Mandatory Fun

It’s no secret that I’m big on organized, mandatory fun and my daughter Talia is cut out of the same cloth. In general, our family is dedicated to ritual gatherings, with our long history of annual events we’ve done for decades—Thanksgiving with my sister’s family, neighborhood Christmas caroling, snow trip with three other families, New Years Walk with particular friends and family, the Spring Calistoga trip with the snow trip people, the annual family gathering at Lake Michigan.  Recently we’ve added the post-Christmas Palms Springs trip with the grandkids and the European bike trips with 6 to 8 friends. Each has its own subset of particular rituals— hikes, games, cooking and such. It could feel like a list of things to check off that overshadows the spontaneity of just hanging out together, but in fact, it helps focus the ways each particular group likes to hang out together. Especially these days when “hanging out together” often means everyone just sitting in the same room looking at their phones. 

 

Michigan with the kids and grandkids is awash with such rituals and I knew that this year, because of my one-time strange schedule with the Orff Course, I’d have very little time to fulfill them all. 3 ½ days to be exact, in contrast to the usual 10 days or even two weeks. But in that short time, we managed to: 

 

Swim in Lake Michigan, play frisbee in the lake, walk to the Outlet and skip stones, look for Petoskey stones on the beach, hike to the Baldy dune, play cornhole, paddleball, Rummy 500, Rummikube, Taboo, Five Crowns and Miniature Golf, go to the Cherry Bowl Drive-in Movie (Spiderman— feel free to skip it). 

 

We didn’t have time to go into town to the Cool Spot for ice cream, walk to the  Frankfort lighthouse, rent bikes and ride on the rails-to-trails path, rent a motorboat on Crystal Lake, visit Mystery Hill, do a jigsaw puzzle, sing songs around a bonfire on the beach, have a Dance Party, go to a dinner out at the Cabbage Shed, walk up Sugarbowl dune (they did it without me, I did it without them today), canoe, kayak, play the card games King’s corner and Trash, throw a football or play wiffle ball or  kickball on the beach, go to the Arcadia Marsh walk, watch a movie on TV with popcorn, go out for breakfast at Watervale Resort.

 

Did it matter that list of things we didn’t do was so much longer than the things we did? Not really. It’s all about the quality of the time spent and that was sheer delight for me. And I believe for everyone, even my almost 15-year-old grand-daughter whose attention, by all her peers’ standards, should be elsewhere than hiking in nature, playing games and hanging out with adults in their 40’s and 70’s. More on that in the next post. 

 

Meanwhile, both grandkids and daughters left today—and yes, it felt too soon—while I have two more weeks here. My list is to swim every day (if I can deal with this swimmer’s ear syndrome that is hard to bear), bike, hike, walk and probably get going on my next book, already in its second draft and awaiting completion. Driving my daughter to the airport, I finished listening to Ann Patchett’s pitch-perfect book Whistler, shopped on the way home and now have a lazy Sunday afternoon ahead with light drizzle outside. While so many friends still teaching school are arriving tomorrow to begin their school year at the obscenely early date of August 10^th (and a week earlier for many!), I’m happy to be here.