by Terry Ward 

That's a favorite saying around my house - well, at least for me, anyway. I love how it just rolls off my tongue. Such a colorful phrase that conveys so much. One of the first times that I used it, my son, Pat, the brainiac, or more commonly known as a smart-aleck, asked me why anybody would want to eat skittles with beer. A valid point, to be sure, and one I had to ponder. I suppose that you would just have to drink enough beer that skittles would be the obvious choice of accompaniment . . . but, this obscures the meaning (he does that a lot to me).

It's this whole being responsible thing. Adulthood. I'm really not sure that I'm cut out for it. My son Tom, who has lived on his own for several years, says that he still has dreams of waking up and finding his parents by his bedside, one holding a rent check in their hand and the other holding bags of groceries. Sounds like a great plan, that is, if someone were doing that for me. I think that Tom can pretty well bet that if there are some parents hanging over his bed some morning when he wakes up it won't be his own and he better think hard about where he was drinking beer and eating skittles.

Recently, someone took a look at me and said, "You look like you need a vacation." Hmmm. Now just exactly how do you handle a statement like that? Although, I can appreciate that the person that said it had kind concern in their heart, you have to wonder just how haggard you were looking at that point. (And I hadn't been drinking beer and eating skittles, that much I do know.) I think the real vacation that I needed was from all this adult stuff. You know, making all those adult decisions like, "Yes, I do have to get up the second time I re-set the alarm," and "No, I really can't eat an entire chocolate cake by myself without sharing." It's not always the big stuff like paying bills. It's all the little things like deciding that you really can't call someone a jack you-know-what, even when they so richly deserve the title. I tell you, a real vacation would involve the collapse of civilized society as we know it.

You know what really stinks is all that time when you're a kid and you can't wait to be an adult because you'll get to stay up late whenever you want, and nobody will tell you what to do - it's this enormous fraud. I couldn't stay up late to save my life - I literally have to fight to stay up until eleven o'clock on Saturday nights just to watch all the British comedy shows on PBS (and by the way, where do they get off with this auction jazz every other week?) and now even my kids tell me what to do. "Vacation" was a state of mind over twenty years ago.

But, I'll tell you, I suppose that in lieu of going back to being a teenager again - which would just be U-G-L-Y, I could stand two weeks in the Bahamas. Now if only my boss and my kids could see their way clear to sending me . . . (And, yes, this is a BIG hint.)