I’ve been thinking about summer vacations lately, past, present, and future — but mostly past. In May, my son Dylan, his wife Emily, my granddaughter Charlotte, and a close family friend, Regina Cherene, took a day trip to Lake Lawn resort in southern Wisconsin. We shared a vacation tradition there in the 1980s and ’90s. We’d heard big changes were afoot at the resort and wanted to see for ourselves.
There is something inherently magical about revisiting the places where cherished memories were forged, especially those from childhood. The past and present dance a tango of enchantment. My family’s history with Lake Lawn goes back even further. My parents met there in the summer of 1941, on the verge of World War II. My mom was 15, my dad 17. Three years later he was in Europe, fighting.
Revisiting Lake Lawn in May was a wondrous pilgrimage to our shared past.
Last weekend I attended a memorial service and reception for my aunt, Grace Louise Simpson, whom we knew as Lulie. She grew up in Oak Park, the daughter of Fred and Grace Gale. The Gale family goes way back in Oak Park history.
Lulie was the last of a generation that vacationed together in northern Wisconsin during my childhood — a place as magical for me as Lake Lawn was for Dylan and Regina.
After her memorial service, we gathered at Il Vicolo for lunch and reconnection. I felt a toast was in order:
Lulie was the last, I said, but also the first. She was the last of a generation. But she was the first to discover an obscure resort just outside an obscure town on an obscure lake in Northern Wisconsin. Actually, it was Lulie’s family who discovered it, but Lulie established our multifamily tradition at Keeler’s Resort in Crandon on Lake Metonga, a Native American word, Menominee perhaps, meaning “peaceful paradise.” I made that up, but peaceful paradise applied for most of the year — except for a few weeks every July when three Oak Park families with a multitude of cousins descended on the small resort run by Bill Keeler.
It was idyllic, both in memory and reality, other than the occasional meltdown on the softball field. We have our parents to thank for that … and grandparents … and Father Rog who was the resort chaplain, and comedian, and tosser of fully-clothed children into the lake.
Our parents probably didn’t think they were doing anything special when they started this annual tradition in the late ’50s. They were just getting away for a few weeks with the kids. But they were wrong. They did something very special indeed.
If there were a God computer — one of my favorite fantasies, a computer that can answer any question with absolute accuracy — I would ask for a transcript from one of the evening get-togethers, when our parents gathered in one of the cabins for storytelling and laughter. That would be a sacred text.
But there is no Godlike computer, so we are left to cobble together our snatches of remembrance and tell our stories to keep memory alive. For instance, that thing my dad would say to us many times over the years, especially after these sojourns to the North Woods, advice well worth heeding. “Stay close to your cousins,” he said. And really that’s what all of them were saying in their own way.
So I’d like to offer a toast — a tontine toast — which I first heard about on a MASH episode years ago. A tontine is defined as “a joint arrangement whereby the participants usually contribute equally to a prize that is awarded entirely to the participant who survives all the others.” Col. Potter was that survivor and the prize was a bottle of fine French brandy, which he opened to toast his fallen comrades in arms, sharing it with his new friends in the MASH encampment. It was a poignant episode and one of that show’s best.
As a group, I told those assembled, we are that survivor. We are the survivors of Lulie and Bob Simpson, Ken and Marilyn Trainor, Eileen and Frank Muriello, Kitty and Bob Simpson Sr., Fr. Rog Simpson, and Bill Keeler. Our prize is the bond we share, the memory of coming together all those years, growing up, summer by summer, in an idyllic place and time, surrounded by love and good-spirited fun. We are surrounded by their good spirits still.
Lulie, et al, you gave us an experience like no other. In a world that is so very imperfect, you helped create the conditions in which life was, briefly, close to perfect. You did more than you know when you brought us together for summer vacations. And for that we owe you our deep gratitude and sincere admiration. We are your ripples, reaching outward, spreading the word, keeping the memory alive.
And insofar as we are able, in this very imperfect world, we will try to pay your gift forward. We will stay close to our cousins.
Here’s to summer vacations, past, present and future.
Here’s to the lucky ones.
Here’s to us.