Okay, good people. We’re down to the last night of the Republican National Conflagration.

I’ve gotten progressively less sleep each night and the portion of my brain responsible for joy is now entirely dark on PET scan.

However, on the upside...

1/

I wisely scheduled in a more robust pregame warmup today coupled with a supply stop at Ye Olde House of Beer.

And more importantly, when this torment is over, I’m packing up the car and heading out on Sat for a week in a bare mountain cabin with my son.

And healing will occur.

Beyond how much of a septic snorkel the RNC has been, this time away with my son is so very overdue. Years overdue. Years and years overdue.

We’re no-frills’ing it. Basic cabin. Pristine lake in front of us. Mountains around us.

Porch with a view.

We’re going to swim and fish and cook out and listen to music and make campfires and lay out under a sky filled with a whole damn universe of stars a kid from the burbs has ever seen.

I could legit cry.

This week has sucked. And next week will be its spectacular opposite.

And since I’m two Smithwicks in and rambling, there is a deep, personal momentousness to this trip. A symmetry.

This cabin is on property once owned by my grandparents. After my grandfather returned from World War II, he married my grandmother and they bought the place.

Thirty bare bones cabins on 40 acres next to a lake.

They did almost all the work themselves. He mowed 20 acres of grass. She washed and changed the linens for 50 beds.

My mother was raised there. My father, raised just down the road.

I was born in raised in New York City. Washington Heights.

In late June, after school got out, my sister and I went to our grandparents. Spent our entire summer there.

We knew the families who came every year. Working class. These cabins were an affordable family vacation.

My other grandparents lived just a couple miles down the road.

Summers were an escape. An escape from the city and being a latchkey kid. An escape from an alcoholic household.

But then my grandparents sold the place when I was 9.

It was just too much work.

After that, instead of staying in the “big house” in the middle of all the cabins - a house that wasn’t big at all but just wasn’t a cabin - we went up for a week or two with my father and rented one of those cabins.

I haven’t stayed in one since probably 1988.

My father and I were long estranged. Hadn’t spoken in twenty years.

He simply never tried and I came to be okay with letting go of a relationship that only existed only if I was willing to perform constant CPR.

He died nearly two years ago - on my son’s birthday.

After he passed, I got a box in the mail.

In it, the sum total of things my sister thought I might want from his house.

A single Manila folder of pictures and a flash drive of converted home movies.

I tucked it on a shelf without opening it.

But now, with my son and me heading up there and the potential we might meet relatives he has never met, we sat down and opened it together this week.

Thumbed through old pics of that place and those times.

And now we’re heading up together.

It will be the first real vacation he and I have taken of this length; the first time I will be back there in decades; the first time I’ve been there since my father died, since turning 50...

But most importantly, while those many things may whirl and hum in the back of mind, for my son, it will be just something he asked of me.

“I wish we could go away. Just the two of us.”

To say I adore my son is to cheapen those words.

I have been gifted with the opportunity of being his father - and of he being my son.

We are thick as thieves. We know each other like the backs of our hands.

And for this next week, in a simple cabin by a lake, there will be nothing more than that.

And that is enough.