Though we stayed from December til May,
It was time to get back under way,
We had put our hook down,
In a posh Florida town,
And they just kicked us out yesterday.
Just kidding! The truth is complex —
No one in this fine town objects,
To our presence, in fact,
They speak to us with tact,
For my Dad’s the Crown Prince: “Vero Rex.”
He must be: He treats us like royalty!
On my birthday, I’d like to believe,
That my brother, the one known as Steve,
Will call from Above,
And say, “Hey, I love
you, and I’m coming back there, on leave!”
When I was born, my brother Stevie was 12. He told the family that Margaret was too long a name for such a little baby, and he proposed the nickname Peggy. It stuck for 17 years (I changed the spelling to “Peigi” at age 11). Now you know where the “P” in Meps came from.
Stevie passed away suddenly on April 16th. He was a kind, gentle soul with a great sense of humor. Losing him is like losing part of my name, part of my identity.
In the photo below, he is the tall, handsome athlete. The miniature person, looking up at him adoringly, is me. I’d just learned to walk.
Stevie’s funeral and a celebration of his life will be here in Vero Beach in mid-May.
I am sorry to hear, Smiling Jill,
That your birthday’s no longer a thrill,
All your friends think you’re great,
And should still celebrate —
You’re not old, you’re just over the hill.
Happy Birthday, Jill! These two friends are looking forward to celebrating with you!
If your five hundred friends each could count,
As one-tenth of your life, the amount,
Is your age: FIFTY years!
Dump some friends now, poor dears,
Do the math — it’s an old-age “discount.”
In other words, if you only had 490 friends, you’d be 49 again.
(I know, I know, I’d be the first one off the list!)
Like a zombie, I shuffled across the Philadelphia airport. It was 5:30 am, and I hadn’t gotten much sleep on my red-eye from Seattle. This cross-country trip required three flights, instead of two, and each plane change was stressful.
A cafe caught my eye, and I joined the line to buy some juice, setting my luggage down and shuffling it forward each time the line moved.
I hardly noticed the older woman in line behind me, until her husband joined her. “I don’t know what you were thinking, you $@#%! You should have $@#^@!” she said to him, her tone loud and acerbic. He responded defensively, then started making nasty accusations at her. I thought about giving up my place in line to get away.
It devolved into one of those toxic “You always!” and “You never!” arguments that’s impossible to resolve. Fortunately for me, they disagreed vehemently about the cafe and went somewhere else.
I felt icky, contaminated by their toxic emotions, but also relieved. It gave me a chance to appreciate that my life is not like that.
By most measures, my morning went downhill further from there. Bad weather delayed my second flight, and when I arrived in Charlotte, my flight home had been cancelled.
Luckily, I didn’t have the same attitude as the angry couple I’d overheard earlier. I took a deep breath and walked to the customer service counter, where a smiling customer is an anomaly. I decided to be the anomaly.
The customer service agent worked out a couple of options and printed new boarding passes. As she handed them to me, the agent still looked concerned. “I need your luggage tags,” she said. I was befuddled by the request, then I realized why she was frowning.
“I only have carry-on luggage,” I said. Her face lit up with a huge smile. “Wow! You’re good to go, then!”
I had plenty of time to catch my new flight to Orlando. With a sigh of relief, I headed for the nearest bathroom.
It was sparkling clean, and just inside the entrance was a display with free candy, hand lotion, hair products, and feminine supplies. The clue to this largesse was the accompanying tip jar. I had just entered the domain of one of the Charlotte airport’s restroom attendants.
This woman, though, was no mere attendant. She was earning her tips as a Bathroom Ambassador.
She bustled around the large bathroom with a cleaning towel, wiping the counters as she greeted women with a cheery hello and a smile. “Hi, how are you today?” She also served as a traffic cop, keeping track of which stalls were in use. “Come on over here, I’ve got a great room for you, lady!” “Here, take this big one — you’ve got a lot of luggage.”
She made the bathroom so pleasant, I wished they had more comfortable, less-specialized seats in there. I would have stayed for a while. She came over and said hi as I was washing my hands. “If you’re going someplace sunny, take me with you!” she quipped.
“I don’t know,” I said, rummaging around for something to put in the tip jar. “You’re making it pretty sunny in here!”
I had over an hour to kill, so I stopped at a Starbucks for a cup of tea. I didn’t even have to use money for this treat — I paid for it with a gift card my brother Hank had given me.
Every time I use this gift card, it makes me feel good. It’s as if he’s giving me a Christmas present over and over.
After my Philadelphia cafe experience, I found myself looking curiously behind me, to see who was next in line. It was a woman about my age, black, with a southern accent. She was alone and had no luggage, perhaps an employee from one of the other shops. She placed an order very similar to mine, and as she fumbled in her purse for the money, I had a brainstorm.
I handed the gift card back to the cashier. “Here, charge it to my card,” I said. The cashier didn’t miss a beat, just swiped the card and handed me a new receipt. She probably assumed we knew each other.
The woman in line behind me went through a series of reactions. There was initially confusion as the cashier refused her payment, and then astonishment that a stranger would pay for her order. Apprehension — was I going to ask something of her? And finally, she got it, and was simply grateful. She’d never experienced anything like this before.
