Saving Those Sandcastles IS Important:
Overcoming the fear of taking vacations

To tell the truth, I need a vacation attitude adjustment.

I’ve been retired for two years, and I’m still thinking like people who are afraid to take time off for fear of losing their jobs. That concern may be legitimate in shaky businesses with lowlife histories of laying off folks while they’re away.

But all work and no play makes people pains in the patootie whether they’re employed or not.

Geez, who would have thought that dragging along a work-oriented mind-set like a pack mule was a habit?

Wives have claimed for years that retired husbands have this problem. With all of my interests, never did I think I’d be behaving this way.

Recently I’ve been thinking about spending the last days of summer at the beach. But my excuse is that I fry after 10 minutes’ exposure to the morning sun even before it clears the horizon.

Historically, my choice has been to grind on through the summer and vacation in, say, January.
 

Ridiculous, actually.

I want a kid’s summer: Check out large stacks of library books, dawdle around in the yard, dribble watermelon down my chin, idle away time without accounting for it.

Time out requires a proper vacation attitude, and I’m the first to admit that boomer Betsy Raines has a better one than I do.

Before she retired two years ago, Raines worked 60 hours a week teaching, grading papers and chairing the math department at J.R. Tucker High School. Plus, she taught a night class at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College, where she still teaches.

“By the time summer started, I was really ready. I had had it,” she says.

“I had that classic teacher mind frame, where you knew you went back at the end of August. Summer used to be my time to play.”

Her mantra: “Don’t put me on a schedule.”

Raines developed habits of relaxing, slowing down and planning little vacations and day trips throughout the year. And every summer, she and a passel of friends head to quiet North Carolina beaches.

“Our intent is to not get in the car for the entire week,” Raines continues.

“There are no shops, not even a gas station. We arrive with real beach toys, not plastic, and make these elaborate sand castles right on the water’s edge. Everybody sets a time when they think a wave is going to destroy the whole thing. People throw their bodies down in front of the sand castle to try to save it for their time. It’s like going back in time. It slows you down.”

With that in mind, she would refuse to give her cell phone number to the principal, who wanted to interrupt her with business.

Not so for Shelley Loving-Ryder, who keeps her BlackBerry with her on vacation. “I check it periodically,” says Loving-Ryder, who manages school improvement and student testing at the Virginia Department of Education.

“I would rather do that than have someone waste three or four hours trying to figure out something that I can answer in a couple of minutes. Plus, if I check it, I know what’s going on and I don’t have to worry that there’s going to be a real problem when I get back.”

However, she does draw a line in the sand: “I don’t take it to the beach.”

For people who are afraid to take vacations from their jobs, Loving-Ryder has this comment: “I feel like when I go on vacation, I come back a better employee because I’ve had a chance to rest.

“I think people need to take a vacation, because if you’re always at work, you don’t have a chance to rejuvenate yourself. I think that’s important.”

Point taken.

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Betty Booker is a retired reporter and columnist for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Contact her at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
Check out her past Boomer Life columns here.