Vacation part 2

While we were visiting the grandchildren in Florida our children who are attending college in Hot Springs, AR came over for a few days. It was a good little family reunion. My daughter and family live in a rather small three bedroom, two-bath house so there were beds everywhere.

Mama and I were given my granddaughter’s bedroom and she moved into her brother’s room temporarily. That takes up the three bedrooms so everyone else had to split up the living room. It was a tight fit for our two sons and three daughters – and the dog who had been brought over for the visit also. It was a houseful, but a happy houseful.

Each morning we would deflate the queen-sized inflatable bed (the blow-up bed) and my grandson would crawl onto the deflating bed and try to bounce so I would have to stop the deflation and get someone on the other side of the bed to alternate pushing down against the “pillowed” side so he would bounce up as the air moved form their side to mine and vice versa until I was afraid he would get sick to his stomach or we would get too carried away and hurt him.

This would be followed by eating Milton Bakery doughnuts. I do not eat many doughnuts and I am faced with a variety from Dunkin Donuts at least once a month at work. But I make an exception for these doughnuts. They are incredible! Good thing we do not visit too often.

We ate good Mexican food - probably too much of that also – walked on the beach, took lots of pictures, attended my daughter’s church and in general had a wonderful time. It was vacation after all. Spend too much, eat too much and figure out the cost for each of those activities later.

Much like my grandson who found delight in an overly soft mattress, vacations are transient times, great memory making opportunities, a short escape from reality, but those mundane, incidental daily details must soon be reckoned with for life to have a good foundation.

For me, Thank God vacations are only a few days long otherwise; I would weigh three hundred pounds and be financially destitute. We do have fabulous memories of those few short days, but that is not where we live.

I find it a good practice to keep reality turned on in the back of my mind so coming back from vacation does not frustrate and depress me. My life is far from ordinary, far from mundane, but it is not hopping from one thrill to another.

That is not what drives me. I adore my wife, I love our children and grandchildren, I love our church and the people that make up our church and I try to ensure that we laugh a lot; to do that we have to find pleasure in the smallest of things.

Though we have sold our house at a great loss, the birds still sing outside the windows of our small apartment. Though we cannot be with our grandchildren any more than we are, they still get very excited to see us or to talk to us on Skype. Though we cannot be there (where we really want to be) we are loved and needed here.

Our life is not empty or disappointing because we cannot have each day what we had for a few days of vacation; our life is full because we have so much where we are now. I am determined not to waste a single moment of what I have here wishing I were somewhere else.

God is good!