Pants on Fire

This is what I get for cheating. I was so pressed for time Friday night I took a limp old rag of writing and tried to make it snap like a flag in a stiff ocean breeze; took words  I wrote three years back and tried passing them off as fresh. What can I say? We were hurrying to  beat the traffic to the Cape.And I get tired sometimes.And that’s my only excuse.Also the fact that when we got down here we went out on the town so I didn’t proof the post and out it went into the world at 5am. I should explain that I schedule these posts so they appear on their own at that hour. So up it went, a great fat fib from beginning to end and chock full of typos too.God got me good though: in the post I talked about how my phone was dying which it in fact had been doing 1,000 days ago when I wrote the piece but then it did die, right during dinner Friday night. This fancy new i-Phone just went black. Wouldn’t reboot, wouldn’t take a charge. Just shut its eyes tight and took the 5^th.So let that be a lesson to me to tell the truth every time out!Another truth is that we had one gorgeous day on old Cape Cod. I ate too much, then drank too much, then came back to our hosts’  breezy cool house, climbed the stairs to the guest room, looked out over the waves of that rocking dish of an ocean and was asleep before my head hit the pillow. Sooo no phone again today. AND a big head from the Crown Royal. AND a guilty conscience for being a liar. I've learned my lesson. Never again will I write here what isn't true and real for me in the moment. And here's what's real right this second: these two views captured an hour or two after sunrise on the third-to-last weekend in August.  

Revenge of the Mocked

I knew I shouldn’t have tried to get a laugh on the backs of such fine people as Shirley Temple and the Carter women just because they wore frocks and blouses with cute little puffed sleeves. I never should have posted that piece here I realize. But the puffed-sleeved blouse I’d grabbed off the rack and bought without benefit of dressing room-time looked SO silly when I tried it on the night before this little four-day cruise that I sat right down and posted a whole array of smarty-pants remarks, even adding pictures, one of them of the Baby Jesus making that arms-outstretched Son-of-God gesture that means basically “Hey you’re a great crowd, I love ya, I’m here every night.”

I felt instantly remorse, of course I did. And since I seem to have turned into a person who believes not only that our pets can read our minds but that inanimate objects can get their feelings hurt, I began to feel sorry for that little blouse. Which is why I put it on at 5am Thursday thinking, to wear it just for the flight to Tampa and the easy cab ride to the pier where, once cozily aboard ship, I would trade it in for a bathing suit and a nice thick layer of Coppertone.

Ah but fate had other plans because here it is two full days later and I am still wearing the thing. Why? Because after my flight out of Boston was cancelled, the scrabbled-together set of substitute flights set me down on the runway in Tampa with just 23 minutes to spare before that ship was sure-enough leaving. After a series of frantic pleading phone calls to Carnival’s Emergency Hotline both before and during the screech of a high-speed cab ride to the pier I did in fact manage to get aboard in a last-possible-second way.

I did, but my luggage did not. And so here I am on Day Three, in the middle of the ocean, still without my suitcase; still living on borrowed toothpaste in this Whatever Happened to Baby Jane blouse with the little puffed sleeves.

They say God will not be mocked but it looks to me like you'd best leave child stars and the kin of Jimmy Carter the hell alone too.