A LIKELY STORY: VACATIONS HAND REST AREA SON THE ROAD MAP OF LIFE

I'd like to be able to just lay my finger on a map and hit the road, but life is never as easy as it is in a song.

On the melodically enchanting new Indigo Girls album, "Shaming of the Sun," there's this great song called "Get Out the Map." On it, Emily Saliers sings about deciding on a summer trip by just laying her finger down on a map before hitting the open road with the one she loves.

You can hear the longing in her voice, for escape -- and acceptance, I suppose. "The saddest sight my eyes can see is that ball of orange sinking slyly down the trees."

I think she's just trying to say that sometimes it's just good to get away from the same-old, same-old.

Lori and I should get away more. (There's something to add to the list of "Things You Never Hear.") We're just now beginning to talk about a vacation, or our version of it.

I'd like to be able to just lay my finger on a map and head out the door. But life is never as good as it is in a song.

We are bound by what we can afford and how much time off from our busy, busy, busy, schedules we can get. We've talked about weekend trips to Memphis to see James, St. Louis for the nightlife, or maybe even Kansas City. But talk is all that it ever turns out to be.

It's no one's fault. We let our lives get in the way of living. But you can't even blame life with all its hustle and bustle; it's just doing its job.

We do manage little vacations, mini vacations I call them. They're never very big, but we always have a good time. We try to meet Lori's cousin Tobe at Van Buren a couple times over the summer to float the river. It's nice to drink a cold beer with the sun beating down as we drift, merrily, merrily, merrily ...

We like to go to movies, a popular mini vacation, but we're home by the time it gets dark.

My folks sure have learned how to take a vacation in their old age. It was about five years ago or so that they all loaded up the truck and rode to Beverly. Pasadena, that is, to visit some family.

Swimming pools, credit cards.

I even managed to miss that vacation. I had better plans, vacationing in beautiful, scenic Fort Jackson, S.C., where the tour guides wore big, round-brimmed hats and the tourists were treated like dirt.

But my folks are continuing their great vacation tradition this summer. As we speak, they're at Disney World in Florida. They've taken Zach, my 5-year-old son, with them. He's been excited about it for months.

He'll be having breakfast with Mickey Mouse over the two weeks that they're gone. I can't help but wonder what they'll talk about.

But to get to the point, vacations are good. (Thank you, Capt. Insight, as Dennis Miller would say.) We all know that, but too many of us don't take the opportunity to put all these headaches on the shelf for a couple of weeks. We have too much going on, too much "life" to live to get to any real life, with no quotation marks around it.

As Emily sings, later in that same song, "Why do we hurtle ourselves through every inch of time and space, when around the corner we can see a resting place."

Scott Moyers is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.