SEPT. 5, 2015 Frank Bruni
EVERY summer for many years now, my family has kept to our ritual. All 20 of us —my siblings, my dad, our better halves, my nieces and nephews — find a beach housebig enough to fit the whole unruly clan. We journey to it from our different statesand time zones. We tensely divvy up the bedrooms, trying to remember who faredpoorly or well on the previous trip. And we fling ourselves at one another for seven days and seven nights.That’s right: a solid week. It’s that part of the ritual that mystifies many of myfriends, who endorse family closeness but think that there can be entirely too muchof it. Wouldn’t a long weekend suffice? And wouldn’t it ward off a few spats andsimplify the planning?The answer to the second question is yes, but to the first, an emphatic no.I used to think that shorter would be better, and in the past, I arrived for these beach vacations a day late or fled two days early, telling myself that I had to when intruth I also wanted to — because I crave my space and my quiet, and because I wearyof marinating in sunscreen and discovering sand in strange places. But in recentyears, I’ve showed up at the start and stayed for the duration, and I’ve noticed adifference.With a more expansive stretch, there’s a better chance that I’ll be around at theprecise, random moment when one of my nephews drops his guard and solicits my advice about something private. Or when one of my nieces will need someone otherthan her parents to tell her that she’s smart and beautiful. Or when one of mysiblings will flash back on an incident from our childhood that makes us laughuncontrollably, and suddenly the cozy, happy chain of our love is cinched that muchtighter.There’s simply no real substitute for physical presence.We delude ourselves when we say otherwise, when we invoke and venerate“quality time,†a shopworn phrase with a debatable promise: that we can planinstances of extraordinary candor, plot episodes of exquisite tenderness, engineerintimacy in an appointed hour.
We can try. We can cordon off one meal each day or two afternoons each weekand weed them of distractions. We can choose a setting that encourages relaxationand uplift. We can fill it with totems and frippery — a balloon for a child, sparklingwine for a spouse — that signal celebration and create a sense of the sacred.And there’s no doubt that the degree of attentiveness that we bring to anoccasion ennobles or demeans it. Better to spend 15 focused, responsive minutesthan 30 utterly distracted ones.But people tend not to operate on cue. At least our moods and emotions don’t.We reach out for help at odd points; we bloom at unpredictable ones. The surest wayto see the brightest colors, or the darkest ones, is to be watching and waiting andready for them.
That’s reflected in a development that Claire Cain Miller and David Streitfeldwrote about in The Times last week. They noted that “a workplace culture that urgesnew mothers and fathers to hurry back to their cubicles is beginning to shift,†andthey cited “more family-friendly policies†at Microsoft and Netflix, which haveextended the leave that parents can take.How many parents will step off the fast track and avail themselves of thisremains to be seen. But those who do will be deciding that the quantity of time withtheir brood matters as much as the intensity of it.
They’ll be lucky: Many people aren’t privileged enough to exercise suchdiscretion. My family is lucky, too. We have the means to get away.But we’re also dedicated to it, and we’ve determined that Thanksgiving Day isn’tample, that Christmas Eve passes too quickly, and that if each of us really means tobe central in the others’ lives, we must make an investment, the biggest componentsof which are minutes, hours, days. As soon as our beach week this summer was done,we huddled over our calendars and traded scores of emails to figure out which weeknext summer we could all set aside. It wasn’t easy. But it was essential.
Couples move in together not just because it’s economically prudent. Theyunderstand, consciously or instinctively, that sustained proximity is the best route tothe soul of someone; that unscripted gestures at unexpected junctures yield sweeterrewards than scripted ones on date night; that the “I love you†that counts most isn’twhispered with great ceremony on a hilltop in Tuscany. No, it slips out casually,spontaneously, in the produce section or over the dishes, amid the drudgery anddetritus of their routines. That’s also when the truest confessions are made, whenhurt is at its rawest and tenderness at its purest.I know how my 80-year-old father feels about dying, religion and God notbecause I scheduled a discrete encounter to discuss all of that with him. I knowbecause I happened to be in the passenger seat of his car when such thoughts wereon his mind and when, for whatever unforeseeable reason, he felt comfortablearticulating them.
And I know what he appreciates and regrets most about his past because I wasnot only punctual for this summer’s vacation, but also traveled there with him, tofatten our visit, and he was uncharacteristically ruminative on that flight.It was over lunch at the beach house one day that my oldest nephew spoke withunusual candor, and at unusual length, about his expectations for college, hisexperiences in high school — stuff that I’d grilled him about previously, neverharvesting the generous answers that he volunteered during that particular meal.It was on a run the next morning that my oldest niece described, as she’d neverdone for me before, the joys, frustrations and contours of her relationships with her parents, her two sisters and her brother. Why this information tumbled out of herthen, with pelicans overheard and sweat slicking our foreheads, I can’t tell you. But Ican tell you that I’m even more tightly bonded with her now, and that’s not becauseof some orchestrated, contrived effort to plumb her emotions. It’s because I waspresent. It’s because I was there.
