Traveling Heavy
By Jim Shahin
OUR 17-YEAR-OLD SON, Sam, is slouching in a chair at his desk, reading instructions from the college that he will head to in two days for a five-week program.
He’s preparing.
I’m fretting.
“Books. Clothes. Not just T-shirts. Nice pants. Button-down shirts. You’ll have lots of stuff,” I say. “You’ll probably need two suitcases.”
“You’ve got a beef,” Sam says over his shoulder.
“What?” I reply.
“You’ve got a beef,” he repeats.
“I’ve got a beef?”
“You’ve got a beef,” he says, looking up from his reading and turning his focus on me. “You’ve got a beef with traveling light.”
I feel as if someone has just taken an ax to my knees. I’m weak. Wobbly. A father cut to the quick by his son. It’s a Greek tragedy moment.
“I don’t have a beef,” I say.
“You didn’t used to,” he says. “You used to travel light. Not anymore. Now you overpack.”
“Sam, you’re going to need all that stuff.”
“Dad, you underestimate me.”
“What are you talking about? I’m talking about packing.”
“I can get everything into one suitcase.”
“One giant suitcase, maybe.”
“Dad,” he says. His tone is at once sympathetic and scolding. “I don’t know what happened. You used to make a big deal about traveling light. Now?”
He shrugs and turns his attention back to reading his instructions.
I slink off to regard my former self and search the Internet to see if there are others like me. I Google “pack light” and up come — this is true; you can try it yourself — 313,000 hits. There is “The Art of Packing Light,” “Pack Light and Travel Happy,” “Smart Packing for Today’s Traveler,” and “Get It Right, Pack Light: 9 Essentials for an Adventurous Weekend.”
Intrigued, I click on that last one. Included as one of the nine essentials is a leather thong (“illustration omitted”). Adventurous weekend, indeed.
But I don’t believe even a leather thong can help me now.
THERE ARE TWO kinds of travelers in this world: people who travel light, and people who believe that sort of thing is utter nonsense.
I guess I’m becoming one of the latter.
No, I don’t pack 14 pairs of shoes, nor do I have a particular blouse for breakfast, an ensemble for touring the city in the afternoon, or a dress for the evening. Um, which is to say that I don’t have a blouse, an ensemble, or an evening dress. Or even a casual dress. Or … oh, never mind.
But I am filling my suitcase, sometimes two, and returning home with shirts unworn and shoes unlaced and pants unfolded. I have come down, I fear, with a bout of the Just in Cases.
JIC, as they call it in the travel biz, is an affliction caused by two things: aging and American-ness.
In terms of the American-ness, it’s true. In lines at airport counters these days, you see families from other countries with ginormous suitcases tied together with rope and piled high, one atop another. But one senses that they are not just traveling but actually moving. In which case, they are traveling light.
If I could move from one country to another with one or two ginormous suitcases, I’d be my own hero.
But the last time we moved, about two years ago, it took us two gigantic moving trucks. Two of them! There are three of us — me, my spousal unit, and a progeny. That’s it. And yet, we needed two enormo-trucks.
What is all this stuff that we accumulate?
Well, I can tell you, because rather than get rid of any of it, we packed it all.
It is what you’d call … junk.
But what if I weren’t American? I’d still age.
When you’re young, the most important thing to pack is tunes. These days, all the tunes fit into an MP3 player the size of a postcard. So it’s not as if a lot of space is taken up with boxes of cassette tapes.
 Of course, when you’re young, you don’t have money to go to restaurants. So you don’t need to bring a couple of sets of nice clothes for your hard-won reservation at Le Snoot.
With age comes the most severe aspect of JIC syndrome: an obsession with the Options, which becomes complicated because of the changeable weather (you actually might even check the weather before you go), not to mention the different things you might do and how you might dress for them. You could spend a night at the theater or take a walk in an English garden or — jeez, oh Pete, am I really talking about the theater and gardens?
Did I really say “jeez, oh Pete”?
Excuse me. I have to bury my head in my hands now.
I’ll be back after I stop wondering where I went.
Hmm … I wonder how much a leather thong costs.
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