Broken By Spring Break
Have you ever looked forward to something so much that you built it up to a point where there’s no way the experience could ever actually meet your expectations? It’s what Clark Griswold did with Christmastime in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation and it’s a recipe for failure.
After all, expectations are like air in a balloon. Too much of it makes the balloon pop. And that ruins everything.
Very much aware of this I yet headlessly prepared for the glories of a Good Ol’ Fashion Harris Family Spring Break Vacation this year. We were going to go camping, fishing, bike riding, picnicking as well as plant the garden, do some spring yard work (something I legitimately look forward to), and maybe even watch some March Madness basketball games.
Was this too much to ask? Yes. Yes it was.
Most of the family came down sick the week before camping so that went kaput. Then our dryer went kaput (although 18 years is a pretty good run especially when you do 87 loads of laundry a day). Of course, the new dryer decided to last 1/6.570th as long as the old one and I had to return it, leaving us without a dryer for approximately eternity.
Even once the new dryer came, the power cord didn’t fit, and a small part went missing to frustrate my attempt to hook it up. Basically the entire category of laundry appliances and laundry appliance parts went into a full on revolt against me.
But it wasn’t just illness and obstinate home appliances. The wind blowing at a steady 30 mph with occasional gusts of tornado put the kibosh on fishing and made bike riding a miserable undertaking. Pivoting to yard work I found the conspiracy to thoroughly break spring break extended into the yard as well.
A warm and sunny spring day working around the yard with the whole family turned into a Chicago style windy day of me barking at the boys not to drop landscaping rocks on their brothers’ feet (or any number of other just as necessary admonishments) and me declaring war on the sprinkler system.
To sum up the sprinkle system situation: I savagely severed a pipe that I incorrectly identified as an old pipe that was not connected to the system. Said “old” pipe responded by gushing out water and attempting to drown all the new flowers and shrubs we had just planted. Then it was full on trench warfare as I dug out the line and attempted to repair it. That part went at least as well as the clothes dryer set up. So that was nice.
All this time, the hopes and plans of a happy, productive, and fun spring break slipped through my hands — much like the rivers of clay-y mud did as I groped around in search of the semi-buried sprinkler head.
There’s a scene in Christmas Vacation where Clark snaps after he can’t get his extravagant Christmas light display to light up after multiple days of work, and he reigns down blows on a plastic Santa and reindeer display in the yard. All I’m saying is it was a good thing there were no plastic reindeer around.
It wasn’t all bad though. We did get the garden planted, had a nice picnic in the park one day, and for at least one bit of yard work the boys went into full ant colony mode and worked as a team to accomplish a tremendous amount of work. Perhaps my expectations should have been more in line with these sorts of small victories.
In the end, the great expectations f0r spring break were as Dickens, and most of life’s experiences, warned they would be: too high. I’ve learned my lesson.
But our summer vacation is going to be great.