Tonight, we leave for a two-week
trip to the Azores and Madeira. The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of
activity as my brother Curtis and his two boys Eliot and Lukas have been
staying with us, so we’ve had a lot of late nights, early mornings, and
activity-filled weekends. I haven’t spent this much time with my brother since
we were kids, and it has been filled with a lot of great conversations, fueled
by craft beer, hot tubs and good old-fashioned coffee. Ana, the kids, and I
have spent very little time with Curt’s boys, so this has been a wonderful
opportunity to get to know them a lot better and see the family dynamic in
action. Sadly, Curt’s wife Carrie is not with them, as she is in the midst of
an epic four-week journey through Southeast Asia, but tonight as we fly off to
the Azores, the Saskatoon Olsons are blasting off for Bangkok to meet up with
Mommy and spent a further four weeks exploring the region.
Curt and I
both follow a fantastic blog called Wait But Why and one day we discussed one
of the articles that really struck home for me. The writer, Tim Urban, has an
interesting way of looking at things, and makes extensive use of stick figures
to drive his points home. One of his other techniques is using grids with
coloured boxes to represent things and present information that forces you to
think about it in a different, more profound way. For example, he uses a grid
with the appropriate number of boxes to represent a 90-year-old human’s life,
with each box representing one week and each row on the grid representing one
year. You can check out this post here - https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html
One of his
posts that really struck me was this one - https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html. It’s all about how much time
in our life we are likely to spend with our siblings and parents once we become
adults. Unless you happen to live close to all the members of your family, once
you become an adult, the overwhelming majority of the time in your life you
will spend with your parents and siblings is over. This is particularly
relevant for me, as my direct family is either a 4-hour airplane ride
(Saskatoon) or 6-hour car ride (Ottawa) away. This makes frequent visits
unfeasible, and in fact I am lucky to see them once per year. So, even though
I’m not close to the end of my life (hopefully), I certainly am nearing the end
of the time I have with some of the most important people in my life. This is a
frightening concept, and one which freaked out Ana so much that she refused to
finish reading the article. It is quite likely that I have already spent more
than 95% of the time with Curtis that I will ever spent with him. It is
thankfully lower for my other brother Marty, where the 6-hour drive on the
congested 401 highway is more affordable, but infinitely more painful than the
plane ride to Saskatoon. In either case though, every moment I spend with them
is precious; much more precious than the seemingly infinite number of days we
spent together in childhood. Of course, the same thing applies to my parents in
Saskatoon, but it is worse as they are further along their lifespans than my
brothers so there are even less squares remaining on the grid.
To put it
mildly, there is no time to waste.
The time
with Curt and the boys has been well spent. We have been so busy that I’ve
scarcely had time to think about our trip, which is good, as the anticipation
would have been killing me. Ana, as always, has taken care of all the packing,
with the utmost attention to detail, with every single included item held up to
the highest scrutiny. Using her keen traveler eye and advanced fashion sense,
she has considered seasonal weather patterns, anticipated state of living
conditions (cold tile floors require slippers), baggage weight restrictions
imposed by the airline, physical characteristics of the luggage, personal
preferences of family members (smoked almond snacks) and expected adjustments
to personal grooming habits (fewer clothes changes, three-day stubble). By some
miracle, she has also purchased gifts of clothing for our family members, none
of whom we have seen for six years, but somehow knows all their sizes, even the
children who are no longer children. The only participation required by me
during the packing process (which took 8 weeks) was to decide which clothes to
wear on the airplane. Truthfully, I just had to review the clothes she had set out
for me in a tidy pile on the bed this morning. I can’t even remember what
bachelorhood was like when I had to make all these domestic decisions on my
own, but I’m never going back there.
At 3:30 this
afternoon, we will leave for the airport, with all seven of us in the van, with
Curt and the boys flying out just a few hours after us. Our flight leaves at 9
and gets us to our destination around 6am the next day.
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