Naked Mom on Display, Men in the Night and Other Anxieties

Travel is about many things: food, more food, meeting unusual people, meeting usual people, seeing beautiful places and, of course the least remembered, never documented aspect of travel: anxiety. Did I pack the right stuff? Did I pack too much? Too little? Will I get there on time?

In Africa there were quite a few extra anxieties: Will I die because I drank that glass of water? Will I die because this bush taxi is driving around curves on the wrong side of the road? Will I die because this motorcycle is going to hit a […..]? Fill in the blank with any of the following: land rover, bush taxi, motorcycle, bicycle, bus, Peugeot, Mercedes Benz, cow, goat, sheep, chicken, child, adult, pothole, mud, quick sand, slow sand,  etc. Will I die from a viper bite? From a cobra bite? From a mosquito bite? Will [amoebas, cholera, malaria, giardia, typhoid, encephalitis, meningitis, hepatitis] kill me? And the most terrifying anxiety of all: will I poop my pants on a public bus?

Traveling with Mom certainly does not rival Africa in terms of anxiety, but offers just a few extra anxieties that you would anticipate: will there be food when she needs it? Will there be a horizontal resting place when she needs it? Will she stay upright? For the most part, being on a cruise reduces these anxieties to a point where they are largely negligible. Quite unexpectedly, however, I have run into a new anxiety: Will Mom be naked in the middle of the room when I open the door?

As you might expect, I get up before Mom. While she sleeps, I go to Deck 12 and walk circles around the ship for an hour if we are at sea or go to the fitness center if we are in port. I try to guess when she might be almost ready for breakfast and high tail it back to our room for a shower. It is when I am standing in my workout clothes in the narrow corridor in front of our door about to slide my card into the door opening thingamajig that the anxiety hits me: is Mom naked behind this door?

Let me assure you that this anxiety does not spring from any sense of modesty or puritanical virtues on my part. It is from a much more pragmatic origin. When I put my card in the thingamajig, the extra wide door (for wheelchair accessibility) will immediately swing open and STAY OPEN FOR WHAT SEEMS LIKE FOREVER letting any casual passerby get a long and hard look inside at what could be a naked Mom standing in the middle of the room.

From what I have seen, everyone looks inside when they pass – it is a non-voluntary gesture as one passes an open door in a narrow corridor. I have experienced it myself. Despite my resolution to not look into someone’s room, my head snaps sideway as though on a spring release. I don’t blame my fellow passengers.

You might think that I could just shut the door behind me. No. Tried that. Doesn’t work. Door doesn’t move until it is damn well ready to move. It’s a lot like Linda in that way.

You might think this problem could be circumvented by simply knocking on the door, but remember, we’re talking Mom without her ears in – good luck communicating with her through a closed door.

My strategy instead has been to look furtively up and down the corridor. If the coast is clear, I push the card in and hope for the best. If there are others in the corridor, I fake like I’m searching for my key card until the potential voyeur has passed. It’s not ideal, and statistically speaking, if we were on this boat long enough there would be views, long, lingering views of naked Mom.

I had a close call early on when Mom was not appropriately attired and the door opened. Luckily, she was off to the side in the one place that was not visible from the wide open door. She seemed to be none the wiser about her potential loss of modesty. Tomorrow is the last opportunity for a Morning Full-Monty Mom. Hold your breath, cross your fingers and hope for the best.

Oh and did I mention the Men Who Come in the Night anxiety? I’ll have to address that in a later post. Mom must be ready after her nap. I gotta go down to our room and open the door.

Giving Thanks

 Day 3 – Mom and I are sitting in the café next to the pool. She is knitting, and I’ve been trying to get her yarn out of the zipper on my backpack. Four strands of yarn somehow got zipped into the zipper head. I suggested the obvious solution: “Let's cut it!”

Mom said, “No!”

I then spent twenty minutes trying not to swear. I was the victor in the battle with the zipper, but it wasn’t easy. I’m feeling a bit heroic at the moment, but I’m not sure Mom recognizes the valor as there are too many people to watch vacationing around her to think of her youngest daughter’s great act of disentanglement.

It’s crowded here by the pool because everyone is back from their daytripping in St. John, New Brunswick. Mom and I don’t leave the boat, so we develop a sense of ownership while our 3,000 shipmates are gone and then resent their return. Alright, Mom doesn’t develop a sense of ownership while they’re gone or resent their return because she’s busy napping in our room, but I like roaming the sparsely populated ship. My favorite part is all the cool art work they have all over the ship but particularly in the grand stairways. (Mom doesn’t do the stairs, so she misses some of this.)

