When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, It's Time To Go Home Read Online Free PDF Page A

small.”
    “Not really,” I said. “It seats one real comfortably.”
    “How do you know that?” she asked.
    “Do you use the refrigerator a lot?”
    She hesitated. “Not a whole lot.”
    “Then it isn't important.” I smiled.
    By the time she rushed to her husband's side, it was too late. The check was in my husband's hand.
    During the rest of that winter, I thought a lot about our first attempt at “quality time.” Was it possible there were vacations where you didn't have to carry your own toilet paper and dispose of your own waste? Somewhere was there a wonderland where nightlife was more than a ranger picking his teeth with a matchbook cover and showing slides of “The Birth of a Bog”?
    Some of our friends had actually gone on trips where they didn't have to cut up everyone's meat or listen to a car radio that made their teeth swell. They visited a world where crying children belonged to someone else, and when they stretched out their arms on the back seat to relax, someone didn't put wads of chewing gum in their hands.
    That's the world I wanted to explore.
     
     
     
     
     
    "Honey, I Just Ditched
    the Kids"
     
    When my children get their own literary agent (and it is only a matter of time), the first chapter in their Dearest book will record this moment in great detail.
    They will describe how they sat on the edge of the bed watching Mommy and Daddy pack for a twenty-one-day European Getaway.
    As they fight back tears of rejection, they will reflect on how they were left behind with nothing but $5,000 worth of toys, a $2,000 entertainment center, enough soft drinks to launch the QE2, color-coordinated menus, and an overpriced babysitter who would hover over them like security in a Loehmann's dressing room. They will tell of how their mother traveled twelve thousand miles with a blowfish balanced between her knees to buy their affection back. Their book will inspire tabloid headlines: my dad was too busy to bond.
    The big question that should be addressed here is not whether parents should take their children on vacation or leave them at home. The question is, What is the best age to leave them behind?
    The answer is, The younger the better. People who think teenagers can be responsible enough to be left alone are in for a shock.
    Realistically, a three-year-old does not put eight hundred miles on your car in a week and pour diet cola in the radiator when it boils over. A three-year-old does not summon one hundred of her closest friends to a party before your plane takes off. An infant will not use “emergency funds” to replace the sliding glass door that someone sailed a chair through.
    Parents who have never before left their children for any length of time anguish for weeks about the time they will spend away from their kids. They will torture themselves with the thought of those little cherub faces waking up in the middle of the night calling, “Mommy! Daddy!”
    They will punish themselves with the memory of those tearful reflections pressed against the window waving bye-bye as they pull out of the driveway.
    This feeling will last ten . . . fifteen minutes tops.
     
     
     
     
     
    Packing
     
    One never realizes how different a husband and wife can be until they begin to pack for a trip. My husband has obviously never heard of the old axiom for travelers, “Pack half the clothes you planned to take and twice the money.”
    His bed is covered with apparel.
    If someone should “just happen” to award him the Nobel Peace Prize, he has the clothes for it.
    He has the wardrobe to parachute behind enemy lines dressed as a mercenary and clothes to commandeer a torpedo boat through a squall.
    If there is a bar mitzvah, ten-kilometer run, costume party, fire in the hotel, bowling tournament, western cookout, or rain for forty days and forty nights, he's ready.
    He can attend an underwater wedding or a mountain hike, change a tire or christen a ship.
    He has clothes to barter for mules and guides