The Depth of the Nows

I feel like I have been complaining and moaning and fearing, lately, but despite myself, these past few days have been pretty wonderful.  Fearing, you say?  Well, I think it is a typical thing.  Makes my think of my friend Jim, who told me way back when I was a freshman in college living in the same dorm (that’s where I met him), that he planned his whole life out—that he was going to get a government job and retire early with a big pension.  And, as it turned out, he actually did do that, got a job with the County of San Francisco, and then retired with a pension when he was 50.  And he bragged about it, it seemed that way to me, anyway, but after a while of such retirement, he started to complain that now he couldn’t do things like he used to.

He said he used to go to the opera, and he used to go out to dinners in elegant San Francisco restaurants (of which there are an infinite supply), and he would travel to Europe, but now he couldn’t.  Why not, I asked?  He said, “Because I don’t have the same amount of money I used to.”

I figure that maybe the pension he was receiving after having worked about fifteen years less than the “normal” pattern (or, comparing him with me, now, he worked twenty years less), I didn’t really feel all that sorry for him, thinking (admittedly unkindly), Well if you need more money, maybe you should get a job!  I didn’t say that to him, of course, that would have been rude and actually none of my business.  And anyway, he does deserve points for planning his life and actually sticking to it, and I don’t think he can be blamed if he later discovered that some of the details ended up being different from what he had expected.  That is life, right?  That happens to all of us.  Any anyway, he still remains a brilliant, talented, and hilarious guy that I always liked.

But for me, lately, in what has now been my three months of retirement, I have now finally experienced and understood Jim’s feelings.  It isn’t whether you have the money or not, but it is that you can’t be quite sure that it is enough.  If you are actually living on your pension, or, in my case, on your retirement fund and various investments, while that may be sufficient for maintaining your previous lifestyle, it isn’t really the same as having a regular paycheck come ringing into your bank account.  I would love in when I would be working on my computer and there would be a signaling “ding” and on the lower right hand side of the screen would be a notice from Wells Fargo saying that a direct deposit had been deposited in my checking account and it would tell me my new balance.  Twice a month.  And I knew that that would come to a stop and I would surely miss it, but that didn’t mean that I was now going to be destitute.  And I absolutely am not.  And my licensed financial adviser underscores that.  And it is not that I am not planning on generating an income from hoped for published books, monetized YouTube travel videos (once they get way better than they are now!) and other ideas.  It’s just that none of those are as secure as a regular paycheck.

So now I am “Mr. Conserve”, running around turning lights off (my father would be proud), only having on the ones in the actual room that I am in, not going out to eat as much as I had been, and cooking at home, instead, and not even taking any major trips (not yet) until my retirement finances are all fully set up (my advisor, Cheryl, tells me that will be somewhere in the middle of January). (P.S., Carmen, if you are reading this, “I am not Cheryl’s only client!”)  But we had a very productive day yesterday, a two-hour phone call discussing my “risk profile” that was generated from a 25-question questionnaire that I had done last week (sweating bullets while doing it).  That was amazingly useful, and essential according to Cheryl.  Based on how you answer the questions, you end up with a “risk tolerance” score, and then Cheryl goes over each question with you to find out why you chose each choice so that she can get a better understanding of your emotions and also set up the most appropriate plan.

The risk tolerance score goes from 1 to 100; a 1 would be a person who was so afraid of risk that they would hide every penny and dollar they owned under a mattress, not even feeling safe with having their money in a bank.  A rating of 100 would be the kind of person who would take their entire retirement fund, all $500,000 or a million or whatever it is, and maybe even borrow money, and go to Las Vegas and put it all on one number on a roulette wheel.  Me, I scored a 55, which means that I am in the risk tolerance band of anywhere between 50 and 60.  I am to make a decision as to exactly which number to apply to myself in that range.  What that will mean will be, suppose I choose 60, then that means that Cheryl will create my portfolio so that 60% of all that I have will be invested in a variety of equities, and 40% in a variety of fixed income investments.  Fixed income investments are those that pay a definite amount, such as 2.5% percent a year (or decades ago, 10% a year), whereas equities can grow in value (or diminish), the typical stock performance of going up or going down, fluctuating the whole time based on market forces and so on.  I think we all know about that.

