“Vacation-Rules”

Professional traveler Paul Theroux wrote: “Being away is almost in itself a thrill—liberating, freedom, different rules, away from the strictness of home. Is it any wonder I have spent forty years wandering?“

Strictness about food was a fixed facet of our childhood, my sister and I. We ate at the table, at mealtime. Snacks weren’t a Thing in our household. (Except we could take two pieces of dried fruit from the glass canister in the living room in the afternoon, to savor while we watched Mister Rogers.) We didn’t have a sugar bowl, we didn’t have cereal brands celebrated by cartoon characters, we took our lunches in Tupperware lunch pails for so long that I eventually shied away from the lunch line because I wasn’t sure how it worked. (I never did eat a “Hot Lunch” in twelve years of school.) We didn’t have soda or chips or cookies in the house, ever—though we could ask for a glass of milk. (To folks who were kids in the ’50s, none of this will sound strange—but it wasn’t so typical in the nineteen-eighties.)

When we went on a trip, though, the Rules of Life shifted.

We could drink root beer or orange soda in the back seat of the car. We could chew gum! (Though it was still forfeit if the gum itself were ever visible in our chewing of it.) We might have Cheetos with lunch, or a grape sno-cone while we laid ourselves out, shivering, on the sun-hot concrete beside a pool. We could pick a mini-box in the morning from a variety pack of cereals like Cocoa Puffs or Fruit Loops, cereals that transformed the very milk into a tinted flavor from over the forbidden borders in the world.

I don’t remember ever talking about this difference as kids—as if the liberality were a soap bubble that might burst and disappear if we brought it to Grownups’ attention.

But by the time we were teenagers, we’d named the phenomenon: “Vacation-Rules!”

As a high-schooler, Vacation-Rules even (to my astonishment!) extended to ordering margaritas and Coronas at restaurants in Mexico.

I still sometimes cite “Vacation-Rules” when my spouse raises an eyebrow while we travel—though he doggedly and good-naturedly insists on telling me Vacation Rules are “not a Thing”.

Looking back, though, I realize that Vacation-Rules applied only to foods. (Well, foods and maybe bedtimes.) We might be eating or drinking what we wanted, but we had to behave like ourselves even elsewhere. In a dozen languages we said “Thank you” when waiters set down foods we wouldn’t see at home. Not just “junk” foods, but new foods—or new variations of foods. Unsalted butter, heated milk. Tea, and scones. (At nine, both those were new to me.) Chocolate sprinkles on buttered toast. Raw hamburger, cooked snails. Merci. Danke. Grazie. Bedankt. Dziekuje.

I’m restless. I’m ready to learn some new versions of “Thank you.”