August 10: Judith Slater, "Family Vacation," Getting Away

Family Vacation

by:  Judith Slater

Four weeks in, quarreling and far 

from home, we came to the loneliest place. 

A western railroad town. Remember? 

I left you at the campsite with greasy pans 

and told our children not to follow me. 

The dying light had made me desperate. 

I broke into a hobbled run, across tracks, 

past warehouses with sun-blanked windows 

to where a playground shone in a wooded clearing. 

Then I was swinging, out over treetops. 

I saw myself never going back, yet 

whatever breathed in the mute woods 

was not another life. The sun sank. 

I let the swing die, my toes scuffed earth, 

and I was rocked into remembrance 

of the girl who had dreamed the life I had. 

Through night, dark at the root, I returned to it.

_____________________________

A poem for today about family vacations.  I don't get many opportunities to get totally away from my life like this.  It takes a great deal of planning.  I have two jobs (three if you count playing the pipe organ on weekends).  So, I have to make sure to cover my work in three different places.  Not an easy task.

I do love being with my wife and kids, away from all my normal distractions.  As I said before, it doesn't happen very often.

Saint Marty is going to sit on his balcony for a little while.  Read a good book.

April 4: War Would End, Wisconsin Dells, Getting Away

During the night, some of the locomotives began to tootle to one another, and then to move.  The locomotive and the last car of each train were marked with a striped banner of orange and black, indicating that the train was not fair game for airplanes--that it was carrying prisoners of war.

The war was nearly over.  The locomotives began to move east in late December.  The war would end in May.  German prisons everywhere were absolutely full, and there was no longer any food for the prisoners to eat, and no longer any fuel to keep them warm.  And yet--here came more prisoners.

Billy is captured by the Germans near the end of World War II.  He will only be in prison a few months.  In a way, Billy is lucky.  There is a sense of finality in these two paragraphs, as if the battles are already over and everybody is just waiting for a truce to be declared.

For the last couple of days, I've been pretty angry about something that happened on Sunday.  It has sort of consumed me, made me supremely tired.  Monday morning I woke up feeling exhausted.  This morning, I woke up feeling exhausted.  I am tired of being tired.  So, today, I am calling a truce.  I am not going to dwell on Sunday's events today.  I am going to try to rest, regain some sense of balance.

This weekend, I am going on a trip to the Wisconsin Dells.  My daughter has a dance competition at the Kalahari Resort.  That means a few days of water slides and amusement park rides and virtual reality games.  And a lot of driving.  When I get home on Sunday night, I have a feeling I'm going to be much more tired than when I left.

I am looking forward to getting away, though.  I'm not going to be able to leave last Sunday completely behind, but I am going to try.  As I said, it's time for a truce with my anger.  I'm sure, when I get back on Sunday, l will find all my negative energy where I left it.

For today, however, Saint Marty is thankful for the upcoming cessation of the hostilities of his mind.