There’s way more to it than that, though, and that is Cheryl’s software has all the performance histories of types of investments from 1970 onward.  I liked the use of that particular date (which is scientifically based, I am guessing based on that being the year that Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard and cycles started to change dramatically; another type of benchmark might happen to be when the Federal Reserve system was begun), but I like that date of 1970 because that was the year I graduated and suddenly felt that I had stepped out into the real adult world, which meant I was no longer in college and supported by my parents.  It was from 1970 and on when I more or less now had to be earning money to live on.

That wasn’t the beginning of my getting a job or earning money—I had been doing that since I was 17, at first having a “taking your trash to dump” in my pick-up truck service, for which there was an immense demand in the neighborhood where I lived, and I really gave them their money’s worth by filling the bed of that truck sky high with stuff.  One summer, I was paid by my parents to paint our house (and boy were they demanding professional quality…and go it), but they were also cool about it and allowed my girlfriend, Becky, to come be with me while I painted.  I got so tan in the sun that summer that I can hardly believe it (I know Becky liked the shirtless view; ah, how nice to be teenager) and apparently I worked much better (and quicker) when I had someone wonderful like Becky to talk and joke and sing, etc., with. Her presence wasn’t a distraction but an energizer.

While in college, I got a job working in the dishwasher area of the dorm, and my friend, Jim (mentioned above) worked by my side.  He was stationed at the window where the students would put their finished trays and dishes.  Jim would scrape off in the garbage the left over food and hand each plate to me, where I would give them a good rinse and hand them to the guy on my left who would put them into the conveyor belt of the dishwashing machine.  It was noisy enough in there that Jim and I could hear each other, but nobody else could hear us, so we had wonderful conversations and hilarious jokes (he could choke you with laughter) and sing songs and dream our future lives.  On Sundays, the dorm dining room was closed, so I worked in the snack bar cooked hamburgers and hot dogs, serving chili, frying French fries, and whipping up milkshakes.  So I already had my so-called “McDonald’s” job when I was in college.  I loved all this, because it was filling my pockets with money and it was all mine to do whatever I wanted to with it.  That money was total gravy, not like once you are out of college and now you have to make a living.

So, Cheryl matches the historical investment performances with her client’s risk profiles and comes up via a multivariate analysis what investment vehicles would get the most money based on a client’s tolerance for the risk of getting that level of growth. 

So having that conference got me feeling a whole lot better yesterday!

That evening, I was going out with a friend I’ve known since high school, Ted, to see at the Lemmle Movie Center in Santa Monica a movie of the recent London play of The King and I.  I actually had never seen the Deborah Kerr, Yule Brenner movie, so this story was new for me.  And it was glorious.  Never before had I seen such a beautifully put together film of what was really being performed on stage.

It’s interesting, because I am currently studying a book written by a movie maker named Steve Stockman, entitled How To Shoot Video That Doesn’t Suck”, and Steven Pressfield, who wrote the The Legend of Bagger Vance, a book and then subsequent movie that made me wish I had taken up golf, said Stockman’s book was “like two years of film school in 248 pages”.  One thing Steve Stockman stresses (and stresses and stresses and stresses) is that you plan your video!   Don’t be like the goofball man who goes to an elementary school concert and stands there the whole time and simply videos the whole chorus by going back and forth from one end of the stage to the other, back and forth over and over again, not even thinking to focus in on his daughter.  Or, what I definitely am guilty of, don’t just randomly video things you see while on vacation trips and expect strangers, or even friends, to sit down and watch more than four seconds of that very boring material.  I sort of get the idea from him (so far) that “vacation videos” are the worst, and yet I somehow expect to make money from posting YouTube videos on just that kind of video.  Well, some amazing people are making tons of money doing just that, and there are several of them whose videos I watch every day as do tens of thousands of other people, so there is still some hope.

