A few weeks ago, my son and I were leaving the mall, walking toward the parking lot, when there, at the end of a row of cars, I saw the unmistakable profile of the Time Machine. I rushed us to the car, a 1981 bare stainless steel DeLorean in mint condition, and peered into the interior. On the passenger floor board rested a pink Mattel hover board. Behind the driver’s seat was a pair of self-sizing Air Jordan’s. An October 22, 2015 USA Today was strewn in the small cargo area. In the center console? You guessed it: a flux capacitor.
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Any travel is in itself time travel. You’re able to go forward, and come back, but it’s the missed time that doesn’t reappear.
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I took more pictures than I needed, and when my son, reached for the door handle, I shooed him away. This was a special car. No touch. It’s from one of Daddy’s favorite movies, Back to the Future.So, my almost-three-year-old doesn’t know what a DeLorean is, nor what movie it’s from. No worry. He will one day. When I show him and his little brother, and begin their lifelong march into my geekdom.
That beautiful little moment is one I’ve been trying to replicate as often as I can this year. 2016 has been the year of trips, at least one a month, only one of those being for pleasure. It’s been all business, and it’s starting to wear me down.
It’s not so much the travel itself as it is time away from family. Any travel is in itself time travel. You’re able to go forward, and come back, but it’s the missed time that doesn’t reappear. It’s not like you’re Marty McFly, and can reset the time coordinates to two days prior, when you were in Philadelphia for a weeklong conference and your baby first started crawling.
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A luxury hotel isn’t so luxurious without your wife ordering room service, and your two little muchachos monkeying with some room fixture they shouldn’t be touching.
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The glamour of travel, or being a road hog as an Uber driver recently described my ilk, dwindles quickly when it’s just you. Rewind a decade and a half, and a solo weekend in a new city, or a backpacking trip alone was food for the man soul. But now, though the company schedules them in places like Boca Raton to reward all your hard work from the past year, a luxury hotel isn’t so luxurious without your wife ordering room service, and your two little muchachos monkeying with some room fixture they shouldn’t be touching.
I keep reminding myself that this year of travel will slow once I get to the fall. The regular three and four night stays away from my wife and sons will decrease, and we’ll go back to the long stretches of Daddy just being home every night.And of course, we’ll time travel on our own later this year. As a little party of McFly’s, we’ll set our coordinates and blast off on vacation. No meetings, no managers. Just the four of us, and a time machine, carving our own little line in the space-time continuum.
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Photo credit: Robert Couse-Baker.
