What I did on my fall vacation

Today is the first day of an extended, alternative, stingy way of using up a pile of vacation days my corporate benefactor has bestowed upon me this year. It's also the first day of the rest of your life, but you knew that. No carryover days allowed, say the suits upstairs, so use it or lose it, and it's time to make up in the fall for lost time in the summer.

Instead of indulging in three weeks at a time or a week at a time (times three) possibly sandwiched around one or more of the traditional end-of-year holidays, I have opted to string them out over the rest of the year, one day at a time, like a 12-step program - carpe diem, dude - in a series of 12 long weekends, beginning now.

This plan leaves a lot to chance, to whim, to the weather. Sure, I have projects to do, but where to begin? And do I want to use every hour checking things off my voluminous to-do list? Even if I had the discipline to go straight to those tasks, I think I'd prefer a second cup of coffee on the patio with the New York Times. Make that a French roast with chocolate milk, waiter, thank you.

Life is short. If you do a little math, you can find the date on the calendar that's the equivalent of your age, given a certain life expectancy, which is of course the great unknown, but let's say 84 just for fun. My Mom just turned 87, and I share many of her genetic traits, so I figure my chances are pretty good, ceteris paribus, which they're not. If 12 months = 84 years, then one month = seven years, a nice developmental subset a la Piaget, Erikson, Gardner, and my track coach, who said it takes seven years to make a person into a runner. Is that because it takes about seven years for the body to replace all its cells through normal growth and regeneration? And is that the physiological basis for Piaget's, et al, psychological theories about personality development, growth of the 'self', and multiple intelligence? But I digress, and I'm on vacation, so screw it, I'll digress if I feel like it.

Where was I? Oh yes, assuming (and we know that's a big mistake) that I live to be 84, in this paradigm my family moved to Detroit in early February, I graduated from high school in the middle of March, got married at the end of April, had two kids about a week apart in mid-May, started grad school at the beginning of June, and started my present job at the end of July. By the end of this year, it will only be about September 7. It's still late summer.

Hey kids, let's all make our own graphic organizers, depicting your own fascinating life on the grid of a 12-month calendar. Or not. If I keep this up, I'll squander my vacation time on aimless graphic organizers, a regular busman's holiday.

I think I'll cut some firewood instead, and graphically organize the remains of a pear tree and parts of a maple. Then I'll carry some water from the rain barrel to the little redbud tree I just transplanted to be in better alignment with its brother and sister redbuds. After that I'll eat baked chicken with Gven and retire to the den to listen to Dylan's Time Out of Mind a couple of times. Why didn't I come across this CD ten years ago? Oh, I forgot, I was doing something else.