So watching that London Palladium film of the play of The King and I was clearly film utterly planned out, perfectly.  Clearly, the filmmakers had to watch that play many times in order to do such a great job.  They couldn’t possibly just arrive one day and figure they could sit down and film that.  You just know that it would be absolutely horrible.  They would have to know when they needed to do wide shots and when they needed to zero in on one particular performer, “et cetera et cetera et cetera”, so they wouldn’t miss anything that would be essential to catch.  Otherwise, they would always be getting to the good scenes after they happened, not before.

I imagine that everybody reading this has already seen the movie of the King and I, but I was like what I think of (affectionately) as “the country bumpkin”, what I often do like to be, which is a sort of “hey, maw, would you look at that!” feeling I get which lets me be flabbergasted by something really wonderful that so many others are already bored with by now.  Kind of like, “Yeah, we actually do have automobiles, now, people just don’t get around with a horse and buggy any more.”  “Well golly!”  Okay, admit it, if you, are sometimes one of those bumpkins, reflect upon how great it is to experience something wonderful for the first time.

So, the singing…people don’t seem to sing like this anymore.  How beautiful that was.  And it was enlightening to know so much of the music, but to have had no idea that this was where it came from. Even a more obscure song (that I hadn’t heard in about forty years), “My Lord and Master”, but also better known songs, such as “Hello, Young Lovers” and “I Have Dreamed”, I didn’t know they were from The King and I. 

There were so many wonderful songs, and I kept thinking to myself, Well, yeah, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and you like Stephen Sondheim so much, you know Oscar Hammerstein was Sondheim’s mentor.  Okay, I am so glad that Ted is way more sophisticated than I am, it was his idea that we go see this, I doubt I would have on my own.

The song I actually liked the best was “Getting to Know You” and I swear that if I were a teacher, I would sometime in the first trimester sing this song with the students and have them learn it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTvnGaZRpj8  I remember when I was in elementary school, all the teachers sang (remember the little note or tone whistle thing, whatever that was called) whether they considered themselves to be good signers or not.  The point is to do it and have fun with it, you don’t have to be Barbra Streisand or Frank Sinatra.

So, the play was great, but also was the dinner we had before hand.  We chose a Thai restaurant, Thai Dishes on Broadway, only a couple of blocks away from the Laemmle.  I really loved it.  They had a nice outdoor patio, but we ate inside.  The service was excellent.  The waitress came up to ask us for what we wanted to drink but first saying that they had something new, “Ice milk green tea”.  I have lately been reading how beneficial green tea actually is (to the extent that people are recommended to drink a cup of it at all three daily meals), so I decided to have that.  I said to the waitress that I normally would order a Thai iced tea, and she explained that this was like that but with green tea.  It was out of this word delicious, surprisingly so.  Up to now, I had felt that green tea didn’t really have any kind of a taste, but wow, something about that combination with the milk absolutely ramped the green tea taste up to utter fresh goodness.  So that was truly a hit with me.

To eat, I had a yellow curry (chicken, carrots, onions, and potatoes in a yellow curry sauce) along with white rice, and the curry dish came in a heated bowl.  Again, a total winner, I kept thinking about how amazingly delicious it was.  Ted had some complicated-looking bowl full of various kinds of seafood and vegetables, which was a lot of food, but he certainly ate it all.  After we finished eating, we still had half an hour before time to go to the theater, so I asked the waitress if we could stay a bit and she said, “Of course”, so I ordered a coffee drink but I can’t say what it was called…it seemed to be like a chai tea but with coffee instead of tea, and had a sense of chocolate involved.  Anyway, it was yet another winner.  I walked out of that restaurant really happy and planning on going back there again very soon.

As we walked to the theater, I saw a couple of other restaurants that I would also like to try out.  I may be making my way down to Santa Monica quite a bit more.  Ted suggests taking the Metro to get there, but that would be about a two-hour one way trip from Tarzana.  He likes to avoid paying the high price to park in Santa Monica.  To get to this movie theater, he parked at the Metro station at Bundy and Olympic for $3.00 and took the train down to the last stop in Santa Monica.  I had parked in the city garage right across the street from the Laemmle and since the movie was three hours long and we had met down there two hours ahead so that we could have a leisurely dinner, we were there a total of five hours and that cost me $14.00 to park.  Oh well, it is all very convenient, though, and I like how when you come down the elevator and get out to the street, there is a crosswalk right there in the middle of the street takes you right to the Laemmle.

