An old army buddy of mine recently dropped by the house for a little visit. He lives down around San Francisco and we don’t get a chance to spend time with each other all that often. We’ve been friends for almost 30 years now and I always look forward to seeing him. We went through Basic Training together up at Fort Lewis, Washington, and our rather lengthy conversations usually revolve around the good old days, when we were both young, hairless, forced to wear green underwear, and scared to death that we were going to end up in Advanced Infantry Training, which was a sure ticket to the war in Vietnam.
This time, however, Eddie brought up a subject we had never touched upon before, marriage vacations. “Now what in the world is a marriage vacation?” I asked him with a smile, sure he was putting me on as usual.
“How long have you been married, Daryl?” he asked me.
“Not as long as you,” I quickly reminded him.
“But we’re both past 20 years, right?”
“Way past.”
“Well,” he explained with apparent sincerity, “if you ask me, I think after a guy has been married for 20 years, he deserves a little vacation, don’t you?”
“I’m listening,” I said, still smiling.
“I’m serious,” he assured me.
“And just when did such a crazy idea first pop into that weird little mind of yours?” I asked him.
“But I don’t think it’s crazy at all,” he said with conviction. “In fact, I think it’s an idea whose time has definitely come.”
“And just how would these little marriage vacations of yours work?” I asked.
“That’s the beauty of it. They would be just like any other vacation. First, you’d have to earn the time off, say at a couple of days a year.”
“And how would a husband go about doing that?”
“Now marriage vacations wouldn’t just be for husbands,” Eddie quickly explained. “No, I don’t think that would ever fly. Wives would have to be able to qualify for one, too.”
“Really?”
“Sure, why not? They have to put up with us just as much as we have to put up with them, don’t they?”
“That’s true.”
“Anyway, the whole thing would be really simple. First, you’d have to put in the full twenty years in order to qualify.”
“Why not just ten years?” I asked.
“Because the first ten years of a marriage are a piece of cake. It’s the next ten that are the killers.”
“I see.”
“But once you’ve been fully qualified, then you’d be able to take a whole month off from being married. You could go anywhere you wanted to go and do anything you wanted to do, no questions asked.”
“Really?”
“That’s right. You could travel, you could go out on dates, you could even….”
“Wait, wait, wait.” I interrupted him. “Did you say you could go out on dates?”
“Sure. Otherwise, it would be just another normal old vacation. No, I’m talking about a complete vacation from the institution of marriage.”
“And you really think men and women everywhere would actually go for that?” I asked.
“Of course, they would. Everyone’s lives revolve around their vacations, don’t they? Well, I’m just suggesting that we add one more. And it would give married people something to really look forward to, you know, a way to kind of recharge their batteries.”
“You wanna know what I think, Eddie?”
“Sure.”
“I think the first marriage vacation we take will be about a hundred times more dangerous to our health than Vietnam ever was.”