Packing for Vacation, the Measure of a Man

We have personality tests these days to determine the core elements of character, but back then a good rule of thumb was to watch how people packed for a vacation. That would tell you a lot.

You could hide much from the world in the ordinary course of events, keep your seething emotions masked, muffle your insecurities, shelter your strong likes and dislikes, offset your personal weaknesses of character, but in the course of the packing process all core were sure to come out. 

You might just as well have been on the psychiatrist’s couch, one of those fellows who looks right through you with their piercing gaze and who has come to expect the worst from human nature.

There on the hard pavement, there was no hiding from original sin; there, there was no pretending to qualities you simply didn’t possess.

Courage, grim endurance, creativity, personal flair all found expression on many a driveway where the family Ford Fairlane stood with its trunk open, but the darker emotions also had their day: anyone who hasn’t seen resentment, inconstancy, carelessness, and implacable envy simply hasn’t put in the time in packing-watching to draw adequate conclusions.

I’ve seen men refuse to do business with the owner of the hardware store after watching him pack his trunk, and others ring the bell of the life insurance salesman going on nothing more than the way he got that last hat box into the trunk.

The grownups on the block never hesitated to wander over and offer advice at key points of the process.

“Bill,” one might say. “I’m thinking that red valise you’ve got about three layers down, there in the wheel well? You might do better with that over here on the left, nearer the top layer. See, that would open up that wheel well for your wife’s swimwear, which after all isn’t going to suffer from a little rolling up.”

The others would join in, either affirming or presenting a countervailing argument, and there were sometimes saintly souls who would say, “why not just leave things the way they are and let the man pack the way he wants to pack?” They were few however.

The packer would thank them all and say, “no, no, I’m anxious for any ideas you might have,” and once he had unpacked fourteen hard-fought items to get to the red valise and then repacked them all again, they’d all stand around nodding their heads and stroking their chins.

It was the brave man with a firm commitment to the truth who then would cast caution to one side and say flatly, “it was better the first way.”

These packings and unpackings could go on for hours, and many a new friendship was made or an old one renewed over the key topics of coat hangers – leave them in to provide an underlying structure to the garment, or bite the bullet and relish the space gained by simply rolling the shirts and dresses as compactly as possible?

Tensions could run high at times over the relative merits of socks – rolled or crammed – and men’s underwear, hidden discreetly away for decency’s sake or on full display wherever it was most convenient, the latter attitude being of the Modernist of Existentialist approach to life.

My Uncle Will would have none of this commentary from the galleries, and seldom was any offered, for he was the acknowledged packing champion for many square miles.

Viewing him in action, strong men would start forward and clear their throat as though to say something, then think better of it, and step back into the shadows of the elms alongside his driveway. Nodding their heads they seemed silently to say, “yes, yes, I see now where you’re going with that.”

A precise, cautious, and specific man constantly in the process of fine-tuning the world, he would lick the lead of his sharpened pencil and tabulate dimensions, weights, and structural allowances on the pocket-sized wire-bound notebook he carried in his shirt pocket.

I was his helper and we would start weeks in advance measuring the boxes and trunks and suitcases, taking like measurements of the trunk space, and experimenting with certain stacking techniques in the garage.

Never a suitcase more nor less than he truly needed, he brought each out onto a tarp laid behind his Oldsmobile 98, arranged in reverse order of placement.

He never asked me directly, but I know he was pleased when I turned to my wristwatch to time him from first piece in to the last.

No test slams for Uncle Will, the man had the utter confidence to turn as he slammed down the lid and walk away, with the aplomb usually reserved for famous athletes who don’t deign to look and see if their shot has gone in.

Preparation was the key for that man, and he applied the same techniques to the entirety of the trip, taking me on practice runs through the first toll booth, testing and retesting the tire pressure at key milestones, and carefully calculating his mpg, both in town and on the highway.

When he was 38 he told me that this would be our last trip together, he had allotted his 39th year first to meeting, and then to wooing, and then to marrying the right girl, and do you know what? A year later I was an usher in his wedding.

Uncle Jake on the other hand, also in his late thirties, he of the loud Hawaiian shirts and noisome cigars and cheerfully failing business ventures, I was his helper too.

“Jackie,” he would say to me, “North, south, east, or west, what’s it going to be? Your call, tell me what direction we’re going in this time.”

And I would. And that would be about the amount of planning he would put into his vacation.

A duffel bag of clothes, a paper sack of pork and beans and beef jerky, and a box of cigars was all he needed, indeed he sometimes felt over-prepared at that, and would toss the beef jerky aside in consequence.

A big man with a big spirit, you could even call him a carouser if your own nature was ungenerous, but any time he spoke of his friends he would round them up to the next highest estimate, that being his way, and more than a few of those friends started taking that estimate at face value and living up to it.

Uncle Will would shake his head and his lips would form a grim horizontal line, “Your Uncle Jake is a good man, Jack, but I can’t see a good end to this, I can’t see a good end to this at all. His life is too disordered. Too uncertain!“  He’d shake his head sadly, “no man should live that way for long.”

Uncle Jake would laugh when he heard of this, he’d laugh each time, but bite his tongue, for there was affection between the two men, even if they couldn’t agree on the best way to pack, and by extension, the best way to live your life.

How I loved those two uncles.

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At the funeral home the women came in and out of the room weeping, and we all talked of that uncle of mine, the man himself, and the things he had brought to our lives and to all those around him.

It had been sudden; he was only in his middle forties.

A chest malady, biding its time till middle age as these things do, made itself known on a routine visit to the doctor — oh, there he is, the doctor, see him there in the back left corner of the room? Docs usually don’t come to these things, you know — but that didn’t directly do him in. it did however reveal and then put under stress a ventricular defect in his heart.

Weakened by the days in bed, an infection found that defect and he died between one minute and the next.

We all told tales of how the man packed for vacation and how it reflected to a tee his whole approach to life, and the sadness was pushed back now and again by laughter, like shadows kept at bay by a candle.