Oh, to to ad the magic of that evening, after I crossed on that crosswalk, who should I see waiting there at the theater but a man I hadn’t seen for 20 years, a man whom I had met doing extra work on movies and television, and who lived in the same apartment building in Hollywood where I lived before I moved to Tarzana.  He was there to see a movie that was starting in a few minutes, so we couldn’t visit with each other very long.  But I take those kinds of chance meetings to be “good omens” of some kind.

One more thing before I post this blog entry.  I said that I had been doing more cooking for myself instead of eating out.  For years, I had been trying so many various diets, none of which seemed to really work all that well.  What worked best was fasting for seven days with only water…but then the weight still quickly came back on afterward.  The eating out was not due to laziness, but because nothing I cooked really tasted very good due to all these diets with what you can eat and what you can’t, which mostly is all you want of what you don’t really care for (or get sick of) and nothing of what you really like.  So I would go out to eat just to actually eat something that I wanted and that tasted good.

But now that I am retired and really wanting to eat more at home, that has made me take off the shelf some of my cook books and do a different kind of “reset”…why not eat things that I want to and actually taste good, but just greatly reduced portions.  Usually the way this has worked out is that I end up having only one, and sometimes two, meals in a day, which ends up being a kind of modified fast by default, and all the food tastes really good.  I don’t yet really know how well this will work “diet wise”, but it sure does make me happy and that seems to be much more important at the time being.

I have been playing around with a marvelous cookbook set that is the Women’s Day Encyclopedia of Cooking, in 12 volumes, 2,000 pages, 1,500 colored illustrations, 8,500 recipes!  Printed in 1966, the year I graduated from high school and then started college.  I don’t know if that had been my mother’s, or one of my Uncle Ham’s (I have books from both of their collections).  Both of them were wonderful cooks.  I will always crave my mother’s cooking, as well as the cooking of both of my grandmothers.  In the latter years of his life, my Uncle Ham would write about cooking for various European magazines.  He would devise menus for various parties and occasions and then make gorgeous photographs of the dishes in amazing settings, such as an Italian feast photographed in a lay out on the Rialto Bridge in Venice with the Grand Canal flowing underneath.

So with this book series, when they say encyclopedia, they mean it.  It isn’t just a book of recipes, but it teaches about food like you just can’t believe, but also includes poetry and essays about food.  Where I will be going Christmas, while it isn’t a pot luck, they do like if you bring a dish.  So I looked up in the encyclopedia under the entry “Christmas” to see what I might want to make.  I’m not sure, yet, but I got entranced by some of the essays regarding food and the Christmas season.

One woman, named Jean Hersey, I don’t know if she was a famous writer back in 1966, or a person who worked on the staff of Women’s Day, wrote an essay entitled, “Twelve Days Before Christmas” which was about how every year she makes a loaf of bread every day of the twelve days before Christmas.  Some of the loaves she and her family will eat, others they will give to visitors during the Holiday season.  And can she make the idea of baking bread appealing!  Now, I have a bread-making machine, that I like to use (so easy!), and I can make bread that is healthy because I can choose the ingredients, but of course Jean Hersey would make her twelve days of bread by hand.  I am tempted to make at least one loaf of bread her way.  Here’s something that she wrote:  There is something so solidly satisfying to me about making bread. Is it perhaps, because, after all, yeast is a plant and it is always good to feel any plant grow in your hands?

Or this, The baking time is when the fragrance reaches its peak of delight.  Ask a friend over for tea just to sit there beside your glowing fire, with the bread baking.  Simple pleasure, but oh so delightful.  I can understand now how I so often feel that I have completely missed the feeling of a particular holiday.  One has to really get into it in whatever way strikes you.  This woman, essentially anonymous writer who nevertheless used her skill that inspires a person 52 years in the future, puts a whole different perspective on the meaning and power of a life.  It’s the depths of the nows that matter.  One of the things that I am learning from retirement is to stop the habit of rushing forward, and instead, experiencing each particular moment as being the whole thing.  It certainly gets rid of the complaining, moaning, and fearing.

