2023-08-19 17:07:19
I throw a centipede at my father, who jumps out of the way far too frantically, screeching at a high pitch. For a moment I think my father will twist his ankle and fall into the hotel fountain.
Undeterred, the centipede continues to curl up and will be eaten later that night, presumably by a frog. My mother buys a throw to protect herself from the sun. The rainbow flag as a poncho, she thinks for a moment that these are the traditional colors of the country. I whisper to my brother: “You can wear it at the next CSD”, the brother giggles, the baby in his arms.
The baby whose second name is my beloved grandmother, who is now here, too. As a middle name, not as a person.
I showed the baby his first hermit crab today and my sister-in-law exclaims: “Thilo mustn’t spend so much time with the child, otherwise later on he will like bugs and will be dragging animals home all the time.”
It’s summer vacation and my family is spending it together. The last time we went on vacation as a family was when my beloved grandmother passed away. We sold off their small inheritance, together, here in this place, and this place made us happy, made the pain of one person’s eternal absence bearable for a brief moment. Between the pool, the taste of salt in the mouth and sweet showers. Exotic flavors of ice cream and sweets with unpronounceable names. My father, who drinks from an indoor fountain because he thought: “That’s how they do it here!” An indoor fountain in which ducks and little guppies swam.
Summer vacation, I think, has a major impact on who we are, how we become, and how we remember.
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In recent years I neglected summer vacations, it was a big mistake. I feel that now, here on vacation with all the people who couldn’t be more important to me. I wanted to work, and because my work involves travel, I always thought: I’m on vacation. Even so, the hair turned grey, the wrinkles deepened. Holidays shouldn’t be as exhausting as the last few years.
I remember now, here, the first summer vacation of my life, in Himmelpfort, in a facility where GDR cultural workers went on vacation. I remember my father catching a strange fish. And to my grandmother, who dared to eat this fish. I remember hiking through Saxon Switzerland with my brother. The forbidden climbing in the nature reserve. And Czech wafers. I remember trips to Portugal with my parents, horror films and first falls in love across the pool lounger. Summer vacation memories are the warmest.
But now I am no longer a child, I have reached the middle of my possible experiences. Confident and cool, my parents move toward the foggy end, and with this little new creature, a start is made. Eight billion starts in this world.
It experiences its first summer vacation, which it will not remember, it experiences me, my brother, its mother, my parents. It smiles, I throw ice cubes at a seven-month-old, I put the centipede on its little arms, and the little one, unlike my father, doesn’t squeal. It looks concentrated and friendly at the insecure worm that doesn’t know where to go.
G. will not remember, but I will. During these holidays we create memories of ourselves and of others. And every summer holiday is more and more charged with the past and with what has been experienced. What will be added this year, I ask myself, my brother asks himself. How many more summer holidays are there, the parents ask themselves, their eyes sad but full of understanding.
“That’s the way it is,” the brutal logic of our lives, made conscious on the beach between the fifth cappuccino and the twelfth Cola Zero.
I never thought these trips could have such a big impact on my life. But if you neglect summer vacation, you also neglect making memories. And life is the sum of all the things we remember right and wrong.
We falsify, make some trips more beautiful, make them more harmonious, maybe also make them less expensive and less flimsy. We make them beautiful.
Maybe we should appreciate summer vacation a lot more for what it does in all of our lives. It’s not a break in the middle of the year, it’s rather the source of a feeling that carries us into the next year. To the next summer, which will again provide us with new memories and new prospects. Not only with enough vitamin D and three kilos more on the scales.
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