Les Grandes Vacances

My son’s family is returning in August from France, where his company moved him a year ago. They will be around for three weeks, and by “around”, I mean appearing and disappearing as they try to touch various bases, presenting themselves to family and friends scattered throughout New England. His older sister is hoping to intersect with him when her two children get out of summer camp so the cousins—her children, his children— can see each other. Everyone will be bouncing between points in Maine, in addition to Boston, Scituate, Nelson, and Hancock. We intend to remain motionless while this goes on to avoid collisions, with an expectation that the orbiting bodies will alight, if only briefly, to feed on what we can provide.

Family vacation is complicated, a full troop movement. It requires planning, logistics, and frequent snacks (an army marches on its stomach). Most of the complexity has disappeared for us as grandparents. We simply watch and wait, answering the emails.

The absence of my son and his gang over the last year, not here for any of the holidays or birthdays, is having its effect on planning. There is less elasticity in the process: not seeing them this visit may mean not seeing them again for months, or even a year. I understand there are families that live like that routinely, by choice, or because someone is in the Navy, on a submarine, or moved to Australia. We may need to settle into such a routine, resetting our expectations. But for the moment, our clan is unpracticed that way. We are used to regular visits.

I don’t know what we would do if France did not have so deeply rooted in its culture Les Grandes Vacances, which sends the country into a state of hibernation every August. Shops close for the month, along with schools, daycares, camps, and companies. Even big multi-nationals, such as the one my son works for, enter a stage of torpor, during which time productivity slows to the equivalent of ten heart beats per minute. Like a hedgehog. Thankfully, Les Grandes Vacances gives all of us with some claim on my son and his family’s precious time at home, a few bites at the apple.

At a particularly high arc in my corporate career, back in the days of chasing rainbows, I remember taking a meeting with a fellow from France in my New York office. Big, corner office, with a small conference table, a couch, and chairs, in addition to my desk. Two or three telephones scattered around the room. Very swell. Very self-important looking place. I have no idea what the meeting was about. I do know I was not happy trapped in it. I sat there acting as pleasantly as possible, but contributing nothing to the conversation that might extend our time together. Soon enough, my guest took account of my detached interest, the peeks at my watch, the looks back over at my desk, and brought the meeting to a close. He finally got my attention, however, when he paused on his way out to say, in his pleasingly accented English, “You know, you must stop and smell the roses sometimes.” After a glance around my office, casually dismissing my trappings of power, he departed, sliding past my assistant in the doorway. “What was that about?” she asked.

At that moment, I decided he was speaking for his whole country, which had striven, gained and lost, again and again, over centuries, until it settled into Les Grandes Vacances, quite content to let others chase balls, having nothing of urgency left to prove. The school year in France, we have learned, reflects the same attention to the scent of roses: six weeks on, and a week off throughout the academic year.

France has paid a price in the number of billionaires for all this vacationing: sixty-eight billionaires in its population of sixty-eight million people, compared to 902 billionaires spread across our population of 340 million. One billionaire for every million people in France, versus almost three, per million, in the U.S.

I don’t imagine any of the people loading the troops into the back of the van for their eagerly awaited August destinations care about that statistic. Nor any of us who wait patiently for them.

Published in the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript, July 15, 2025