Departure

Sometimes it was San Diego, other years Laguna Beach, but in my father's post-divorce and all-male household, summers brought some form of vacation. Money was tight. This wasn't the usual case for a doctor in 1950s California, and I knew it somehow. My mother was the problem, my father said. She was draining him with her demands for child support. I listened, I saddened, I got older. I didn't care about any of it. I wanted a vacation, a time away from our desert town, far from the school and the drugstore and the supermarket and the bakery, where reflections of failed family life came at me all the time.

My father had a very hard time getting off on vacations. It seemed so simple. Put some clothes in a bag, put some gas in the car, and drive. Maps came out, big color depictions of roads and towns as seen by the Automobile Club of Southern California. My father found terrible confusion in highways and directions and getting lost. As a boy, I had no understanding or sympathy. I could have guided him to San Diego myself. Yes, the roads were changing, for California was growing, its suburbs and freeways spreading. Perhaps my father didn't like change. He'd certainly seen enough of it, his marriage gone, living above his medical practice with two teenage boys. Virtually friendless in a small town.

On vacation departure days, August heat rising, my father spent the morning dawdling over small projects. Things in his office needed fixing. He taped electrical wires together. He moved furniture. The day drew on. What time do we have to be at our hotel, I would ask?  None of my business, he would reply. I would wander outside and try to find something to do. I knew that my father was at least considering departure when he went to work on the sign. It was a black plastic pegboard, with white letters that snapped into place. Dr. Bendix is gone until. For emergencies call San Gorgonio Pass Memorial Hospital at. But the letters were difficult to snap into position, and they didn't align well. The lines of type undulated like waves. Like the waves that were currently breaking, one after the next, on the San Diego County beaches. The ocean smell would be overwhelming, when it hit us. But for now, all that was hitting was time. Light was taking on the late afternoon/early evening feel of summers. At last he was done, reluctant but actually loading the car. His door slammed, we backed out of our driveway and things began to change. Ahead was something different, where people thronged and restaurant signs lit up parking lots and the setting sun shimmered in copper luminescence. Algae, my father said. It was always dark when we got to our motel. I didn't care. We were here, not there, and one restaurant was usually still open.

Marlou and I have done a much better job of departing for Provence. Via New York. And the Queen Mary 2. By way of London, Gloucestershire, London and Lille. We've covered all bases, except for the trial run of the international voltage battery charger for the electric wheelchair. Methodical, thorough -- and yet tinged with fate, as all departures seem to be. I understand my father better now. When it's time to get away, you know there's no getting away. Just when you're about to leave, the real things arrive. The plastic sign in the window that says you're a doctor...should have been there all along. You can see that now. The absence of the sign was a sign. And now the presence of the sign reminds you of its former absence. Departure is a time of coming to grips.

And so days before our departure, Marlou paid a visit to her oncologist. The vague abdominal symptoms may not be so vague after all, it seems. Is the cancer back? Don't go there, the doctor said. Go where you're going. Make the trip. And the doctor will make the diagnosis. There will be some tests in the next couple of days. Whatever happens next can happen in November. Go. Depart, travel and arrive, because there's no real getting away. The important thing is to pack your bags, to be aware of everything you choose to bring. Pay attention to the things you forget. And be open to the things you find along the way -- in fact, be grateful. You only get to keep them for a while.