Taking leave (but not of my senses)

[aadler]

 
I did, in fact, at last receive a specific date for my mid-tour leave; it begins in the third week of January. I said in my last post that I’d provide more details, so here they are.

In 2006, during my Afghanistan tour, I took my R&R leave in Germany. I’d heard good things about the military resort at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and found them to be true. I was alone, and while it normally is deeply depressing to me to be alone in a strange place, I knew this about myself and went in with the understanding that I would need to be proactive inside my own psyche: keep myself on a steady keel, focus on what was in front of me, seek out the pleasures to be found and make a conscious decision to be open to them and enjoy them. Of the two weeks of my leave, I spent eight days at Garmisch, and the remainder in a small hotel in Freising … which, as I learned after arriving there, was where Pope Benedict XVI attended seminary.

(Incidentally, it was the awareness of this fact about myself, that I enjoy travel more in company than alone, that moved me to invite my ex-wife to accompany me when I decided to take an Alaska cruise. The offer was absolutely sincere — shared experience, her company and her pleasure in the journey increasing my own — and my reasoning thoroughly validated by the cruise itself. That we remarried a year later was a fortunate byproduct but not an intended effect; I honestly had no ulterior motive, which may be why it worked out so well.)

I loved Germany so much that I was determined to spend my next leave there, at least with my ex- ex-wife and possibly (but not necessarily) with one or both of our children. I still want to do that. Shortly after my arrival in Iraq, however, one of the people in my shop accepted an early leave slot — we have to spread it out over time, because no more than 10% of us can be absent at any one point — and he and his wife allowed the Army to fly them to Hawaii. That sounded really nice, and my wife thought so, too, when I broached the possibility. So, Hawaii this time, and Germany at some future point.

But then …

One evening I was on night duty at our HQ. Sitting in the middle of the briefing table was something that had just come in: a large manila envelope full of ‘Dear Soldier’ letters from the third-grade class of a Catholic school. I spent most of a night-to-morning shift sorting through the various letters and trying to pick out which one I wanted to answer. In the end, there were too many that I wasn’t willing to relinquish … so I copied the lot and set out to answer them all. All fifty-five of them.

Partway through, a thought struck me. I considered it at some length, and then brought it up to my wife, and she instantly and enthusiastically approved. Then I checked with the teacher of the class that had sent the letters, and she checked with the school’s vice-principal, and now it’s basically settled: rather than Susan meeting me in Hawaii (or Germany), I’ll fly back to the States, and we’ll spend two weeks on a tourist holiday to various parts of the U.S., all of it essentially built around the two of us making a visit to the school from whence all those letters originated.

It’s not just fun. It’s not just cool. This is different, this is new, this is so much not-the-person-I-used-to-be that I’m amazed that it even occurred to me, much less that I should be so looking forward to it.

I have been very fortunate in my life, and the good things don’t seem to have stopped yet.