One recent afternoon, my husband and I and our two sons ducked into a small restaurant near the McGill University campus in Montreal. We settled into a red booth in the back, beside a window that had no glass and brought the pageantry of city life into close view. My sons ordered sandwiches and red-berry smoothies, which were served in tall glasses and seemed to give off their own summer glow.
Glancing around the cafe, I wondered when juice drinks had become so ubiquitous. Who invented smoothies? "Mr. Smoothie," my younger son replied with a straight face, then added, "Don't write about smoothies. They're not interesting and they're not news."
"I think smoothies are interesting," I lamely countered.
It was not what you would call the most sparkling repartee, but then family trips come with their own risks. My husband and I still travel with our children, who are no longer technically children but full-fledged adults, ages 23 and 20. Before we left for Montreal, a friend of mine expressed surprise, as if we were in violation of some prescribed cut-off point on a pediatrician's child-development chart. Is there a moment when family vacations are supposed to cease? I admit it might seem a bit clingy or regressive to corral grown children into the back seat of a car and expect them to enjoy riding around North America with you. It nudges them back into roles they long ago relinquished and can lead to a certain impatience on their part, even when the subject turns to fruit smoothies.
The truth is I still savor our family vacations, however much they have changed since the long-ago days when the boys were little and every experience — swimming in a hotel pool in California, driving to Friendly's in the Berkshires for a scoop of ice cream — had an aura of newness and adventure. These days, the things that excite my sons, that register on their emotional spectrum, are more likely to involve either the New York Mets or the kind of personal or professional improvisation that occurs with no parents present.
Still, whoever said that a family vacation should be harmonious? Although our culture tends to conceive of vacations, not to mention all of contemporary life, as a vast menu of consumer options, free choice was never a sure route to happiness. A case can be made for physical proximity to the people you love, for simple togetherness, even after your family is no longer a cohesive mammalian unit but rather a group of adults who could probably benefit from the services of a lawyer in trying to reach an amicable agreement on where to eat or what movie to see.
So here we were in Montreal, a destination we had selected by putting the question up for a vote. It seemed promising: a chance to leave the United States without getting on a plane. The runner-up was Pittsburgh, home of the Andy Warhol Museum and the Pirates. We will go to Pittsburgh next time. If our family has a vacation philosophy, it is this: Go somewhere new, preferably a city that has both a major sports team and a major art museum.
We made the drive to Montreal in a Toyota Venza S.U.V. of a nondescript rental-car color and, frankly, I did not harbor high expectations for car conversation. For one thing, the trip is a six-hour zoom straight up the New York State Thruway. For another, almost everyone now travels with his or her own digital entertainment system. Long car trips that were once enlivened by guessing games like 20 Questions are now devoted to untangling cords, comparing notes on dwindling phone batteries and negotiating for access to the USB-powered port on the dashboard. My husband was the designated driver, and he prefers music to news. Connecting his iPod to the car radio, he listened with visible contentment to the pulsing tunes of his youth — Springsteen, Janis Joplin, the Kinks singing, "I'm gonna be your number one."
Keeping his eyes on the road, he commented to the boys, as if imparting some valuable fatherly wisdom: "This is the Phil Spector sound." No one responded. "You know who Phil Spector is? The one who accidentally killed his wife?"
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