When Mom’s not napping or knitting, we’re eating. But you knew this, right?

Today, during Mom’s second nap, I went down to the Schooner Bar to participate in a card making workshop. The “workshop” was a tall blond guy with a foreign accent dumping a plastic container of crafts supplies on a piano top and telling we four women who had eagerly assembled for card making that he doesn’t know anything about it, but we could use the stuff in the box. The stuff in the box included one pair of scissors and one spray can of Elmer’s glue along with various scrapbooking papers and stickers, a sheet a glittering gold bows, and the rather sizable Royal Caribbean Instructor’s Manual for craft workshops, which apparently no one on the Royal Caribbean staff had actually read.

I gently suggested to my fellow card makers that perhaps the ship folk really wouldn’t like us to be spraying glue on their piano. They seemed to buy into this idea and instead we turned away from the piano and sprayed glue more randomly throughout the bar where we were gathered. Perhaps not the ideal solution, but it was easier than the alternative that got bandied about – getting glue sticks from the kids’ space. We were sure that the children had better craft supplies and certainly more than one pair of scissors, but we were too lazy to find their craft cache. We’d make do.

It quickly became apparent that only three of the four of us were game as one participant made it clear that she was only there because of her Card Making Sister. The weak sister gave up quickly; after a few cuts and a few sprays, she declared that she was going to read her book, leaving three of us until a new woman showed up. We’ll call her Elevator Woman.

Mom and I had previously encountered Elevator Woman in the – can you guess? – elevator. It was during the interlude between our copious breakfast and Mom’s first nap, a period of time that  you might be tempted to measure in nanoseconds. Elevator Woman, who was more than ample, decided to tell Mom and me in the few seconds one shares in the elevator with strangers that she loses weight during cruises. Her doctor asks her how she can lose weight on a cruise, and she happily explained to us that it is because she watches these large women with heaping plates of food and it makes her not eat as much. The “heaping plates of food” was accompanied with hand gestures, which I will leave to your imagination. Even though we were only going down four floors, she managed to repeat her observation of how much these large women eat and seemed to expect us to respond to this valuable insight in the same spirit of condemnation. I found myself unable to muster a response, feeling somewhat defensive of my fellow cruisers and inclined to question the pot trash talking the kettle. You can imagine my surprise when of the five women (of the 3,000 or so people on this ship) who showed up to the card making workshop, Elevator Woman was one of them. Statistically speaking, we are talking 5 in 1,500 chance.

“My husband is sleeping,” she said by way explaining her presence. She then proceeded to tell us that she has only made one scrapbook and her 90-plus mother is a hoarder. Her mother is now in an assisted living facility where there isn’t room to hoard, but she tries to get other residents’ visitors to bring her stuff that she can hoard.

The Card Maker Sister then shared that her 90-plus mother is a hoarder too. At this point, I am the only one actually making a card. Elevator Woman and Card Making Sister are just talking. Elevator Woman never actually started to make a card, and Card Making Sister seemed to quickly lose interest in hers. The Third Woman threw in a few card-making gestures but will soon leave us with a pack of card-making materials in her hand, which she will work on at home where presumably she has her own scissors and glue. (As an aside, there were comments made about how these materials are expensive, but are they really so expensive that you’d want to schlep them home from your cruise?)

I can’t remember if Third Woman’s mother was a hoarder, but I think she might be because I definitely had the sense that I was the only card-maker present whose mother wasn’t a hoarder. (We’ll let Mom off the hook for the yarn fetish. This time.) Perhaps the absence of a hoarding mother is what freed me to be the only card-maker present who actually made a card.

While the conversation moved beyond hoarding into other mother deficiencies, I was quiet and feeling rather appreciative of Mom. It was around this time that the Elevator Woman decided to tell us about her cousin (or was it an uncle?) who was a hoarder and lived in a storage container. When he died they only found him because of the smell and had to identify the body using DNA. Umm, how does one respond to this?

I’m thinking I should at least know someone’s name and their place of habitation before I find out their cousin rotted away in a storage container.

“So, where are you from?”

All Aboard!

