Springtime in Suburbia

There's something very depressing about listening to vacation plans which combine jet travel, Bermuda, suntan lotion and volleyballs when you know you're just trundling back to suburbia next week. Ever since my parents decided we couldn't afford the psychic toll of another family vacation (the fighting in the back seat finally got to them). I have known, with a sense of doom approximating the feeling of a Christian Scientist with appendicitis, that I will not be embarking on a spree in the Netherlands Antilles, but on a hopeless quest to entertain myself in a deserted suburban wasteland.

Deserted because Harvard, with its characteristic instinct for the jugular, chooses to have its vacations at times when all self-respecting colleges don't. If you're going to the same old place for vacation, you don't even have the comfort of the same old faces. With no change of scene and no old high school friends to catch up with, vacation survival means avoiding major confrontations with your nearest and dearest and a continuous battle with ennui. Now don't get me wrong, I love my family. But it is a strain to spend seven uninterrupted days in their loving and perhaps over-solicitous company.

Eat and Drink, for Tomorrow We Eat and Drink

The first days of vacation are all right of course, because no one expects me to do anything but collapse into bed, wake up for meals that put Adams House cooking to shame, and drift back to sleep again. But parental tolerance of the sleep-gorge-sleep regimen wanes quickly, and then, at least in my family, I am expected to fill the 'rents in on the details of life at school: intellectual pursuits stimulating lectures and an exhilerating, whirlwind, cosmopolitan social life. Unfortunately, words fail me here, because much of my life is spent hunched over a typewriter contracting curvature of the spine and shortchanging the glorious intellectual pursuits my family values.

After the obligatory "these are my courses and this is my life," I must search, however fruitlessly, for a release from boredom. It's not that my family is boring, it's just that it's hard to switch gears from a lifestyle of always too much to do--and I therefore do nothing--to one of enough time to do anything I want--and I therefore do nothing.

Drugs and Diamonds

I am not, of course, intellectually employed at home. It doesn't matter that I could spend my time catching up on reading I will have to do when I return to Harvard. When at home, relax. My search for mental bubble gum begins with television, a narcotic I deny myself while at school. I am an old movie fanatic. After 11:30 p.m., the television ether ripples with old, older and oldest movies. A good evening at home starts with a rapid scan of the good old New York Times T.V. section for cinematic gems and ends in the wee hours while I chew on unexploded popcorn kernels and await the closing credits. One vacation I spent four nights in a row watching Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers, doubles features. Looking back on it now, I can't see how I survived, because the titles came and went, but those mindless plots stayed the same. It got so by the third night I could predict exactly when the big dance number would come. I would claim the gift of prophecy, but I might just have been watching reruns.

But old movies can fill only part of each day. I may rise at noon or later; still I have many hours to fill' and my hometown doesn't offer much scintillating entertainment. The tree-lined streets are very placid and social life in the town is about the same. My town sports Playland, an amusement park famous county-wide, but in spring all anyone can do is stare at the deserted rides. There are two bars in town, but I have grown weary of watching the local football players and their fawning cheerleaders. Visiting the old high school doesn't tempt me either. Most of the teachers I Knew are gone, and all the people are too young. Only the speckled floors, bisected by a strip of silver, are the same. The lunchroom now has round tables on which ice cream sandwich wrappers are still smeared.

Farewell, My Slovenly

About the only thing my town has going for it is a grand, ivy-decked library. On vacations, I always soothe my slightly troubled conscience with the promise that if I don't read schoolwork, I will at least read a few good books. So every year I take out four great books and one of my favorite mysteries, read the mystery and take the others back to the library at the end of the week, never opened.

After I've exhausted the limited resources of suburbia, there remains that most hallowed of vacation traditions--visiting the relatives. In my family, that's quite a ritual, because the bulk of my father's large family still lives in one very clannish neighborhood in Brooklyn. They inhabit a world where no one ever moves away, women get married at 18 or 19, and everyone knows everyone else and what they're doing. Visiting my grandmother, one of the local matriarchs, is always an occasion Despite our protest that we have eaten, overeaten, or can feel our aortas congealing into hockey pucks a la S. J. Perelman, she always has more food ready than any undernourished victim of Harvard cooking could eat in weeks. And because my grandmother is a Syrian Jew, it's delightfully exotic food--stuffed grape leaves, soups with unpronouncable names and apricot desserts. But the food aside, visiting the relatives is part and parcel of the vacation ordeal. The same recital of courses and social life is in order, with the exception that my grandmother cannot quite accustom herself to my unmarried status. She asks curiously, "How's your boyfriend?" "Fine, Gramma." "Are you getting married?" "Nooo, Gramma!" Then she concedes magnanimously that I can wait until after I graduate--preferably the day after--to marry.

The duty list for visiting--or enduring visits from--runs from grandmothers to aunts and uncles--whose relationships with the family vary from warm and cordial to very rocky. One or another of my less tolerable uncles always seems to descend on us for days, leaving only after communication between him and my father has degenerated to muttered threats and growling. From all these relatives, good and bad, there come the endless rounds of the same questions. Why do you go to Harvard? Isn't it Radcliffe? Do you really live in co-ed dorms and is it fun? Yes, it is really. And to be perfectly honest, I don't mind the litany half as much as coming back to school, where I won't feel quite so specialCrimsonDavid Beach