Marley and Me
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Back in the saddle
Oh, my, where did August go? My last entry in this blog was Aug. 2, and here we are at the end of the month already. No, I didn't fall off the earth. But I did go off the grid for a couple weeks to escape to Michigan with my family. I grew up in Michigan, outside Detroit, and my first newspaper job was in a small harbor town on Lake Michigan, where I met my wife, Jenny. (You can read about it in my autobiographical sketch at http://www.marleyandme.com/about.html) We have lots of good memories there, and besides the Great Lakes totally rock. So on August 6, my wife and I packed the minivan to the gills, loaded in the kids, wedged in Gracie, our 14-month-old Labrador retriever, managed to get the doors slammed, and off we went for the 10 hour drive.
The first few days we stayed at my childhood home, which is now filled with an evocative mix of good memories and sad reminders. A year ago when we visited, my father and mother greeted us at the door. This year was much different. My father died over the Christmas holiday. He had been my mother's sole caregiver, and Mom, who suffers from mid-stage Alzheimers disease, went into a nursing home shortly after. There was really no other option. During our visit, we stayed in the house, visited my father's grave in Ann Arbor, and spent our days with my mother in the nursing home. One morning, I went alone to the nursing home to visit her while my kids and Jenny stayed behind to swim. I found my mother in the chapel, attending Mass, and sound asleep. It was one of those visits that forces a son to come to grips with the difficult passage families make. I wrote a column about the experience, and it ran in The Philadelphia Inquirer on Monday 29: http://go.philly.com/grogan.
The real "vacation" part of the trip came when we descended on our good friends Pete and Maureen Kelly for a week with them at their beach cottage on Lake Huron. The weather was classic crisp Great Lakes; the winds were perfect for sailing; the shade ideal for reading. I polished off Robert Kurson's Shadow Divers, which I thought was great, great, great. I was on a panel discussion with Rob in Chicago in June and I found him to be a very engaging speaker. He's an even better writer and storyteller. I've been recommending it to anyone who asks for a good read. This is meticulously researched and reported non-fiction that reads like a novel.
We finished our vacation with a couple nights in a quaint hotel on the harbor in South Haven, across the state on Lake Michigan, where we visited friends and strolled among the sailboats and out to the lighthouse. Then it was back for one last day visiting my mother, and then back to Pennsylvania. And work. And bills. And chores. And reality. Sigh. But we were all glad to be home, especially Gracie the Dog who celebrated by chasing the chickens around the yard (we have four, and I tell their story in Marley & Me), throwing them into a panic that has disrupted their egg laying ever since. They're sensitive little things.
posted by John Grogan at 9:24 PM
 
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