AROUND
THE KITCHEN TABLE
By
Joan Eyolfson Cadham
On
vacation: the joys of an unplugged holiday
It might have been an honest
accident. Or perhaps it was some sort of psychological slip. Whatever
the cause, after I had moved from Chute-a-Blondeau, my daughter Inga’s
home, to Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, and after Inga and Michael had gone off
to cottage country for a week and I couldn’t reach them, I discovered
that I had left the connector for my laptop in Inga’s office.
With no way of plugging into
a power source, and with batteries that last only 38 minutes, there
was no way I could access the multitude of files that I had loaded up
before I left home. I could check my email on my friend Judy’s
computer, but I couldn’t get any serious work done.
For a full day, I panicked.
I realized that I was going
to be forced to take a real holiday. It was going to be strange —
it was the first since I had started freelance writing back in the early
1980s.
I had been invited to Inga’s
for a monster family birthday party — five of us celebrating milestones
within a few weeks of one another — a 20, a 50, a 70 and two 80s.
Fourteen people slept over. Thirty-three were invited to the official
birthday cake party. I did manage an almost all-night work session a
day after I arrived, but then my kids conspired to keep me too busy
to get back to the computer.
I know I am not the only
Canadian who cannot get away from the office. Though I do not carry
a cellphone or Blackberry, I have a pressing need to check email at
least twice a day.
The roots of my malady go
way back. When I first cracked the freelance hurdle — the one
that required finding editors who would agree to pay cash for material
I provided — Jack became aware that I was making money off our
boating holidays.
We would pull into a marina
for the evening. We’d secure the boat and he would head off to
visit while I puttered around a bit, made a cup of tea and assembled
my book and the most comfortable cushion I could find. His timing was
exquisite. I would be just settled when Jack would come racing up the
dock.
“You’ve got to
come right now. I met this interesting man and I told him you would
put him into a yachting magazine. Get your camera and your notebooks.”
Jack was never deterred by
the fact that only rarely did an “interesting man” yield
the kind of material I needed if I were going to interest an editor.
On a good day, he would line me up with three interviews, allowing just
enough time off for me to help produce supper. A friend reminded me
that in a book I wrote about our boating experiences — which,
for the most part, were wonderful — I made reference to provisioning
the boat and “tossing in the typewriter.”
Jack, who was my most vocal
fan, and so wildly supportive of my desire to write for a living that
he agreed to move to Foam Lake, never realized what he was doing. No
number of threats to use him as a spare anchor made any difference.
He saw it as helping me. I was the introvert, he was the extrovert.
He’d make the the contacts and all I had to do was conduct an
interview, take appropriate photos, write a plausable piece and attempt
to market it. No big deal.
I learned to accept holiday
time as an information-gathering opportunity. I would come out west
for two weeks and, again aided by well-meaning friends and relatives,
spend my entire time moving from interview to interview, from one possibly
newsworthy event to another. There was nothing wrong with any of it
— except that there was no time to indulge in the simple pleasures
that are supposed to be part of a vacation.
So, here I was, some 25 years
later, with all my files locked into my computer.
Small wonder I panicked.
The rest of the week was
a revelation. One evening, Judy, my friend and hostess, suggested we
wander down to the park by the lakeshore, just to sit and watch the
reflections of light on water. I read, just for the fun of it. I let
friends know I was in town and available for very long lunches. Marc,
my honorary French Canadian son, took me back to St-Anicet, a favourite
stop on our boating cruises, and we wandered and walked and took photos
and I never once pulled out a notebook or tried to conduct an interview.
I was offered rides through all the places that are still so dear to
me, and I accepted. Half the time, I didn’t even bother taking
photos.
No, I’m not alone.
According to a US survey — and those numbers probably mirror Canadian
habits — nearly one-quarter of American workers bring work with
them on vacation. Sixteen per cent of workers admit they feel guilty
about missing work while on vacation. According to the experts, it takes
three days of vacation before you start winding down, so that holidays
should be at least seven days long.
I could say that, amazingly,
I survived a weeklong workless holiday. However, that would not be honest.
The ugly truth is that I had a very good time indeed. Enough so that
when one lunchtime friend suggested that, next vacation, I just might
leave my laptop at home, I seriously considered the idea.
Eyolfson Cadham is an award-winning columnist and freelance journalist who moved from Montreal to Foam Lake in 1992. She is a member of Sask Writers Guild and is an oral storyteller with professional status with Storytellers of Canada.
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