Sabbaticals for the Rest of Us

I've always looked favorably on academic sabbaticals and so applaud President Freedman's six month respite for reading, writing, and resting in Cambridge. Something like that should happen to all of us.

In fact, it plays right into a fantasy I've been advocating for years, known as Hier's Law of Refreshment. Not the Chivas or six-pack kind; I'm talking refreshment of the spirit. Quite simply, a mid life, age of 40 year off for everyone, regardless of sex, occupation, or batting average. A chance to get away from it all; leave the job, the stress, the routine, or the happy commonplace. Do something else: travel, lie in a hammock, read War andPeace, learn yoga or how to tie knots, follow the Red Sox to training camp (if and when), walk the Appalachian Trail.

Years ago while working in Europe, I was struck by the fact that a high percentage of tourists disembarking from planes and trains and restaurants were elderly: so many shufflers and wheezers and grouches. True or not, I thought too many of these souls looked weary of churches, museums, and indifferent waiters, and would just as soon be back home in Peoria. Just think, I thought, how much happier they'd be if they were 40 like me and not 70 like them, with 120 over 80 blood pressures and without traveling medicine cabinets. If only younger they could scramble amongst the Alps, chase the pigeons in Venice, and sprint out of the way if the Tower of Pisa leaned too far. The really fit might swim the Bosporus or decipher a couple of Dead Sea Scrolls or take a shot at breaking humorist Art Buchwald's record of 2:13.3 minutes, in sneakers, for running the Louvre triangle of Winged Victory to Mona Lisa to Venus de Milo and back.

They'd revel in the Arch of Triumph and not grouse about their own aching ones.

This plan has a few bugs, of course: kids in school, paying the gas bill, motor pool obligations, feeding the cat. But isn't that what computers are all about? Let them reckon how to get us all out of our domiciles, work places, and geographies and then back in again a year later. Call Cyberspace, whatever and wherever that is.

Tennis, anyone? A year's worth?