I swear, one could even be hanging off a cliff 2,000 feet above a rocky gorge, holding onto a tree root for dear life, scared to death and thinking that in a few moments you will be falling to your death and you just can’t hold on any longer, when suddenly you will notice the awesomeness of your surroundings and be amazed that you are there to witness such spectacular beauty.  I will bet that at the very next moment, you will happen to see a previously undetected toehold that is enough for you to use to get yourself back up to the safety of the ledge above you.  That’s not a miracle, it’s that the answer is right there right in front of your nose, if only you will stop long enough to be able to see it.

If It Isn't Saturday, Then It Must Be Sunday!

Don't get mad at me, but one of the aspects of retirement (that is entirely understandable) is that I keep thinking it is Saturday.  And then when I realize that it isn't, the next day I am sure it is Sunday.  And sure, it is wonderfully nice that every day can feel like a weekend, because it mostly is like a weekend, at least, emotionally, and also how nice it is to be able to do weekend things on a week-day, such as take my car in for the service that was due on it like I did last Monday, instead of having to reserve ahead for a Saturday. I was able to make an appointment for 7:00 AM, when they opened, and even though it was a more "major" check-up than a routine oil and filter change, the dealership was not so packed and jammed like they would be on a Saturday and therefore I was out of there in an hour instead of needing to ride the shuttle home for that day.  (My service writer told me that would be the case, so I went to have breakfast at the restaurant across the street and hardly had to wait in the waiting room at all.)

I have also realized that can I go to movies at a matinee and receive a discount even on top of the senior discount, which I will be taking advantage of tomorrow when I go see the documentary Quincy, about one of my favorite musicians, Quincy Jones.  It's only playing at one Laemmle theater, all the way over to 2nd Street in Santa Monica, a normally so-heavily-trafficked distance that I rarely would choose to go there after work.  But in the afternoon, not much a problem.

Doctor's visits are a snap, too (unfortunately, I am needing those), because I don't have to wait for the next "first thing in the morning" visits which I would always want as the most time-efficient way of handling those visits on a working day.

However, peculiarly, I haven't seen any advantage to grocery shopping; the stores just seem to be crowded all the time no matter when I go.  And the truth be told, in most ways it seems in Los Angeles, there are just so many people who seemingly never work at all.  I used to marvel, for example, at all the people I would see walking their dogs as I crept along in my daily morning commute.  It makes me think of Claudio and Arianna, my friends from Italy whom I met when I was in Fakarava, who stopped in Los Angeles for a couple of days on their way back home from another French Polynesian island that they had gone to after I had fun with them for five days in Fakarava.  I had offered to give them a tour of Los Angeles when they came if they would like and sure enough, they called me and took me up on my offer and they really loved Los Angeles, so it had been hugely fun to take them around to everything they wanted to see.

But one of their comments was, "Doesn't anybody here work?" because, as I could see through their eyes, everywhere we went, there were hordes of people out and about, and this was on a week day (I, myself, was on my vacation).  Beyond the people walking dogs, the beaches were packed, Venice was loaded with tricksters and crowded stalls, the sidewalks always were filled with people (but to Arianna's happiness, Hollywood Boulevard had a movie premier in front of the Chinese Theater so she could see some celebrities walk the red carpet), and traffic everywhere was very heavy.  I had chosen for us to go to Paradise Cove in Malibu to sit at tables on the sand and have drinks and lunch, and they were so surprised when we were presented a "buzzing lobster" to let us know when a table would be ready, that the wait for a table could be up to an hour.  Claudio said, "A special technology just to let us know when there is a vacant table on a weekday afternoon?"  They could hardly believe it!  (Also, they could hardly believe that the houses in Bel Air really were houses, but I think I finally convinced them!  "Yes, Claudio, even that one!")

