Hello, I’m Veronica
The sky is not completely dark at night. Were the sky absolutely dark, one would not be able to see the silhouette of an object against the sky.
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extraordinary
When my wife and I took a cruise last month, I had one of those smile moments on board that did not fully explain itself until much later. You see, the cruise was a tour around the Baltic Sea, where you wake up in a different port each morning and spend each day off the ship exploring the cities. Translation: the only cruising you do is at night while you are sleeping.
But that’s not entirely truthful. Fact: if you travel on the Baltic Sea from Tallinn, Estonia to St. Petersburg, Russia, it takes a full day to get from one to the other. Which means you actually do get a “day at sea”. Ours was a Sunday. And Sunday includes a Sunday afternoon. So on that Sunday (smile moment), I found myself humming the tune made famous by Marvin Gaye:
“Cruisin…’ on a Sunday afternoon. Really… couldn’t get away too soon…”
For those of you in the know, I found out well after the cruise that I need to work on my Marvin Gaye lyrics. It’s actually “Groovin’… on a Sunday afternoon”. Well okay, maybe I was crusin’ AND groovin’ on a Sunday afternoon. I’m just glad I wasn’t singing out loud.
I want to share a few details about this cruise; the jaw-dropping experiences that add the “extra” to “ordinary”. “Ordinary” my wife and I have already experienced, several years ago on the only other cruise we’ve taken. “Extraordinary” arrived last month in the form of the cruise ship Marina, a 1,200-passenger stunner that is the newest member of the Oceania fleet.
Here’s an example of extraordinary. When we arrived at our cabin door after boarding Marina, we were greeted almost immediately by our room steward; a lovely woman from the Philippines named Remy (another smile moment, as we have a dog by the same name). Remy gave us the full “tour” of our cabin and insisted we call on her day or night for anything we needed. Then she disappeared almost as soon as she arrived. But we saw her several more times in the hallways, and she always greeted us by name. “Good morning Mr. and Mrs. Wilson”. “Good evening Mr. and Mrs. Wilson”. How does she do that? I know she was room steward for a dozen other cabins and there’s no way I would remember all those names after a single, brief introduction. Extraordinary.
Here’s another example. When my wife and I returned to Marina from our daily “land excursions”, the crew arranged afternoon tea in a beautiful ballroom near the stern. Dozens of small tables for two or four, with comfy chairs, tablecloths and steaming teapots (we always chose the peppermint). A black-tied four-piece string quartet would entertain us. A waiter materialized with a choice of sandwiches (with the crusts cut off no less) and several scrumptious desserts. It was that feeling of being under-dressed but over-pampered. It was also the feeling – apparently – of English royalty. Extraordinary.
Final example. Our cruise line offered on-board culinary classes, so we just had to bite (ha). We donned our chef whites for three blissful hours one afternoon, preparing and tasting delicious pasta dishes and sauces. It was a scene right out of the Food Channel. You had your master chef at the front of the room, behind her spotless and stainless kitchen counter, with the requisite mirror overhead to make it easier to watch. Then you had her several assistant chefs scurrying around the room to help you, making sure your prep station was cleaned up for the next step; ingredients perfectly measured. All you had to do was watch and prepare, cook and consume. I could get used to that. Extraordinary.
Take a cruise sometime and see if it doesn’t get you groovin’ too. I also find it extraordinary that my brain still remembers the lyrics from a song written in 1967. Well, I remember the lyrics incorrectly (which is a great topic for another blog) but you get the idea.
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wistful
The church we belong to has an interesting element in its design; something I have not seen since my childhood. It’s called a “cry room”. A cry room is a small, enclosed, soundproofed space adjacent to a more public space – like a church sanctuary – with a few chairs (or pews) behind a large pane of glass. Parents can take their unhappy infants into the cry room and still see and hear the church service without disturbing the congregation. Parents can enter from the sanctuary or they can enter from the church foyer; in fact, you hardly notice them.
Our pastor enjoys telling new visitors the cry room is actually for adults as well – the ones who are upset with what he has to say in his sermons.
I was first introduced to cry rooms at a movie theater of my youth. It was a small seaside venue with only one or two screens. The cry room was situated at the back of the theater, soundproofed and elevated. They put a few theater-style seats behind the glass, with speakers so you could still hear the movie. As a teenager, my friends and I thought the cry room was the cool place to watch the movie from, as if we had our very own private theater. In hindsight, it would have been a great place for a first date.
Cry rooms are clearly a throwback to times gone by, like those big velvet curtains that would pull aside before the movie began. They bring back memories of the simpler, more refined eras that I sometimes yearn for. They make me wistful. I did a little research and learned that cry rooms were always included in early theater design. The nicer ones included electric bottle warmers, complimentary formula, and often a nurse on duty. Different times, no?
