A couple of weeks ago my son and I went to the Smoky Mountains National Park for a week of hiking, eating, sleeping and no cell phones.
This location had been our favorite vacation destination since my wife Janet and I went there on our honeymoon forty-six years ago. I remember a funny story about the first time we took our son with us. He was about a year and a few months. We went with my in-laws. He was pretty much a daddy’s boy. He liked it when I carried him. Sometimes he would put his fingers in my hair and pat the back of my head. He also knew that I was the one who put him in his stroller and pushed him.
If you have been to Gatlinburg you know one of the favorite activities each night is to eat out and walk up and down the street until you are ready to collapse. One candy kitchen gave out free mini candy canes at some point so you had to stay up long up long enough to get your candy cane.
One evening my mother-in-law decided that my father-in-law should be the one to push the carriage so, of course, he did. I began walking next to the stroller where my son could see me. He casually glanced over and then did a double take. He stood up in the stroller, looked around to see who was pushing him and then settled back down.
My son and I decided to go on this trip and at this particular time because the end of July coincided with the forty-sixth anniversary. Cancer took Janet a year and a half ago, and we both still miss her.
We missed the way she liked the arts and crafts shops best. The T-shirt stores could make her giggle. She didn’t like candle and incense shops because the smells gave her a headache. She liked the candy kitchens. We liked to listen to her complain about stepping on the tree roots and rocks on the hiking trails.
By the time our daughter came along everything had become a ritual of what we did first, not at all and must do before we went home. Our daughter is now married with a child of her own, a husband and a job, so she was too busy to join us on our adventure into the past.
My son and I amused ourselves by trying to remember which rock Janet sat on to rest on the trails. I sat on all of them just to make sure I was sitting where she sat.
Of course, we would have preferred to have had her with us. But we can’t have everything we want in life, can we?

Excuse the quality of the photo of my son Josh. I used an old instamatic I found in a drawer.