Vacation on the 20th floor

A beer, a book and a pack of crackers. Everything I need is in my backpack as I head for the pool. A short elevator ride a few floors up and I'm on the roof of the hotel. Great views in all directions and an olympic size pool. A little payback and some quiet time at the end of a long first day in class, 100 miles from home. It is typically not crowded at this time of day and often I have the whole place to myself, but it is the week before the fourth of July and I am not alone. I have only sixty pages left to read in my book, so I might have to go back to the room for some uninterrupted reading. Let me just get to a good stopping point and I'll head back down.

After an hour of thinking that the next paragraph would make a better stopping point, I've gotten closer to the end of the book. It seems like I will just stay here and finish up when I hear the sound of a small herd of flip flop covered feet headed my way. I'm in the big city, so I try not to look up. Avoiding eye contact has proven the best approach to keep panhandlers at bay, so why not use it on the other hotel guests. I have noticed that when you ask a stranger a question there there first response is "huh". I'm pretty sure they hear you, I think it means leave me alone. So I keep my head down and try to continue reading.

"Wow! Look daddy, you can see Stone Mountain from here!" a little girl of about eight tells her father. "Are we still gonna go there this week?"

The little girl is one of five children clinging to the railing twenty floors above downtown Atlanta. They seem to fall in a line at the rail arranged by height. The father tells them to turn around and he takes their picture. They are very excited and I'm sure that all five mouths are open in every photo.

"Don't make that face" the father says. "Just smile. You know your mother will not be happy at you posing with your tongue sticking out."

It is really impossible to read with all of this noise beside me, so I stand up and offer to take their picture all together. I catch a fleeting glimpse of fear in the father's eyes as he hands me the family camera, but they turn and face me quietly.

"Perfect" I tell them as I extend the camera back to the father. The smallest boy breaks from the group and runs to view the picture. He takes no more than a few steps in my direction before his father's hand catches his collar and reels him back in. I can't tell if it's the presence of a stranger or the distance to the ground, but the father is on guard.

We talked for a while longer and the father seemed to relax. They were from the Bahamas, on vacation for a week in Atlanta. It's hard for me to imagine leaving the Carribean to come to Georgia, but contrary to the beliefs of my wife and daughter, I dont know everything. He told me the places they planned to visit and asked for recommendations of others and the entire time he never let go of the little boy's collar. We shook hands and exchanged names about the time his oldest daughter ran back up.

"They are from Wisconsin!" she yelled, pointing back toward the edge of the pool. "Wisconsin daddy!" I imagine if you live in Naussau, Wisconsin is like the North Pole. Snow celebrities. The father nodded his head at me and they headed for the door. The other three falling in line, skipping and turning in circles. I could hear his promises of a swim later as they walked away. I think I even heard a "we'll see" or two before they got out of earshot.

I sit back down with my book. Twenty four more pages to go, but I have to re-read a page or two to get back into the story. As I'm turning a page as I hear a woman beside me ask "Mind if ask you a question?" I'm a little startled because she is way too big to have gotten so close undetected. Must be that Wisconsin stealth I think, recognizing her as the one the little girl was pointing toward earlier. I try to keep my adopted city cool and respond with the typical "huh", but it has little effect on her. She takes this as a yes and begins to rattle off questions. Her husband comes up behind her and stares at me blankly as if I'm speaking Bulgarian. Southern Bulgarian maybe.

"Where should we eat? Have you been to the Aquarium? Are we safe going here...there? Is it always this hot?" she asked, with hardly enough time for me to respond to each. I do my best to answer a few questions while she takes a breath. Although I've been staying at this same hotel off and on for the last year, she probably knew as much as I did about Atlanta from looking online. Her husband finally got up the courage to speak. He told me they were from a small town and were not used to "certain kinds of people". I usually bristle at these types of comments, but I really don't think he meant anything by it because they had been very nice to the family from the Bahamas. This family was the "certain kinds of people" he was talking about, if only by appearance.

Well I finally parted ways with the small town snow celebrities and it was no longer light enough to read. I packed my book and untouched beer back into my pack and started to head down to my room. The all too common sound of sirens twenty floors below caught my attention, and I walked back to the rail to look down. Matchbox cars with flashing lights and wailing sirens made their way to somebody's bad day. Sombody's variable. The answer to the questions both families wanted to ask, but couldn't verbalize. Is my family safe here?

With each passing day I am more impressed with just how similiar we all are. We look in the mirror and appear so different from others. We speak different languages and crave different foods, but we all seek the same thing. Food, shelter and saftey for our families.

