You rarely know when your last time is your last time.

After that aforementioned National Lampoon-style drive across America the Summer of ’98, my parents opted to actually splurge for our next family vacation: so Spring Break of 2001, during my senior year of High School, they booked a bona fide Hawaiian vacation–complete with an upscale Oahu resort, an ocean view room, a top-down convertible, expensive dinners, the whole shebang.

Every cost cutting, penny-pinching, let’s-pack-our-own-lunch-and-only-order-off-the-McDonalds-Value-menu tendency from literally every other family vacation I can remember growing up got thrown out the window for once. Were we total tourist cliches? Oh, and how! We bought Hawaiian shirts, snorkeled in Waikiki Bay, toured the Polynesian Cultural Center, saw BYU-Hawaii^[1]to this day, I’m still not clear on why I attended BYU-Idaho instead, paid respects at Pearl Harbor, visited the Dole Pineapple plantation, went to the hotel beach every single evening—we did not stray from the beaten path! And you know what? We didn’t care! For us denizens of the Pacific Northwest, where the rain was cold, the skies gray, and the ocean freezing even on the hottest day of the year, just the cliches alone of Hawaii were a revelation.

At least it was for me, who was suffering a particularly severe bout of senioritus at the time–wondering why I had spent the past 12 years of my life, dating back to my earliest childhood memories, breaking my back to get “good” grades, all so I could break my back at a “good” college, all so I could break my back at a “good” job, all so I could save for retirement, grind away and die in the end anyways–this realization that there were other alternatives, that things don’t have to be this way, was a genuine new idea for me.

For that matter, the idea that a vacation could actually be a vacation–someplace where you actually relax, and reujvenate, and re-create yourself, and not just rush from one sight to the next on a checklist no different from any other day at work–was also a whole new concept for the Bender clan. Indeed, the distinct, inescapable feeling we all have on an actually-good-vacation is that this is how we’re supposed to live; not trapped in the inherently suicidal, self-destructive grind of our workaday existence, but to take the scripture “men are that they might have joy” literally.^[2]“Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter!”

As a young man I suspected–and as a full-grown adult I now know–that hustle and grind are the ways of Satan; rest and vacation are the promises of the Savior. “You can have anything in this world with money,” declares the wicked one in our most sacred Temple rituals; it is Christ, by contrast, who declares “Come unto me, all ye that are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”^[3]Matt. 11:28; emphasis added The Sabbath day (despite our worst efforts otherwise) is also supposed to be a day of rest—”The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath”^[4]Mark 2:27–that is, the Sabbath is supposed to be a vacation; and Christ is Lord of the Sabbath.

“Work less, wear less, eat less, and we will be a much wiser, healthier, and wealthier people,” Brigham Young declared–and of all the sketchy theology our second prophet once taught^[5]e.g. Adam-God theory, Blood Atonement, racist Priesthood ban, etc., this one at least was true doctrine, and is the line I wish we all quoted to death instead.

Yes, our trip to Hawaii was a true vacation; and I’m glad my family got to experience it together at least once, because it would never happen again.

The following year, my Mom would be diagnosed with cancer; I would leave on my mission to Puerto Rico shortly thereafter; her cancer would go into remission, only to come roaring back, culminating in her death only 2 days after I got home (as you may have heard me recount in a book I’ve been relentlessly plugging lately). We would never take another vacation like that as a foursome.

As such, that Hawaii trip took on a totemic quality for all of us; my Dad, for example, would recall our first night in Hawaii anytime he needed to lower his blood-pressure during a doctor’s visit. It became consecrated in memory as my family’s one, last, perfect vacation together–the one we finally got right–before everything changed forever.^[6]Almost too on the nose, 9/11 also happened only 5 months later.

Which is why it irritated me ever so slightly that another full decade would pass before an album came out that finally articulated why that tropical vacation meant so much to me in the first place—something that could take the cliches and make them art.

I am speaking here of Bomb the Music Industry!’s 2011 Swan Song and magnum opus, Vacation. (And the fact that frontman Jeff Rosenstock is half-Jewish feels relevant; if he makes the act of vacationing sound like a religious experience, it is because he too is trying to observe a Sabbath).

There is for starters that stunningly gorgeous opener “Campaign For a Better Next Weekend“, which somehow absolutely nails that feeling of letting the warmer weather make you feel better almost in spite of yourself (“I can’t shrug off the awesome weather/but I can surely dress my wounds”)–as well as describe the experience of being hit by a car while biking even more artfully than I attempted^[7]not to mention those harp flourishes towards the song’s end feel especially custom made for me–my Mom was a classically-trained harpist.

And certainly he also understood the anxiety-inducing side of vacations too, as when he belts out “When relaxing/feels like sinking” on “Savers.”

Plus that cover art of a young man staring off into the surf at sunset is one I had re-enacted countless times before I finally stumbled upon the album.

(I should also note that “Can’t Complain” was actually featured in a season 8 episode of The Office, “Pool Party”.)

But it’s the album’s grand finale, “Felt Just Like Vacation,” that always sweeps me right back to Spring Break 2001:

The context is that the song–like the album entire–was inspired by a vacation that Rosenstock had recently taken to Belize. As a perpetually broke punk rocker who stubbornly gave away all his music for free while eeking out a modest living amidst the freezing cold winters of his native Long Island, it was as much a revelation for him as it was for teenaged me to suddenly find himself in the tropics, and to finally know what genuine relaxation feels like. “Eighty degree water/I see right to the bottom/Take the pressure off for good/Don’t give me any more,” he belts out at the song’s opener–and my goodness, was that also my first feeling in Hawaii.

I also resonated way too much with Rosenstock when he sang out, “But this vacation feels more like home.” Let me be clear: I love Washington, I was born and raised there, I think it’s one of the most beautiful states in the Union; nevertheless, I did not want to return home from Oahu that Spring Break, because it finally felt like I was home, for perhaps the first time in my life.^[8]Part of me will always wonder if that’s why I was called on a mission to a tropical island–so that I would also feel home again while serving.

The way to de-cliche a cliche is to foreground what the stakes are again, and that’s exactly what Rosenstock does at the bridge:

“In truth, December destroyed me
January crushed me
By February, I was not myself
March rolled in like beatings and rolled out like a bear hug
In April I stared out the window for a f*cking month

“I don’t want October
I don’t want November
I don’t want to feel those crippling blows
That I can’t explain to, myself, my friends or you…”

He finishes off both the album and the song with a repetition of “So the winter never kills me…” For it’s not just that the vacation gave him a break from the cold, but that it also shored up his spiritual reserves for when the winter returns–both metaphorically and literally.

And he could have been singing about both my High School graduating class soon scattering to the four winds, and my soon-to-be-late Mother, when he sings: “I’ll be thinking of her/long after the summer/Long after the crowd is bored and talking sh*t/And moved away and everybody’s gone…”

One day during the Sabbath that will be known as the Millennium, I firmly believe that we will all be on Vacation–working to live, not living to work–as the Father had always intended; the Fall was meant to be temporary, the Garden of Eden is forever. There’s a reason Christ repeatedly invites us specifically to “enter into my rest.” But until the resurrection and celestialization of the earth, we will have to take our vacations where we can snatch at them, to rebel against Lucifer’s dominion on this earth, to keep that taste of Eden on our lips–to ensure that our last time isn’t ever again our last time.