Eternal Happy Memories

By Dan Barber

There are vacations where people can visit an attraction in a location away from their home then there are “staycations” where people can just stay at home from work and relax.

Since I’ve grown old and retired I’ve gotten bored with my permanent staycation. But I’ve always gotten bored easily anyway except when I’m with my loved ones. I’ve even got bored while living and working, without my family nearby, in exotic places around the world where people spend thousands of dollars just to visit on their vacations, “to get away”…places like Hawaii, Italy, The Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the Aleutian Islands of Alaska and many great places in the Continental United States.

When my wife and I were physically able to hike we’d pack a picnic lunch and hike out into the Joshua Tree National Park, pick out a giant boulder where we could sit in solitude and eat our lunch. Since retiring  my wife and I have tried hiking in the national park that borders our backyard, but the older we get the shorter the hikes become and they are no longer very challenging…unless we’re walking up a slight incline. 

My ideal setting for daydreaming.

Just sitting alone by my pool while drinking a cold beer, gets old without my wife sitting there with me or with the grandkids hanging out in the pool playing, fighting and splashing water on me.

My favorite vacations now are “mind vacations” or daydreams where I can enjoy the past, present or future. All that’s required is a comfortable chair, a good book or a research project or an imagination, and of course, a good supply of fond memories.

My wife and I do have a favorite historical road trip we take once in awhile. It is a relatively short drive from where we live in Twentynine Palms to the Kelso train depot in the Mojave Desert. There is no admission to a beautiful old restored California Spanish style building that houses artifacts and photographs from the heyday of passenger train travel…it’s like taking a mini-vacation back in time.

Other vacations that I’ve enjoyed were meditation vacations, where I would take a week off from my stressful job and just sit in a lawn chair every day for a week and observe the events in my neighborhood. I also enjoyed just watching my children at play or the grass growing.

I once took a bowling vacation where I went bowling every day for a week…but that one gave me a big blister on my thumb.

One time I took a week off from work and allowed my children to pick a different location every day that was close enough for a short road trip from our home in San Diego…we visited the museums at Balboa Park (twice), spent a day at the beach, picked apples in the mountains, visited the San Diego Zoo and rode inner tubes down a creek on an Indian reservation in the nearby mountains that was much better than any water park.

When my children were young they would take turns accompanying me “one on one” on business trips where they could chose a location for a short visit near my destination….my daughter’s choice once was, a mall! My oldest son wanted to visit an old car junkyard he spotted along the road.

Some of my vacations in history are also made possible through my research in my family’s genealogy. 

My 3^rd Great grandfather Martin Hirsch (later changed to Hersh) homesteaded a farm in Missouri in the 1850s just a short distance out of St. Joseph. That historical vacation was kind of hard because of the extensive research I did to make the family connections and to get the “feel.” It was fun but still a great challenge mentally to try to understand that environment, where just about everything in nature could be deadly to anyone except my very hardy ancestor.  I imagine that present-day Amish farmers have it much easier as compared to the challenges Martin Hirsch faced in trying to clear the land to create a productive farm from scratch in the wilderness of Missouri.

Taormina Sicily with Mt. Etna in the background where
  I lived in a small village called Bel Paso with my family. 

Photo by Evan Erickson.

I enjoy my “memory” vacations even those when at times I was homesick for my wife. Once I was sitting at a table at a sidewalk café with my toddler son in Taormina Sicily overlooking the Messina Strait, sipping a cold soda on a beautiful day, waiting for the ferry that would take us across the strait to the mainland of Italy. I was wishing my wife could see what I was seeing but it was a good memory because my son and I were on our way up to the U.S. Naval Hospital Naples to see his Mom and spend the weekend with her where she was waiting for the birth of our second child. My son and I had to return to our home in Sicily after the weekend because I had to return to work.

Chania, Crete (Souda Bay.)

Another time I recall walking through the open marketplace of Chania, Crete wishing my wife was there with me to see the things I saw. She would have gotten a kick out of that experience because of her Greek heritage.

Music can also take me back, Whenever I listen to Fleetwood Mac’s instrumental “Albatross” it puts me in mind of the time I was sitting on the beach in Hawaii watching my wife on her surfboard waiting for a wave and thinking those guys on their surfboards out there by her better not be trying to pick her up! I was not out there with her because I have a phobia about being eaten by sharks so I was not going to tempt them (the sharks) with my presence that day or any other day.

Another favorite memory vacation is when I was stationed in Puerto Rico my kids needed to learn how to swim so they could snorkel in the clear water at the beach near our house, so we spent a lot of time at the community pool near our house. My daughter confessed to me years later, as an adult, that she and her little "boyfriend," they were both about 5-years old at the time, snuck out after dark climbed the fence of the pool and went swimming.

Puerto Rico was also the scene of the "great blue crab invasion" that terrified my wife. There must have been hundreds of the huge critters that were making a pilgrimage across our yard at the time. They are a protected species so we weren’t legally allowed to catch them for dinner, or run over them with our car. However, In the Aleutian Islands, we did buy freshly caught large Tanner crab directly from the boats that harvested them from the Bering Sea that same day. 

My sons were more than happy to catch Salmon out of the surf off the beach behind our house or in one of the local creeks during the annual Salmon run for our freezer. Also, in the summer, we would take a family outing to the tundra where we could harvest Tundra Berries to take home so we could preserve them into Tundra Berry Jam as a family project.

My kids at the Pet Cemetery at
Adak, Alaska.

My future dream vacation is, of course being able to spend all eternity in Heaven where I will relive all of those favorite times over and over again as if for the first time.

I mentioned in an earlier post about my father coming to me in a dream a couple of weeks after he passed away. I asked him if he could come back to life would he. He told me no way because in Heaven he was able to relive all of the happy memories in his life as many times as he wanted just like they were the first time he experienced them. He was having a ball reliving the happy times of his life.

As a habit, I listen to 60s music from my youth whenever I write. In the song “MacArthur’s Park” by Richard Harris he uses a metaphor about the fear of a memory fading away,

“MacArthur's Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet, green icing flowing down
Someone left the cake out in the rain

I don't think that I can take it
'Cause it took so long to bake it
And I'll never have that recipe again
Oh no, oh no, no, no, oh no”

I believe that human consciousness never fades away, even after death. My hope is I will get to live eternally with my wife in our termite eaten tree house in Hawaii where our loved ones will make frequent visits in our memories and not melt away in the rain or darkness.