Published: August 05, 2009 01:34 am      

GESENHUES: Summer vacation essay

With school about to start, it feels like a good time to salute summer vacations in all their sandy-beached glory.

We didn’t do a beach vacation this year and I have that weird feeling lurking, like I forgot to turn off my iron or left the water running somewhere in my house. Instead of going to the beach, my husband and I walked the streets of San Francisco. There was much to see, but I missed my lazy days of sunbathing and seafood-eating.

My family has been vacationing in Gulf Shores, Ala., for almost 30 years; and by family, I mean all of them, three generations worth of aunts, uncles, and cousins. When we first started going, we all stayed in one house right on the Gulf of Mexico. The name of the place was (still is?) Colonel’s Cabin and had enough beds and floors space throughout that we all had a place to crash. The younger kids were in the rooms with their parents while the older, more mature, kids got to sleep in the loft (the more mature kids being those of us who would have driven our parents nuts playing Atari and watching MTV if we had been forced to stay in the same rooms with them).

My grandmother and grandfather — both of whom are now deceased — headed up the clan during our “hey-day” years at Gulf Shores. The “hey-day” years were when I was old enough to take walks on the beach alone, but still too young to drive into town. Our entire family would carpool to the Colonel’s Cabin together in the dead of night. All the families had kids 12 and under, so the quickest way to get from here to there was to leave at bedtime. My parents along with all my aunts and uncles would meet up at my grandparent’s house and then take off in a long line of minivans headed south down Interstate 65. I could usually stay awake all the way to Bowling Green before I zonked out with my headphones on listening to Duran Duran.

My grandfather had a truck that he and grandma would pack with all the good stuff: apples from their orchard, ripe tomatoes from their garden, and beer from the liquor mart a ways up the road (it was much cheaper to travel with it than buy it at the beach). The Colonel’s Cabin had two full-size refrigerators in the kitchen and during the hey-days one was for food and the other for beer and my uncles’ margarita and Bloody Mary mixes. (Some may say that an entire refrigerator dedicated to alcohol may seem a bit extreme, but those of you who belong to big Catholic families like ours are sure to understand.)

At night, my grandfather and uncle would play guitar on the deck and we would dance to everything from a sad song about a girl named Peaches to my most requested tune, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ”Give Me Three Steps” (I absolutely loved singing these lyrics along with my uncle and still think of him every time I hear it).

In the mornings, the crew would wake at different intervals. My grandfather and uncles would be up fixing coffee before sunrise. Some of the aunts would follow behind them even though they had stayed awake late into the night playing Dirty Dog (our family’s version of the card game Uno played with two full decks of cards and all the spite that can be mustered up at midnight). I was a late sleeper and would wake only after it was already hot enough to slip into my swimsuit, grab a quick bowl of generic Frosted Flakes, and then take my V.C. Andrews book and Walkman to the water to start working on my tan for the day.

The hey-days of Gulf Shores have now become a much larger event. My cousins and I are no longer the kids who sleep in the loft. We all have kids of our own and need more space (or, at least, more beds) than the original beach house offers. A portion of the family still stays at Colonel’s Cabin, while the extended family stays in condos and beach houses close by.

We’re not all packed in together every night, but we make it work. There is still seafood night. Pounds and pounds of fresh-caught battered fish and shrimp are deep fried and served with homemade tartar sauce and hushpuppies. My uncles still make their Bloody Marys and margaritas (and still mix the first batches before noon); although now, you may find a bottle of breast milk among the bottles of Bud Light in the beer fridge.

But that’s what a family does; they grow and expand and sometimes they have to make room for milk along with the beer ... even at the beach.