La preparacion

At age 10, my mom told me I had to pack my own bag for our annual summer trip to Lava Hot Springs, a tiny town that hides itself away in the Idaho Rockies, just a couple hours north of our house in Ogden, Utah. I guess she expected this to be a maturing exercise. She felt I needed to stop relying on her for everything. It was time to grow up. Growing up meant packing my own bag. That was evident, even to a 10-year-old little shit. So I did. I packed my own bag with all the essentials necessary for a week-long vacation that would be full of marathon days at the pool and reckless inner-tube rides down the infamous Snake River. It took me all morning, and I felt confident.

We arrived in the tiny town right after noon. The gigantic Olympic-sized pool was open. We saw it from the road. It beckoned me and my brother Jake, and all my cousins. Like Hotel California, we aimed to check in but never leave. The pool. The sun. The Mecca of my youth. We threw our personally packed bags on the floor and got yelled at for throwing our personally packed bags on the floor. I made it exactly 34 seconds before getting disciplined. It seems like a short amount of time, but it was actually close to a record. It would be years before Jake and I made it a whole minute at our holiday destination without getting in trouble. Never mind the time the sitter in Vegas quit and left us alone for hours before my parents got back from the Willie Nelson concert... but that’s for another story, which includes sibling teamwork – a true rarity that necessitates a full chapter in a book some day.

Jake opened his bag. He threw out his trunks. He ran to the bathroom to change out of the view of our girl cousins. I opened my bag too. But there were no trunks. No panatelones cortos por la piscina gigante alla. I turned and drilled my mom to tell me where she packed my trunks.

“You packed your bag,” my mom answered me.

She pulled my bag up off the floor and looked through it for my elusive short shorts, all John Stockton-style swim trunks. She couldn’t find any swim trunks. Her lips pursed in frustration right before she dumped the contents of my bag on the bed. She shook the bag once. Then she shook it 50 more times. She shook it then looked inside to see if anything had gotten caught and couldn’t fall freely. She reached in it over and over and scraped the sides of the bag with her hands. She looked and looked for a secret compartment that held my trunks and maybe a rabbit or maybe a magician’s assistant recently cut in two that waited to be melded back together.

Finally, she gave up her search of my bag, and we both stared at what I had packed. In my mind, all the essentials were there. 12 pairs of socks. One t-shirt. Three INXS cassette tapes to show my cousins that I was cool and knew my music. And my little-league baseball cap for our daily trip to get ice cream and pizza after our 12 hours at the pool – I had to look hip, ya know. I felt I packed the staples for a great week at the pool. What I had forgotten to pack were underwear, pants, non-swimming shorts, t-shirts for more than one day, my toothbrush, and my swimming trunks.

Many people think that packing es facil. I have never been so good at it. Some people think that preparation for a long trip is a cake walk. If that’s the case, I might forget the batter. While I will have my wife to contribute to the majority of the packing, she is depending on me to offer advice on what to bring for month-long trips in foreign countries. The tickets are bought. Our apartment in the center of Barcelona is rented. And although we have exactly one month to get our stuff into our travel packs, I have already rolled up my swim trunks, put a new toothbrush in a plastic baggy, and shoved them into my pack.  

La preparacion empieza.