On the way a holiday has taught me a valuable lesson about time
Being away on a big holiday with my kids took me into a new psychic space, and reminded me which days matter
I’m writing this from Minneapolis airport, where my connecting flight from Billings, Montana to Washington DC, has been delayed. It’s the twilight zone of Sunday evening, with the added melancholy of the moment the whirligig of the high of the holiday suddenly comes to a crashing standstill, and real-life rushes back in.
A few hours ago, I was in Cody, Wyoming, sitting beneath bison and elk heads in the dining room of Hotel Irma, eating a western breakfast, of biscuits, which are a kind of roll you only really get in the west, and which are like light, fluffy scones, with grape jelly (a specific, highly artificial taste I crave), with bacon and scrambled eggs I’d covered in both maple syrup and hot sauce (also an acquired taste, I admit, but one I love). I drank several large mugs of weak black coffee as the kids scrapped around me, all a bit jagged and tired, wanting my phone, while trying to let the space I was in surround me absolutely, imprint itself into me, maybe, so that I wouldn’t forget it. I didn’t want to leave that landscape.
But we had to leave Cody eventually, driving through a vast landscape of jagged yellow rock and distant blue mountains, with the smell of desert sage in the air, the early light low and sharp as jack rabbits and deer startled at our passing car. Everything felt picturesque, almost celluloid, even the tarmac elevated to an elegant black ribbon stretching into the distance; after almost three weeks of waking to this landscape, it was almost starting to feel familiar. I really didn’t want to leave, because more than anything, the magnitude of the landscape was giving me a sense of psychic space I rarely experience in the city.
The airport is none of these things of course; artificially cooled air and passengers, their shoulders collapsed this late on Sunday evening, are all waiting, held captive for a few hours, while willing themselves to be somewhere different. It’s not where I want to be (I want to be back on Cody, or Star Valley, or Freedom, or Big Timber, or Red Lodge, where even the names are full of promise), but it is forcing me to think about the different things we get from a holiday, and the many different ways they sustain and inspire us.
Because a holiday has lots of different functions, doesn’t it? A change of scene. A chance to rest. An adventure. At this moment in my life, holidays represent a chance to be with all of my kids. When we moved to America a year ago, Jimmy and Dolly were 20 and 23; leaving them was, and is, a special kind of agony for me, but they had places at university. Putting the Atlantic between myself and them felt absolutely counterintuitive, especially since I’ve always tried, as much as I can, to create a shared sense of home with Evangeline, Dash and Lester, who are only 11, 10 and 8. My two sets of kids have different dads but it matters a lot that their tight, bright feelings of what home represents are similar for them all, something I wrote about in The Giant on the Skyline. And a holiday now represents a time to be with all of them together, not just to have big, formative adventure together but more importantly, simply spend time together, talking, ragging, bickering, being. Three weeks driving through Montana and Wyoming has, unquestionably, achieved this, although there were times, when Dash was shouting and we had another 7 hours on the road and everyone was twanging off each other, when it genuinely felt like I’d inadvertently forced us all onto the pioneer trail and I really wasn’t quite sure we’d make it.