We got some drinks to take to the sand while we waited for the lobster to vibrate, but then I saw a parent from the school where I work and his two little girls, enjoying the beach.  I stopped to speak to them and introduce my friends from Italy and I complained about the long wait, when the man said, "Here, take our lobster, we gave up waiting and decided to get lunch from the snack bar, instead!"  How wonderfully generous!  Almost as soon as he gave the lobster to me, it began to vibrate, so we got to get a table right away after all, plus I got to prove once again the adage that one will always run into our school's parents, no matter where in the world you go!

But, back to my confusion about days, one of the fall-outs of this always thinking that it is a weekend is that I find myself craving to go out for a weekend breakfast, which had more or less been a normal habit of mine for years, but which would not be so good to do every single day.  And now, coming along with that, is a sense of nostalgia for formerly beloved breakfast places that are no longer around.

One of them, whose name I sadly can't remember at the moment, was a place I went to for years and years, and not only for breakfast, but other meals as well.  A friend of mine who I did extra work in films with, and had been in a play with, even took me to this place to celebrate my birthday, and beyond the specialness of that, a man sitting at a nearby booth had overheard that it was my birthday and before he left, he handed me a Happy Birthday card in which he had written something extremely nice.  How amazing is that--I wondered what does he do, go around with birthday cards in is pocket and if he sees somebody who is having a birthday, he whips out a card and writes wonderful wishes to give them?  That seems like a really great idea, actually, especially when you go out to eat, there often is a table there where somebody is having their birthday celebrated.  How cool is it to not only sing along and clap with the well-wishers, but to even provide a birthday card!

A couple of years ago, I had gone to The Mission Inn (one of my all-time favorite hotels) in Riverside   as a quick and easy get-way which happened to be the weekend of my birthday.  For dinner, I chose to eat at Duane's, their marvelous steakhouse.  I overheard a man sitting near me say to his wife, "This is where I would like to celebrate my birthday," which led me to say to them, "Good idea; today is my birthday!" so they were nice and said, "Oh, Happy Birthday!" and gave me their fond good wishes, which I enjoyed.  Well, then later, after I had finished my wonderful dinner, the waitress brought me this, which was a surprise that made me very happy:

I said, "How did you know?" and she said, "I heard you tell the couple near you that it was your birthday, so...!"  So if you are like me and actually like your birthday, speak up!  I am shameless in this regard....

Back to the restaurant where the man had given me the birthday card, I happened to go there to have breakfast one weekend, and to my shock it was closed for good.  What?  At that time, I used to get my hair cut by a barber whose shop was across the street from the shopping mall where that restaurant was, so I asked him if he had any idea why that place was now closed. I told him that I had eaten there regularly for years and it was always very popular.  By then, I knew the name of every waiter and waitress and many of them knew my name.  There was a steady crowd of diners (like me) who liked to have breakfast out there on their covered patio.  (I had been semi-amused by a sign that they had posted out there.  Inside the restaurant, there were normal booths and sturdy wooden chairs around tables, but outside the chairs were those white plastic molded outdoor chairs.  The sign said, "Maximum capacity of chairs is 225 pounds.  If you weigh more than this, ask the waiter to bring you a heavy-duty chair."  The nerve!  I guess maybe somebody did happen to sit down and collapse one of those chairs, I don't know, but in my view that really wasn't a sign to have posted--just get some sturdier chairs!)

Anyway, I couldn't believe such a long-term and popular restaurant like this would suddenly go broke.  But the barber said it had nothing to do with the success or failure of the restaurant, but that the owner of the land was beginning a process of evicting tenant after tenant once their lease was up, because he wanted to do something else with that property that he thought would bring in more profits.  What happened to be there on that land (that I remember) was this restaurant, a Trader Joe's market (the only one I have ever been in), an Indian restaurant, a Mexican take-out, an aquarium shop, and a shop renting and selling Russian videos.  There might have been other stores, but that is what I remember...plus a large and very convenient parking lot.  Yeah, probably not the most profitable mix of stores, but this was an aspect of having a business that I hadn't thought much about. The owners of the land have an ancillary stake in your operation as well as you have an ancillary stake in theirs, so it is hoped that each have a mutual success.  If it doesn't happen, both are in trouble.

