guilt I feel, being on vacation. Earlier I wrote of my family that “we are not a people who go places,” but here I am. Places. Places Not America. I want to bring my people with me, but the truth is my lodging for this particular vacation is free, and the truth is I am not rich enough to bring my people anywhere, and the truth is my dad’s health is rickety and my mom is out of work and, even if I could send my parents to some all-expenses-paid, three-day two-night resort just beyond the border for $400 a pop, they will never have time to fall in love with an insect. There’s just too much worry to go around.

This guilt is not unique. I think those of us who eventually gain access to things our parents never had feel like we pulled a fast one on the caste system. I keep picturing myself sneaking onto the White House lawn to take a selfie.

Last night we went to a club on the beach called BK, which I described to one of my friends as “a place where you might accidentally hook up with a sixteen-year-old.” I wasn’t thinking about hooking up last night though, I was thinking about my dad — because of the sky, or more accurately, because of the stars. My dad is really into astronomy, and I realize I’m not sure how that happened — like me, he grew up in Brooklyn and stars are sort of… well, we know they’re there, but the light pollution makes them difficult to see without a telescope. My dad owns one though, and on clear nights he’d bring it up to the blacktop roof of our old apartment to show my sister and me the constellations. Or Neptune. When my parents moved to Florida the telescope moved too, but I don’t think it gets much use because they’ve got a different kind of sky there. You can see a lot with just your eyes, if you know what you’re looking for. My dad does.

The stars on the beach last night, man. I saw the biggest Big Dipper, and a star shooting vertically, which I don’t think I’ve seen before, and I was thinking that maybe my dad doesn’t have vacation, but he has this. We can both have this, and for free. This is a good thing to have.