Time Dilation, or how Fourteen Days can Seem Like Two Decades

On the day that Jesse turns fourteen, we are also fourteen days out from flying to New York and leaving Austin. For these last few weeks, Mike and I have been suffering from the relativistic effects of being really ready for something that isn't allowed to happen yet. We're not eager to leave Austin, but we are soooo ready to be reunited under one roof. At 3 weeks from the day of departure, it seemed like there was still six months to go. At 2 weeks, it feels as if there are now 4 years to go. The minutes drip past, each drop of time travelling the distance from the highest raincloud to the bottom of the deepest canyon.

I want to crawl into a stasis chamber and stay there until they call us to board our flight.

And, meanwhile, there are many birthday celebrations. I realize that when you and I were young and had to walk five miles in the snow to school everyday, birthday parties did not even dare speak their name. My mother threw me exactly one, when I was four or five, and it wouldn't surprise me if she resented even that one. For that reason, as well as a general incompetence at all forms of entertaining guests, except maybe with a dinner party, my party planning skills are complete and utter pants.

I wanted to do something large in scope this time. I wanted to invite every friend Jesse has and every schoolmate she has more than a nodding acquaintance with. This would be a combination bon voyage and birthday party. It would not be like all the other anxieties of my present life, which crank slowly past, one painful turn of the screw every time a supernova is spotted, but instead it would be large, somewhat lavish, and over with quickly.

Of course, I couldn't think of a single appropriate venue or activity. Jesse's idea -- rent one of the party boats that cruise Town Lake -- made me white with fear. Especially when I thought about the bill. I consulted with my friend Robin, who has a teenage son. She was full of ideas. We could have a party at a local rock climbing club's 'party wall'. We could go to one of those laser arenas and the kids could use each other for non-lethal target practice. Or we could try paint-ball. Or we could just hire a room at the local roller rink. I presented these ideas in turn to Jesse and they were all flatly rejected. Too large. Too small. Too boring. Too boy.

All Jesse could come up with was a Series of Intimate Events. Dinner with that chick, a movie with this other one. The most she would let me gather together at one time were her 3 friends from the middle school band. Overly excited, I found a discount service that rented a room at the Hilton for me before J. had a chance to change her mind. There would be a pool, a hot tub, a walk down Sixth Street on a Saturday evening. It would be fun!

We arrived at the Hilton, a few blocks from Sixth Street, the city's, er, lounge district. The girls took a tour of the hotel, self-guided, then we all went to the hotel spa, where the pool and jacuzzi beckoned. It amazes me how vulnerable I still am to some of my lower-middle-class instincts. My mom always booked us in whatever Roach Ranch we could afford. The showers drizzled you with warmish water, the carpets reeked of that awful rug pomade they use in vacuum cleaners to conceal the smell of mold and old beer. The Coldsmith kids considered themselves quite lucky if there was a pool that hadn't been closed by the health department.

I'm still that kid in some ways. Though I've been put up by past employers in more than a few swanky accommodations, I still can't help taking a step back in places like the Hilton. We entered the foyer to the spa and pool area, where desk clerks waited with sotto voce offers of fluffy robes. I was momentarily tongue-tied, certain that this couldn't be something we had paid for. Surely, I thought, some hotel flack was about to swoop down and inform us that those towels and that pool were reserved for the Hilton's VIP Class.

Whatever my habits as the descendant of sodbusters, there was to be no swimming that evening. We'd stepped onto the terrace to the sound of a great clap of thunder. The girls scurried back in and re-settled themselves back into their hotel room. Rain started to beat at the unopenable windows. Clearly, dinner and a long walk on Sixth Street would be ill-advised.

But they didn't seem to mind. Fourteen-year-old girls can giggle a lot for a long time, over nothing at all. I mentioned having pizza delivered to the room and they were ecstatic. The piled on to the bed. They watched the movies they'd brought on a laptop, shunning the fancy LCD TV in the hotel's wardrobe. They giggled some more. They only required that Mike and I be absent as often as possible. The thought crossed my grumpy mind that if they weren't going to use the pool or the TV, we could have stayed at the kind of motels favored by my mother, where you have a view of the Interstate and where the sticky substances are never cleaned off the remote control.

Mike and I had drinks with friends in the hotel bar and returned to find the girls still watching movies and giggling. We let them stay that way until about a half past midnight, when we made them shut it down. The next morning, I found them like this, all sacked out in the same bed. Apparently, the two girls designated for the other bed thought, at the last moment before surrendering to the sandman, that two feet was just too far to go. I think I now understand where all those cases of middle-school headlice come from.

Eventually the girls got up and made their way to the hotel's lovely salt-water pool. The temperature was perfect and the hot-tub warmed us up nicely. So long as I kept my distance, I was allowed to take pictures.

But after the giggling, the tears. The guests were all dispatched homewards and we returned to the Wee Flat, where Jesse rediscovered that her life sucked in every possible way. We've returned to the reality of what's left in these fourteen days, the many protracted goodbyes, the last-time-to-see people and the last-time-to-do things. And the Latin homework. We've been home just three hours and my dear daughter has cried four times.

If I can't find that stasis chamber, I may have to turn to Mojitos.