I Was a Wreck (So I Took a Cruise)

I was a wreck, so I took a cruise.This was me two weeks ago.I don't look all that much better now but I feel better.Cruising today isn't like cruising 100 years ago when wealthy wasp-waisted women dressed for dinner in their rustling silks, and their gents came in white-tie-and-tails. Today, for as little as $500,  anyone can revel in a week of total spoiling, and far from the chill Atlantic to boot, moseying instead among the sapphire-tinted harbors of the Caribbean.During this whole cruise I took I kept thinking, Well here we all are, waddling about in our scanty beachwear consuming literal tons of food at the almost-continuous all-you-can-eat buffets; shopping obsessively, both on ship and shore; and gambling day and night in the jingling casino spaces you can’t cross the 5th deck without having to walk through. No wonder much of the world finds us laughable. We’re a boatload of Baby Hueys, I kept thinking, getting fed and fussed over, having our pants changed, practically, by a vast staff of people 95% from developing countries.But hey: why be negative? Basically it's AWESOME to be on a cruise. Awesome to see how many ladies for example, succumb to getting their hair lashed down in the tiny island-style braids that unless you have the face of an angel and a noggin to match, make you look like ET.Awesome to notice how middle-schoolers find each other so unerringly on a cruise, making friends fast and moving in packs around the ship, the girls shrieking “Omigod!” every five minutes and the boys bellowing “Dude!”It’s even fun waiting in line for the iron in the laundry room, with the dozen others trying to gussy up for the big Captain’s Reception. It feels like a college dorm then, or a real friendly apartment building. The whole experience feels like a big sleepover we were all having.But the best fun on a cruise is what you notice the first night out and that is this: when you lie in your bed, the bed moves.All night long it moves, and you sleep rocked like an infant, dreaming lovely long dreams with complicated plots and sub-plots.  And even later, the boat docked and the cruise long over, when you sleep once again in your own bed, you can still feel it: that something much larger is holding you and you, great baby, are just along for the ride. AH!Also, show me a nicer sight than this eh?Now picture yourself with your eyes closed , on bed in your cabin, face down and clinging lightly to the bedding, as a baby chimp clings to its momma's fur as she swings slow and easy through the treetops.That to me is the best part of the whole deal.

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.