All summer in a day

Here’s an excerpt from a trip we used to take to the mountains (from the summer of 2009):

We are on our family vacation in the mountains two hours outside of Los Angeles. It’s our third year at the alumni camp for the University of California, Los Angeles, but it feels like our first. This is the first year our younger child can attend the daily camp activities for kids, so we are now able to partake of the grownup activities. So far my husband and I have spent a lot of time in the gym and in the arts and crafts building glazing pottery. We have both read a few novels and had cocktail hour at 4 pm. Our meals are family style and in the dining hall, a cross between dormitory and cruise ship. Other than feeding and bathing our own children, we are free of responsibility. Even the feeding requires only a trip to the children’s table to make a peanut butter sandwich or scoop up servings of pasta and chicken nuggets. There are no messes, no dishes, no driving, no complicated decisions. We alternate between viewing it as a sanitarium visit (the days we glaze ceramics), a foray into a 19th century novel (the day we took a landscape painting class), a trip into our collective memories of high school and college (every day, surrounded as we are by bright, athletic UCLA students who tend to our kids, mix our drinks, and lead us in our artistic and athletic amusements).

As you can see, I didn’t finish this blog entry. One of the other things I was going to accomplish on my one-week sanitarium visit was to catch up on all of the reading and writing I never do. Right.

Summer is approaching again. I’m trying not to tell myself that this is the summer I’ll finish drafts of books, read as though I’m an English major on fire, and learn to cook like a gourmet with superpowers. I am trying to tell myself that whatever gets done this summer is the way it is. This is a little like what I do every Monday, when I wake up feeling like all the angst of the previous week was just a state of mind, that my ability to cope with all of the multitasking I do has grown exponentially over the weekend due to a couple of good nights’ sleep. By Tuesday, racing around in traffic, perennially 15 minutes late and cursing, I have been disabused of this fallacy. When it comes to summer, usually in mid-July I am still hoping to hit the reset button.

I think these particular unrealistic expectations date back to the lovely, lazy summers I had as a child. At the time, of course I had no idea how idyllic my summers were. In grade school, when I still lived at my grandparents’ farm, I read a hodge-podge of anything and everything I could find. Spider Man comic books and Pygmalion/My Fair Lady (the play) stand out. Where the books came from, I have no idea. I probably begged for the comic books in line at the grocery store and found musty books in the basement. As a teenager, I was underutilized, underemployed, and sullen, but I still got a hell of a lot of reading done. My summer reading list was generated by whatever interesting-looking book was adjacent to the last thing I’d read in the children’s room at the Eau Claire Public Library. At the end of most summers, I’d discover that I really knew a lot about Greek mythology/Cleopatra/the Tudors/the French Revolution, at least for a 13- or 14-year-old.

Recently I joked with someone that Ray Bradbury was my babysitter when I was growing up. The person I was talking to actually knows Ray Bradbury. She was incredulous that he would agree to it and that my parents would allow it, until I explained that reading everything by Ray Bradbury had been all I’d done for a couple of summers. I stopped only for dizzying bike rides, meals, and bathroom breaks.

By the time I was in graduate school, more than a decade ago, I’d lost the habit of obsessive reading. Now, I don’t have the time. My house contains numerous volumes that I may never read and a vast trove of children’s and young adult books. My kids have discovered some of them, but the others I have on the shelf for that moment that they wander through the house, bored and wondering what to do all afternoon.

We don’t go to family camp in the mountains anymore. As fun as it was to cram an imaginary life of leisure — complete with arts and crafts, parties, working out, and solitary down time — into one week, it isn’t who we actually are. Our summers are more relaxed than the school year, but we still take trips each year to see parents in faraway locations. My husband still works a regular schedule, and I still get done whatever writing I can get done while schlepping children hither and thither and trying to tune out the whining.

Lately, as I try to accept that the pace of my work output is very slow, and that even the plan for my family life consists of much magical thinking, I keep coming back to the movie “Groundhog Day.” This association bothered me at first. Bill Murray’s asshole-weatherman character wages a futilathon against the eternal-recurrence hell he’s landed in. He commits ridiculous acts. Once he figures out what he wants, he tries to find shortcuts. He tries to give up. But he has no choice but to keep reliving the same day.

There are probably some complex, Eastern philosophical roots to the story, but I’ve got no idea about that. I just know that, ever since I’ve had children, I see the movie in a whole new light. My routine is a lot more varied and fun than the endless day in “Groundhog Day.” But, ever since I stopped working in a corporate office, I can’t deny the similarities I’ve felt at every stage (so far) of parenting-while-trying-to-write.

Will this summer be any different? Possibly. But only if I let go of desire, let myself read and write, and let the days and nights be filled with random sandwiches.