Those advertisements for cruise holidays for mature people. You get this suave man in a dinner jacket, hair lightly streaked with gray, looking into the eyes of a woman with a pashmina stole around her slim, firm shoulders, to protect her against the night breezes as they stand on deck together. There is a hint that they have been at it like rabbits all afternoon and that they can’t wait for the captain’s cocktail party and gala dinner to end, so they can be at it all over again. Are there people like this or is it just a fantasy dreamed up by an advertising agency, to sell holidays to us middle-aged Americans? Something that will leave the rest of us unsettled and unhappy? In any event, it is not important; it’s not relevant to us. We had never had a real vacation. Not even when the girls, Mel and Margy, were children. Brian used to say, in his farming days: “Find me a cow that doesn’t need to be milked for three weeks, and then we’ll have a vacation.” And when the bottom fell out of the dairy-cattle market, as it did—for Brian, anyway—he was into growing corn in Illinois and flax in North Dakota, and in those days you couldn’t take a vacation, either, because there was always something to be planted or watered or reaped or saved.
What do You think about A Week In Summer: A Short Story?