Ahoy family and friends,

The second day of the cruise finds Mom on the couch napping and me on the balcony looking at what I think is Mount Desert Island, reading the New York Times and catching up on email. What is that expression - the more things change, the more they stay the same?

We think we are at anchor in Frenchmen's Bay where naturally we feel right at home, wondering only where is the gorton for breakfast? Perhaps they will surprise us with pork pie at dinner.

Yesterday around noon we were dropped off at the curb of the ship terminal in Boston where thousands of other people seemed to share similar intentions. Thanks to Byard's help, I didn't lose or forget Mom at the curb (a real possibility) while I dealt with getting our luggage to anyone who looked remotely appropriate. Byard also spotted an empty wheelchair just waiting for us at the curb, which arguably could be interpreted as a sign of divine intervention, a tangible payoff for all those prayers and the wear and tear on Mom's knees. Ah, so the righteous do get their just rewards.

Most of our fellow passengers were assigned to endless cattle corrals but with Mom in her wheelchair, we said goodbye and thanks to our able escort Byard and breezed by the cattle and the trolleys piled with mountains of luggage to take the elevator up to the terminal. The police officer who checked our passports spotted the absence of Mom's signature in her passport and cheerily recommended that she sign it next time she had a pen. 

Later, when I saw the pile of discarded water bottles at the security line, I panicked and tried to get Mom to down her entire water bottle. She took a single sip and handed the bottle back to me as though her work was done. Realizing that having Mom chug an entire water bottle was not the best strategy, I instead asked the guy working the security conveyor belt where to empty our metal water bottles. The guard took one look at Mom in the wheelchair and told us to tuck our full bottles into our carry-on luggage and promised not to notice them. (Cruise ship security, at least in Boston, is still dispatched by private security firms, not the more formidable TSA.) The moral of the story: those with nefarious intentions might consider the opportunities afforded with the 90-plus set.

Despite the pragmatic flexibility of the security personnel, the wait at security was long, and Mom said with great surprise, "This is just like at the airports!" Truth be told, it was way worse than the airports. The comedian who worked the "Welcome on Board" show that we saw last night joked that you could have just gotten off in Philadelphia and walked to the ship by the time you got through security. 

To get to the boat I wheeled Mom down a ramp, quite sure that a single slip on my part would take out many of our fellow passengers as Mom would careen into the back of their knees. I had images of once-happy cruise goers heaped in piles around us. Fortunately those many hours at the gym paid off; I held steady against the not insignificant pull of the wheelchair and the at-risk passengers in front of us were none the wiser.

The more-than-normal chaos that characterized boarding was transformed into elevator hell when we finally got onboard. A crew member, who I begged to let me onboard an elevator because I had just sent my 91-year old mother to another floor by herself with only a cane and no wheelchair, explained that the ship had just arrived from Europe to begin its New England-Nova Scotia cruise season, so everything was crazy. I'm not sure why that creates chaos but getting onto the ship elevators was a significant trial, testing our patience and making us not like our fellow passengers who would GET ON BEFORE US EVEN THOUGH WE WERE ALREADY WAITING WHEN THEY ARRIVED AT THE ELEVATORS. There is a special place in hell for people like that. (In defense of that particular couple, for whom we felt something akin to hatred fill our otherwise loving hearts, there were a lot of people waiting for an elevator, and they may not have noticed THAT WE HAD BEEN WAITING FOREVER.)

We had lunch onboard while waiting for our stateroom to open. Mom didn't like the potato curry (too hot) but enjoyed the tilapia with teriyaki sauce and the strawberry mousse. She also had key lime mousse, but you didn't hear it from me that she started the cruise with TWO DESSERTS. (Since she is insisting on reading this, I am compelled to disclose that I'm the one who selected and provided her desserts.) Dinner found more dessert in front of her - low-sugar strawberry charlotte, but I will deny any accusations that I outed her on the dessert front. 

Virtue overcame me and I eschewed dessert at lunch but then more than made up for it with a Bailey's Irish Cream creme brûlée with caramelized bananas at dinner. In case any of you harbor Mom's penchant for vicarious food experiences - she had mojo pork for dinner and I had the Atlantic salmon with horseradish butter sauce (or something like that). Her starter was a rather boring Caesar salad (although the croutons were reportedly excellent) while I wisely took the waitress's advice and ordered the smoked fish roulettes with crostini, which were noteworthy.

My time flies - it is time to eat again! Gotta run.