11.26.2002 Vacation Memoirs
“Vacations… ahh”
Today I thought about vacations and some memories I had about them when I was little. My parents have these old photo albums and there’s this picture of me hunched over a dog cautiously trying to pet it. It was taken in the Catskill Mountains and I must have been about seven years old. The dog’s name was Lady, and I remember being very intrigued with playing with her. It was the first time I had been so close to an actual dog and the combination of me being curious and the dog being friendly just made me want to play with it for hours on end.
These vacations took place only once a year. I remember that. And, they were very modest. My parents didn’t have high paying jobs having emigrated over from China, they had to take on manual labor jobs just to make ends meet. For a while, Ba, Chinese for father, worked as a waiter in restaurants, and Ma, my mother, worked as a seamstress in garment factories. The hours were long and they had to often work six or maybe seven days a week, but they made it a point to take these week long vacations once a year.
We lived in Manhattan, just outside of Chinatown at the time. The rent was very affordable. Ba rented a car for the week. We packed it up and headed on our two-hour drive to the country; in other words, upstate to the Catskill Mountains. There we would find a motel where we would camp out for the week and then just chill. Ba used to describe how the country was so peaceful and serene as compared to the city. This was probably cause he grew up in a more rural area than where we lived now.
It was just nice.
Due to her working nights, Elizabeth sleeps a lot in the evenings now. Sometimes, I sit up in the bed next to her crunching away at the laptop—just so I can be close to her. I wonder what she dreams about, ‘cause once in a while, she throws her arm across me hugging me, but instead, smashes all the keys.