A hotel in Japan takes a different spin on the concept of a cry room. They’ve set aside several rooms specifically for women to de-stress from the apparently demanding lifestyle of the Japanese culture. Check into a cry room, select from one of several Hollywood tear-jerker DVD’s, and let the tears flow and the stress melt away. They supply you with a healthy stock of tissues and a warm eye mask, so you can emerge a few hours later with no evidence on your face. Would you pay $85 for that?
The recent trend in church design is to remove the cry room from the sanctuary. I think that’s a shame, as infants are showing up in the pews in greater numbers these days. Speaking of infants, a few months ago I watched a woman video the pastor’s sermon on her iPhone with no regard for the people sitting around her. She was in the pew directly in front of me. Try concentrating on the message as you look past an iPhone held up high. Forget the wailing babies; I’ve found an even better reason to bring back cry rooms.
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meticulous
I have bed-making down to an art. Tens of thousands of practices over my lifetime have developed a habit and an approach that is as efficient and perfect as they come. I am precise and thorough, with the extreme attention to detail that can only be defined as meticulous. Inside of five minutes I can boast hospital corners, fluffed pillows, and perfectly aligned tucked-in sheets and blankets with not a crease in site. It’s quite the accomplishment.
Recently – and somewhat disturbingly – I found myself making the bed in our hotel when my wife and I would travel. Even though housekeeping comes along later in the day and their very job is to make the bed, the habit is so ingrained from childhood that I simply can’t leave the room without giving the bed some semblance of an orderly look.
All of this attention to bed-making has me questioning the entire practice, so let’s just put it out there. Why do we make beds in the first place? Who really sees your bed besides you and whomever you share it with? Why make it nice and neat if you’re just going to mess it up again later the same day? Or how about this: isn’t it more sanitary to leave the sheets exposed to the fresh air instead hiding them under blankets and comforters all day long?
Maybe these questions are really just excuses born from a childhood of not wanting to make my bed.
In the classic children’s novel “The Twenty-One Balloons”, author William Pene du Bois imagined a fantastic bed-making device. The sheets formed a continuous loop that disappeared into the floor on both sides of the bed. The portions of the sheet below the floor passed through rollers into a flat washing machine and a drying press before looping back up to the bed. A crank inserted into the footboard would rotate the sheets exactly one width of the bed. Therefore, not only is the bed made all the time but you always have clean sheets. Brilliant!
Sometimes my wife and I wake up in the morning, and the bed looks like it’s still made even though we haven’t gotten up yet. In fact, if I carefully turn back the sheets and blankets as I get out of bed, it only takes a single tug to restore order. It’s the simplest form of bed-making. Is that my answer; learning to sleep lying perfectly still all night long so the bed practically makes itself?
More likely I should take a lesson from the not-so-classic film “Along Came Polly”. In a scene that absolutely resonates with me, Ben Stiller’s character would make his bed every day meticulously, topping it off with a dozen or more perfectly-placed decorative pillows. In an even better scene, Jennifer Aniston’s character – a wonderfully free spirit – launches an all-out assault on the pillows, reducing them to a storm of ripped-up cloth and flying feathers. And there’s the lesson. Let the bed go unmade every now and then. Forget about the hospital corners or the sheet aligning with the blanket or the arrangement of the pillows. It doesn’t matter. Goodness knows you have more important things to do with your day.
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certitude
Several posts ago I told the woe-is-me story of leaving my Kindle e-reader in an airplane seat pocket. Much to my chagrin I wrote, this was the second time in two years; exiting a plane without my prized portable technological wonder. In the post I made two predictions about the eventual destination of my e-reader. The first was into the hands of the Delta employee who cleans the plane. The second was into the hands of the next traveler who reached into my seat pocket (“Congratulations! You’ve just won an Amazon Kindle!”) So one or the other of these scenarios was the end of the line for my e-reader. I drew those conclusions as if they were fact. I wrote with certitude.
Here then, “the rest of the story”. On the eventual destination of my e-reader I was wrong – way wrong. In what I would label a small miracle, my Kindle ended up… in my own hands. The perseverance of DALLIRT (Delta Air Lines Lost Item Recovery Team) won the day. Perhaps my Kindle was found immediately or perhaps it traveled on to one or more exotic destinations. Either way, a human took pity on me and made things right. Imagine my disbelief (and chagrin) when I received an email from DALLFC (Delta Air Lines Lost & Found Central) that began “Dear David Wilson: We are happy to tell you that we have located an item that closely matches the description of your reported lost item”. Twelve dollars and seventy-seven cents of postage and three days later, my Kindle was dropped on my doorstep. No damage. No note. Everything intact.