Georgia America

As I walk to the edge of the pool, I discover that I will probably have to walk down the steps instead of diving in. Too many people with the same idea and it's crowded! Little kids with plastic floats strapped to their arms look up from the shallow steps and clear a path as I enter. I have to stop as a squealing sunburn victim splashes right in front of me, dog paddling like a fifty pound poodle. A very tan lady looks over the top of her sunglasses at me, she lets me know she is watching and the poodle belongs to her. I move even slower.
The water feels great and I ease down toward the deep end. I map out a path and breaststroke through the crowd of coconut flavored vacationers. When I reach the bouyed rope that seperates the swimmers from the sinkers, I latch on. After dunking my blistered head I shift around and sit on the rope. The rope begins to sway and as I reach for a firmer grip, a little boy of six or seven materializes beside me. No float or swimmies, just a firm grip on the cable.
"I'm sorry" I offer, "did I knock you off?"
"Yeah" the boy said, "but it's ok, I have fifteen lives. It's her you need to worry about, she only has one."
He points to another very tan, visor wearing lady that has to be his grandmother. She doesn't look up.
All I could really think to say was "cool", but that was enough and he took it from there.
PJ finally pried us apart after an hour or so, but I had a new friend. The only real pertinent information I got from him was that he had enjoyed his seventh birthday at the beach and he was from Georgia America. He was funny. He told me several things that I feel sure were family secrets, or at a minimum, family embarrassments. But he really just seemed to enjoy having a conversation with somebody that would listen, ask questions and take him seriously. An "adult" discussion.
I saw him several times during my vacation and his grandmother ended up being nice too. I guess everybody is a little more wary of strangers than they were when I was a kid, and after watching the news, why not. When I was little I always tried to talk to adults. Some would talk to me and others would not. It was a number's game for me, but I remember the feeling of confidence I got when they would. I felt important, accepted.
But isn't "remembering" the key? People tell me that I'm a kid magnet because we are (and I quote) "about the same age", but that's not it. I'm fully cooked, I just remember being a little kid. A little kid, a big kid and now an adult. There is really not much difference in the three. At all stages I wanted to be looked at, heard and treated with respect. To laugh, love and play. To not be written off when I do or say something stupid. To enjoy the things we all have in common; two Georgia Americans.

Perfect People

The door flies open and a little girl of about five or six pounces on the bed, butterfly net in hand, to roust her sleeping parents. The couple in bed sits up smiling, honestly looking better than I do after coffee and a shower. They smile at her and the father jumps out of bed, takes her in his arms and swings her around the room. Her too blonde hair blowing around her small, smiling face. The little girl takes the father's hand and leads him outside for a day of catching butterflies and identifying harmless, non-stinging insects.
After the bugs are identified and released, the father and daughter relax in a well shaded hammock, face to face, solving the world's kid problems. Why dogs walk on four legs. Why he has a big dark hair growing between his eyes. How he met her mother. Cataloging answers from the most trusted person in the world.
The day winds to a close and the little girl is tucked in bed. Before she closes her eyes she reaches under her pillow and takes out a card in a purple envelope. "Happy Father's Day Daddy, I love you." she chirps before dropping her head on the pillow with eyes pinched shut. Shut so tightly that none of the love and excitement she feels can escape, locking the memories of the day away. She falls asleep, father watching, with a big smile on her face.
Sound familiar? Yes, this was a Hallmark greeting card commercial I saw on television this morning. There are many similiar to this one for every occasion we celebrate. Perfect looking people enjoying a perfect event. They sleep in ironed clothes with combed hair, brushed teeth and makeup. Fat, smooth pillows and ornate comforters. Blinds open just enough to allow the perfect amount of morning light, and a pre-caffeine smile that can come only from a fairy tale.
But as unreal as this sounds, isn't this how we remember our best days? Most of us don't look like the models on television. We sleep in pajamas with holes in them and compare bed heads in the morning. I've always thought that the worse my hair looked in the morning the better I slept the night before! But when we sit together eating breakfast I feel like Brad Pitt. Well more like Robert Redford, but you know what I mean. I'm enjoying breakfast with my group of perfect people. My family. My television commercial. I loved explaining the kid mysteries to my daughter almost as much as love telling adult jokes with her now. My wife and I don't talk about the same things we did 25 years ago, but they are no less as important or exciting. It's our life.
I've wanted time to freeze many times in my life. Pinch my eyes shut and stay in the moment forever. To step off the rollercoaster of good and bad, and live in the Hallmark commercial of the day. But if I had done this I would have missed the lifetime of moments that have followed. The lifetime of moments yet to come. The bad that allows me to throughly enjoy the good. My life may never be Hallmark worthy, but it's mine. I wouldn't have missed it for the world.