What I Did on My Summer Vacation

This is a lone sailboat on Pleasant Bay.

Approaching the 50th anniversary of Woodstock this week, my wife and I were sitting under a tent today splitting a bottle of wine. We were an hour's drive from Yasgur's Farm, listening to a great cover band play classic rock.

When Rick of The Flying Obersons began singing: "Love, I get so lost, sometimes days pass and this emptiness fills my heart..." I broke into a wide smile.

I recognized Peter Gabriel's song, which immediately brought to mind the movie "Say Anything" and John Cusack defiantly holding a boombox aloft to play "In Your Eyes."

Such is the power of music. It brought my wistful mood into focus.

My wife and I had just returned home from a vacation week in Cape Cod without our daughters, now grown, and without our family dog, now gone. In the past, we had always spent vacation time there together as a family.

This year, all week long, we toured, joked, ate and hiked surrounded by families with young children and curious dogs -- all with doting fathers who looked and acted just like me, nearly 20 years ago.

If only I could go back in time, I thought.

Meanwhile, all week long, I took many more photos than I've ever taken on vacation, as if I could stop time millisecond by millisecond. As if I had some control.

Now I'm left with all these images, without the five of us in any of them, nearly 20 years later.

So in my own act of defiance, I'm posting nine of them here. As if this blog post were a boombox and I'm holding it aloft.

Because, really... on second thought... I don't want to go back in time. I want to remember everything just as it was last week, for as long as I can.

I want to appreciate that when I look into eyes of my wife or my daughters today, I see the doorway to a thousand churches... and the resolution of all my fruitless searches.

This is where we stayed. Facing south, we often saw Mars in the night sky in our view from the Adirondack chairs. It was too cloudy to see the Perseid meteor shower.

This is Sipson, a 25-acre island currently for sale for $8 million.

This is a Cape Cod Baseball League playoff game. The Chatham Anglers won.

This is the beach at Provincetown, where you don't have to get sand between your toes.

This is Chatham Lighthouse. My wife likes the "Danger, Rough Bar" sign.

This is the Sharks in the Park display on the lawn of the Eldredge Public Library, with artwork currently up for auction online. 

This is still a fishing village.

This is where we went to church on Sunday. No one looked happy during Mass.