“This is one of those pay it forward things, isn’t it? Now I have to do something nice for someone else?” she said. I just smiled and said, gently, “Only if you want to.” I slipped away to put some milk in my tea, and she followed me across the restaurant. “Thank you! You really made my day! What’s your name?” If I hadn’t been carrying a very full cup of tea and two pieces of heavy luggage, I suspect she might have hugged me.
Despite my lack of sleep and change of plans, I was on Cloud Nine for the rest of the day. If I hadn’t jotted a note about the angry couple in Philadelphia, I would have forgotten about them completely.
For many people, the experience of traveling by plane is miserable. The security process takes away all privacy and dignity. When you reassemble your belongings and put your shoes back on, you no longer have your autonomy or your freedom. Your fate is in someone else’s hands.
Your fate, perhaps, but not your experience. Each of us can choose whether to be miserable or not. The couple in the cafe line? They chose to be angry. Me, I choose to smile, and to do things to help other people smile.
Sometimes, like when my flight gets cancelled, I don’t feel like smiling, but I paste on a smile anyway. Eventually, someone sees my smile and smiles back at me. Then the game is up — I can’t help it, I’m smiling for real now! The next thing I know, I’m smiling at everybody, basking in the cheerful smiles I get in return.
Meps, smiling at you: (=
Dad’s garage is our workshop, therein
Is the stuff that we’ll need to begin,
We will lay plywood flat,
And we’ll draw lines on that,
While his car is out, to his chagrin.
But what’s this? While her spouse was obsessed,
Margaret boarded a plane for the West,
She’s gone off to give care,
To a friend they both share,
Leaving Barry to sew all the rest.
So he lofted the panels and cut,
Out the sail fabric, cheerfully, but,
Figuratively, a wall,
Stopped the man. Then a call,
To his wife, got him out of that rut.
I’ll be helping with the sewing when I return later this week. And I’ve provided emotional support by phone every day. But please, feel free to leave your encouraging comments for Barry on the blog!
Oops… I just figured out that comments are disabled for the limericks section. That’s goofy! We’ll have to fix it one of these days, when we’re not making sails in Dad’s garage. Well, send him an encouraging email instead. But don’t tell him I said so.
On our mooring in Vero Beach, Flutterby usually hangs bow to the wind, gently hunting back and forth from one “tack” to the other. When there is no wind she faces a random direction, only moving when we walk about inside. But most days there is a breeze, and Flutterby spins back and forth, and sunbeams come through portlights and hatches to walk back and forth across the opposite wall, or our berth.
Yesterday, a little barge was working its way through the mooring field. Eventually it came up next to Flutterby to inspect our mooring. I’m one of those guys who likes work, and as they say, I can watch it all day. In that spirit, I had a conversation with the guys on the barge while one of them dove down to inspect our mooring anchor. I found out that we were on an old-style mooring with a ten foot long concrete piling — buried completely under the mud and shell bottom, with a chain going from it up through the float at the surface. Flutterby’s bow is tied to a ring on the end of the chain, free to spin around and hang whichever way the wind or current sends her.
Since the wind was always coming from the bow, on any breezy day I could open the companionway and the forward-facing hatch in the V-berth, and fresh air would blast straight in through the cabin. This is great if somebody just started to scorch things on the stove and you want to clear the air before the smoke alarm goes off. (Don’t ask me how I know!)
But today, all this changed. I motored for less than an hour to Flutterby‘s new home on a dock. It sure is convenient to not have a 5-10 minute dinghy ride (with its high risk of a wet butt) in order to go anywhere or do anything. In fact, I took a bike ride in my new neighborhood just for the fun of it, something I never got around to doing when the bike was a dinghy ride away.
Living in a place that is tied down at 4 corners, unable to move, is just weird! Now the sunbeams only make one very slow transit per day. And the wind: It blows whatever direction it wants to, possibly from the starboard side of the boat all day. It is just plain weird, and that is all I can say about it!
There once was a fellow named Jason,
Who learned that it’s bad luck to hasten,
Just a trip and a splash,
Can relieve you of cash,
When your eyeglasses now need replacin’.
Jason’s really a quite graceful lad,
Just a chip off the block, like his Dad,
Who has pitched a few phones,
Down to old Davy Jones,
But poor Jason’s Blackberry — so sad!
All joking aside, send your kind thoughts to Jason, who banged up his knee in the incident. Given the dunking his Blackberry got, I wonder if texting had something to do with his distraction?
There once was a lady named Jacqui,
And her taste in small boats was not wacky.
She knows quick as a jig,
With her fine Freedom rig,
She can rotate the wheel and yell “Tackie!”
It’s her birthday today, and I wish,
That the day brings some cake in a dish,
And a stroll down the dock,
Where she hears, to her shock:
“Happy Birthday To You!” sung by fish.
There is a fish I call Harvey who hangs out under our boat and makes funny “groink” noises. We suspect he is a “croaker” or a “grunt,” as his ability to hold a tune is limited.
In other news, we heard some strange noises in our dinghy this morning, and I thought it was just the wave pattern. A few hours later, as we went to row ashore, Barry discovered a beautiful 12-inch fish in the bottom of the dinghy! If we’d realized that was the source of the earlier noise, we could have had fresh fish for breakfast.