Let's Go, So We Can Get Back
Let's Go, So We Can Get Back
A trip to the Amalfi Coast yields a meditation on Limoncello abuse, destination funerals, family, and our own mortality
Do we even call it plagiarism when we admit our theft outright? Because that’s what I did just now with the above headline. I lifted it wholesale from Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy’s delightful 2018 memoir of the same name. In Tweedy’s telling, “Let’s go, so we can get back,” was a crack his father used to utter when he had to go some place outside his comfort zone, like a company picnic or the funeral service of a distant relative. It was a joke that wasn’t really a joke. No matter what occasion or location beckoned over the horizon, the only place his pop really wanted to be was back in his easy chair in his unfinished basement, nursing a thin pisswater beer.
And so, as advertised in this space a couple weeks back, when I warned I’d be taking a protracted absence to attend my beautiful niece’s elegant wedding on the Amalfi Coast (a tad more glorious than a company picnic), I went, and now I’m back. Tanned, ready, and rested. Or maybe just tanned, since the trip ended up becoming my own personal Trail of Tears, with more Limoncello and less ethnic cleansing.
Mind you, I don’t have anything against the Millennial-device-of-choice these days to impoverish us all: the destination wedding. So long as the destination is no further away than an hour-and-a-half by car, as prescribed by the wisest man of our time, Larry David. Though it does have me thinking about counterprogramming the young’uns with my own destination funeral, forcing them to fly halfway around the world to prove they’re serious about honoring my memory. When I ran the idea by my fishing compagno, The Cool Refresher, who has a few years on me and is presumably closer to his own demise than I am (fingers crossed), C.R. said, “I’m in! I would like my ashes scattered in one of the pirate’s coves in Somalia. That will be a memorable funeral.”