How I Spent My Spring, Summer and Fall Vacations

Suburban Cleveland (Mentor, Lake County).  Great Lake.  Bland houses.  Soccer Mom Park with trails.  Aunt.  Uncle.  Dad’s 50-year reunion.  Lox and whitefish.  Sitting indoors.  Stuffed refrigerator.  Listening to the old folks talk.  Who got divorced.  Who died.  Who has an interesting illness.  Rinse. Repeat.  April is the cruellest month.

Miami Beach.  In the merry month of May.  Between Spring Break and hurricane season.  Research.  Art Deco.  More Art Deco.  Jewish Museum of Florida.  Flying over a houndstooth-patterned coast.  South Beach.  Mid-Beach.  Smid Beach.  Causeways.  Rich girls riding mopeds with open-toed slingbacks.  Cardstock cutouts of flamingos on apartment balconies.  Fencing and deep concrete pits all around south of 5th street.  Surfers and Sexwax.  Waiting in a hot car in the Nikki Beach Club parking lot while my friend walks around looking for a broken meter.  A skyline varying from blue-gray to Peptol-Bismol pink.  Cruising around Biscayne Bay with a cracked windshield.  A cerulean ocean submerged in rain water.  Dining under the doubly-awned awnings of News Cafe as thunder rumbles.  Watching cruise ships dock in the morning, beachcombing dune buggies scooping up last night’s seaweed.  Trekking the shore barefoot with a 15-pound backpack.  Changing clothes on a windy beach à la Marilyn in The Seven-Year Itch.

West Tennessee.  Buford Pusser Country (think Walking Tall movies 1 through 4).  Be alone, be very alone.  Tricked into babysitting.  Uncle.  Aunt.  Stepcousin.  First stepcousins once removed.  55 acre land.  Graves in front yard.  Two ponds.  Cell phone tower (a little extra rent money a month and it’s going to get built, anyway).  Wraparound patio.  Adirondack chairs.  Party.  Bluegrass band.  Hills, guns, walking trails, and bush hogs.  Dirt road.  State park across the highway.  Conifers everywhere. 

St. Petersburg, Russia.  A fortnight of writer’s conference heaven.  (Or writer’s hell, be you in the wrong hotel room).  Daylight until 11:30 p.m.  Up all night every night with seagulls getting hot and heavy outside my hotel window.  Seminars:  Russian absurdism — suggestive poems read in slow Kabuki style by scholar who accentuates his recitations with absent-minded pacing and rubbing his buzzcut.  Russian rock n’ roll (”It Tastes Like Chicken?”) Russian language crash course.  American Independence Day reading poetry at a smoky club.  Beluga in the grocery on Nevsky Prospekt.  “Black Squirrel” chocolate (high cocoa content).  The best mushrooms ever.  The best salmon ever.   Brides and grooms everywhere on Saturday.  Poplar down raining from the sky, very slow-mo confetti.  Herzen University – Filthy toilets, no toilet seat lids. Walking around with a disposable camera in one pocket and a roll of American TP in the other.  The Russian museum.  8 rooms of Marc Chagall (hey, there really were fiddlers on the roofs!)  The Hermitage.  The Louvre/Prado/Guggenheim at only $5 American dollars.  Tsars’ palaces: Gold, golder and goldest.  Peterhof:  a fountain-infested estate overlooking the Gulf of Finland. Answer to hotel maids, strangers on street, convenience store clerks is always “Da.”  A total “da” woman.

A night stuck in Heathrow a few days after the London subway bombing.

Hampton Roads area, Virginia.  Sister.  Brother-in-law.  Nephew.  Nephew.  Niece.  Nephew.  Yorktown.  Jamestown.  Virginia Beach, a.k.a. the cleanest toilet this side of the Chesapeake.  Military planes swooping over the beach like gray devilfish. 

Munich.  Morph from “da” woman to “ja” woman.  Great conversation in my rusty German with old frau outside Oktoberfest grounds regarding my trach scar — just wish I knew what the hell we were saying. Red-flowered window boxes forever.  Tombstone-encrusted church masonry at Marienplatz.  Astronomical clock merry-go-ring. 

Nurnberg.  Giant Adidas soccerball.  Mile-high high-carb pastries, scroll stencils on cathedrals.  Streamlined architecture vaguely reminding me of the 70s.  Hobbit-esque fountains, nooks and crannies bound to do Bilbo Baggins proud.

Plzen.  A warm-weather revisit of a place I visited on a rainy Sunday last year.  Pastel Baroque, easier on the eyes than its big-city neighbors.  Plainclothed couples marrying at city hall while fathers of the bride/groom smoke outside.

Prague. Another revisit.  Fall.  The poplar trees don’t look like sick cattails in September as they did in March.  Everything a version of green-black-blue or red-brown-orange-lemon.  Ancient baths overlooking Vltava river valley. Dvorak. Smetana.  Their museums. Their graves.  Jewish Museum — all five of them.  Night river cruise.  Charles Bridge, with Hradcany-St. Vitus perched atop the hill like Sleeping Beauty’s castle.  Baroque Disney.  Baroque not-for-the-faint-of-heart.  Strahov Monastery.  Dusk over the city of a hundred spires (or is it a thousand?)  Cobblestone paradise.  Cobblestone purgatory.  Long schleps across town.  Fairyland occupied by wicked tourist witches of the west.

Bratislava.  Slovakia under construction.  Opera outlet.  Ancient Communist artifacts.  Statue of man crawling out of a manhole — crawling out of a manhole.  Pastel Old Town.  Baroque Lite. 

Budapest.  Buda.  Pest.  Breathtaking wine country outskirts.  Hole in the flag.  50-year-old bullet holes in the walls from the Revolution.  Parliament. Fisherman’s Wharf (delightfully Ottoman).  Big synagogue/Holocaust Museum.  Silverplated willow tree with a name per leaf.  Underpasses complete with florist shops and vendors — why hasn’t America tried this? An Officer and a Gentleman.  The Not-So-Blue Danube (though in Bratislava as well).  Gypsy violin virtuosos. 

Vienna.  Maria Theresaland.  Churches with open-glass coffins, well-dressed saint skeletons.  (How many Austrian brides have asked, “I get the stuff about the Sacrament of Marriage and all, but can we maybe cover up those bones for the wedding?”) Green park, bubbling brook.  Music, music and more music.  Buy a cup of joe and park your tush for two hours.  Modern art toilet tourist trap. Jewish Museum complete with hologram installations.  Double-headed Hapsburg serpents, larger-than-life Greek gods. 

Vienna Woods. Did you know that you can turn the crime scene of a royal murder into a really cool tourist trap? 

Danube River Valley.  Rolling hills, pastoral cottages.  Those hills or mountains?  Exactly where do the Alps begin?  More wine country, artfully knotted hillsides.  Hansel und Gretel. 

Melk.  Ancient abbey, high-tech museum.  Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.  Couldn’t resist asking about what they do with the monks’ bones.  (Kept buried for 100 years, then exhumed and encased in ossuary.)  In the middle of the middle of things. 

Salzburg. The Sound of Music.  The Sound of Music.  Locals in tweed.  Tourists in Tyrolean hats. The Austrian version of Belgium’s little urinating boy Manneken-Pis…except it’s horses with nose-fountains (Manneken-Snot?) The hills where Julie Andrews outspread her arms and sang.  The cathedral where the von Trapps got married.  Apparently those dolled-up saint reliquaries are kinda trendy in these parts.  The hills are alive…