I must own up to one other aspect of this story. A day or two after I filed the lost item report with Delta, I promptly logged onto Amazon and bought another Kindle. That’s right; before I gave Delta’s process a chance, I purchased a new e-reader. I even upgraded to a newer version (“Voyage” – oooo). That’s certitude in a nutshell. Zero faith in the alternative.
I suppose the lost dollars to Amazon represents my penance (another good word for my blog) for not trusting a process designed to correct my mistakes. But to further cleanse my guilt, I sent DALCC (Delta Air Lines Customer Care) a glowing email, complimenting them on their lost item recovery process. And they wrote right back, beginning with the following line: “It’s so easy to leave something important behind while flying”. Gee, thanks for making me feel better. Except I did it twice.
My son will probably inherit my recovered Kindle. Yes I should probably keep it because things happen in threes but I’ll take my chances. I’ll trust the process. And I’ll certainly consider Delta Airlines the next time I fly.
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irk
Watch out. I’m about to ruin your theater-going experience. If you want to enjoy your movies without the nagging of my detail-oriented world, do not read any further. You have been warned.
I am one of those who can’t help but notice the little things. When I enter a theater I am immediately aware of my surroundings. How big is the screen? How comfortable are the chairs? Is the sound too loud or just right? Did I get freshly-made popcorn or the slightly stale stuff from the bottom of the bin? Yet these are minor distractions when I consider my recent experiences at the movies. Drum roll please; I give you the twelve items that irk me most when I’m at the theater. No matter how intense the action scene or how enrapturing the love scene, one or more of these dozen offenses are sure to get up in my face and say “hello”:
1) The sounds of snacks. At the movies I demand the silence that Simon & Garfunkel made famous (get it?) but instead I’m surrounded by crunches, slurps, wrappers, pours, gulps, and chews. Is this a vote for early-onset hearing loss?
2) Cell phones. To the credit of my fellow movie-goers, I can’t recall the last time I heard a cell phone bleep during a movie. But they still buzz. And they light up. And I notice. My peripheral vision gets high marks at the eye doctor but makes me pay dearly at the movies.
3) Ushers with flashlights. Here’s a new one. Ushers pass through the theater once during the movie to check things out. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a good idea with some of the crazies out there. But I see them. I know why they’re there. And my movie gets a “time-out” until they leave.
4) People movement. This one is trending upward. Why are people going in and out of the theater during the movie? Did they not take care of business earlier? Are there lottery winnings distributed in the lobby that I’m not aware of? And what about missing those couple of minutes while you’re gone? Don’t you want your money’s worth? Sit still people!
5) Commercials. I include movie previews in the value of my ticket purchase. But not commercials. Nor previews that are really just commercials in disguise. Nor ads for television shows. Not what I came for.
6) Seat kicks. Which begs the question, are they intentional or is the person behind you overly-aggressive with their response to a given scene? No matter; you never see them coming and once you get one you’re on edge wondering when number two will hit.
7) The louder movie next door. Beware the lure of a soft romance or poignant drama. Hollywood has produced an action-packed blockbuster that just happens to be playing in the adjacent theater. There are no words to describe the moment when a bomb goes off in the middle of a love scene.
8) Ticket/concession costs. Okay maybe this is just me, but it takes time to get over the fact that I just paid more for my concessions than I did for my movie ticket. I know, I know – concessions equal profit margin. But I’m already well into my movie before I can make peace with that.
9) “People” sounds. In addition to the sounds of snacks, I give you loud breathing, distinctive laughs (otherwise known as cackles, whoops, snickers, and howls), coughs, sniffles, and those other sounds better left to the imagination than described here.
10) The wrong movie. I kid you not. At a theater a few months ago our romantic comedy opened with a towering image of Will Ferrell’s face. I knew instantly they’d queued up the wrong movie. Will Ferrell and romantic comedy do not belong in the same sentence. Or movie theater.
11) The person sitting next to you. Admit it, you arrive early and choose your seats hoping no one will sit next to you. And when they do, you wonder who gets the arm rest. Or the drink holder. And what’s that funny smell?
12) Talkers. Sorry ladies, but women who go to the movies together like to talk ABOUT the movie DURING the movie for EVERYONE to hear. They also seem drawn to the seats directly behind me. One time I actually confronted them about it and promptly learned the meaning of the phrase “dagger eyes”.
So there you have it. Life used to be so simple. My gauge of a good movie was getting to the closing credits without wondering where I put my car keys. But those days are gone. The movies are officially a gamble, but only with respect to which (or how many) of the above distractions will be included. I hope you’re enlightened. I’m irked. Enjoy the show.
About Me
The sky is not completely dark at night. Were the sky absolutely dark, one would not be able to see the silhouette of an object against the sky.
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