Vacaaaaaaay

So, yeah, I'm back (if you'd even noticed I'd been gone).
Had an AWESOME time.
'Twas just the old man and myself; The Boy had taken his vacation the week prior to visit The Girlfriend.
The surf was positively brutal. I nearly drowned. Wave after suffocating wave slamming into us, knocking us over, the undertow pulling us back down as we scrambled to upright ourselves.
G insisted I should be "more buoyant", and was slightly disappointed that I am more of a klutz on clown feet. You know what your problem is, he stated, you are short and round, sort of like a beach ball. I wonder why you can't float better?
The resulting concussion wasn't quite as amusing. Butthole.
We actually spent more time fishing than filling our cracks with sand. Whether by boat or by pier, we were landing poor defenseless fishies by the dozens. We each caught a crab, but mine was bigger by far. At one point, I was having more luck than he; he decided he would unhook my fishes, re-bait and cast, and I'd just rotate between our poles, pulling them in as fast as the bait hit the water. It was cool. "Gettin' jiggy wit it" sounded so much more amusing at the time.
Back at the beach, we did a little people-watching rather than the old dunk-and-drown routine. Work on our tans, drink heavily, talk about stuff. It was nice. A young family set up near us; it appeared to be two young couples and their respective offspring, I got the feeling the wives were sisters, and the little cousins played together nicely. The oldest child, probably about 2 1/2 years old (Nick's age, of course) was wearing spiderman trunks and a little red fisherman's hat; the little girl was just barely walking. I felt myself watching SpiderTot a little too intensely. It's not that the mommy wasn't paying adequate attention to the boy; only once or a couple more dozen times did I feel the need to ready myself to spring into action... it's just that when you have a SpiderTot wandering off toward the edge of the water and you're taking pictures of someone or fucking around with the damn umbrella, bad stuff can happen. G thought maybe it was stressing me out a little and reminded me that maybe our neighbors on the sand might view me as some creepy old lady who is staring at their kids. As naptime neared, the little girl who had been making googly eyes and laughing at me started getting cranky. She stumbled over towards us, and her mommy said "Oh don't go bothering them, now, sweety, they don't want you! They don't want a little whiny baby!"
Yeah, actually, we do.
Can we have her? How much you want? I've got the checkbook in the car.
Anyway. It was good to visit with my parents again. Shame they aren't willing or able to go out and enjoy the things they used to. I often felt like we used them more for a bed and breakfast facility than spending quality time together, but they understood, and we had some nice visits. Funny though, you remember the old saying about fish and visitors getting stale after a few days, it is so true. Up through day three it was wonderful, by day 4 we all were getting a little crabby, and by day 5, it was time to wrap things up and get the hell outta there. Suddenly I realized why I was so ready to move away when I was 18. All of my parent's little weird habits and mannerisms suddenly became unbearable, as I'm sure did ours, and we had to cut out before damage was done. My dear, wonderful, perfect father is OCD out the ass, and my sweet, loving, perfect mother is just plain nuts. And we, well, we were just in the way.
To give you a little taste: my father gift-wraps his garbage. Some may look at is recycling, but he is downright anal about it. He reuses the plastic newspaper baggies for trash bags. These go into plastic grocery bags, each tied up tightly and all the air squished out, and they, in turn, go into larger brown paper bags. Every little box and package is carefully torn into confetti before making it into the trash. Cans, jars and bottles are de-labled and rinsed well, and placed into the recycling bin. The jagged lids from cans are wrapped in used paper towels he dug out of the garbage. He saves the wrappers from meat packaging just in case we come down with some dreaded food poisoning. I have long since accepted the reused aluminum foil and ziploc bags, the margarine and coolwhip containers, and the piles of fastfood napkins and condiments that made their way home with my folks. They're thrifty, what can I say? But when he goes along behind us rechecking every door we closed, readjusting any item we might have disturbed, and straightening out every rug and slipcover we touched, we felt a little invasive.
Ah, well. Things are fine. They just loved having us there, and told us not to wait so long for a return again. We did have a good time, overall, and overlooking family weirdness is what reunions are all about, right? Right.