ETCETERA
NIGHTCAP
Escape! It's a long ride to get away from it all.
By Harry Kirsbaum
it was a glorious wedding — the stuff dreams are
made of.
i And after six months of planning a wedding
and one week of parties, dinners and get-togethers
with family and friends before the big day, the bride
and I wanted a weeklong incommunicado honey-
moon.
Canada seemed the logical choice. Quiet, simple,
plenty of places to get lost — and enough extra
roaming charges on our cell phones to
convince us to turn them off.
We were sitting on a bench outside the
Festival Theatre waiting to see 42nd Street
when I realized our"get-away" honey-
moon hadn't gotten away enough.
When you overhear a couple of couples
sitting on the next bench talking about
Temple Israel, you get the feeling you're
sitting on a park bench in Birmingham,
Mich., not Stratford, Ontario.
When you spot a formerJN editor and
his family walking into the theater among
a crowd of hundreds a moment later, you're honey-
mooning at the Plaza Deli.
Obviously, we weren't"north" enough. So we
loaded the beige beast and followed the compass
farther up the road.
Stopping at the visitors' bureau outside of town,
we were told that a room was available for two
nights at a "resort" (American translation: room with
a working refrigerator and a bar near the front desk,
which doubles as the waitress station).
Checking in a few minutes later, we met the own-
er who grew up in Sterling Heights. No escaping it.
With no Wi-Fi, no cell phone and no interest in
the world outside our line of sight, we exhaled and
relaxed.
We didn't read anything except roadside historical
markers and wine lists.
We didn't watch anything close to
American news — nothing relating to
smoke jumpers fighting Colorado forest
fires or Oprah-couch jumpers divorcing in
Hollywood.
We only heard the sounds of nature —
the birds chirping in the forest, the cows
mooing in the field, the bullfrogs mooing
in the pond.
We didn't turn on the phone until we
crossed the bridge back to home soil, and
we didn't connect to the Internet until we
got home.
A week later, we both agreed we should do
"incommunicado" more often. The Orthodox have
it right. Take at least one day a week to liberate
yourself from the noise and the stress and the busy-
ness of life, and just concentrate on what's in front
of your eyes. :7,17
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RED THRUM
August 2012 53