I used to have an auto mechanic who was forced to leave his leased repair shop because the owner of the land raised the rents way too high for him with the next lease renewal.  My mechanic felt that the land owner was greedy and would regret that decision.  All I know is that space still has an auto repair shop in it, just another one, whereas my mechanic ended up moving four different times after that, having a lot of trouble making a go of his enterprise and that is too bad, because he was an excellent mechanic.

Yesterday, I suddenly wondered what "awesome" thing had finally taken the place of the restaurant I had liked.  I "toured Santa Monica Boulevard" via Google Maps, but could not figure out exactly where that location was, as the area had undergone quite a bit of changes in the last decade or so.  I could no longer recognize much of that area, at least, from seeing via Google Maps.  I realized that it required to actually there in person.

So much of all that was when I lived in Hollywood, but when I moved to Tarzana, Hollywood was no longer my neighborhood so I have rarely gone back there since.  But now with this sense of nostalgia for many of those places that I enjoyed in the past, I decided to have breakfast at The House of Pies on the corner of Franklin and Vermont (when I lived in Hollywood, I lived on Franklin), which, I was glad to see, is still in business.  I even did my "bad thing" of eating the same breakfast that I used to have when I lived in the area, what in those days they called "The Western Breakfast", but what they now call "The Ultimate Breakfast Combo":  two eggs, two sausages, two slices of bacon, ham, hash browns, two slices of toast, and three pancakes (or a Belgian waffle).  Carbs carbs carbs, it's so wonderfully negatively indulgent that it is a slap in my keto face--hash browns and two slices of toast and three pancakes (or Belgian waffle) PLUS all the fats and protein of sausages, bacon, and ham--I said to the waitress, "That certainly covers all the bases!"  I ate outside on their patio, as I always did back then, and really enjoyed it.  I was kind of worried that I couldn't finish all that food, which if you order something like that, you have to eat it all or you are stupid...well, I needn't have worried about that, I certainly did finish it all and also had three cups of coffee and completely drank the very large glass of water that she brought me.  Okay, so I can fast tomorrow.

I noticed that there is still in the area a BOOK STORE, so hooray for them.  Also, catty-corner on the street is still a Masonic lodge and I realized that I have certainly heard of Masons that their lodges, for heaven's sake, yet all these years I never actually knew just what they did.  So that's another thing good about retirement, you can actually make the time to learn about things that you somehow managed to miss previously, if you want to, that is.

After my great nostalgic breakfast, I made my way to Santa Monica Boulevard to go see what had happened with that poor old strip mall that had the restaurant and the Trader Joe's.  And what I found knocked my socks right off.  The owner thought he wasn't getting enough profit!  Well I guess so--this guy had foresight or ambition far beyond anything I ever could have imagined.

Remember what was there before, nothing above a single story--three places to eat, a Trader Joe's, an aquarium shop, and a video store...and a wonderful large parking lot.  Oh, and what was (had been) across the street (just to give you a reference) was a barber shop, an acting studio, and a boxing gym.

What is there now, here is the front view (see it covers that whole block):

and here is one of the side views:

These are the Avalon Apartments, Hollywood, which essentially take up an entire block and cover almost every square inch of the original land, and is six stories high.  It still does have a Trader Joe's!

Think of how much more each square foot of that land is earning now compared with what it was earning before.  It's understandable, but also scary when you contemplate these kinds of differences.  I saw a lot of that on today's little trip through my old stomping grounds, quite a few new immense apartment and condo complexes, as well as more large hotels.  I, myself, would not want to live right on a very busy street like Santa Monica Boulevard or Sunset Boulevard, but apparently (some) people really do like that.  That is sort of "New Yorking" Los Angeles.  Also making it way more densely crowded.  I saw that was so much easier to get around in the Valley.

The most dramatic change of land use that ever touched me happened in North Miami Beach (they call it Sunny Isles Beach).  I had stayed in a cute little Days Inn there (three stories high), right on the beach (not across the street), had a nice big swimming pool (I really enjoy going back and forth between the ocean and a fresh water swimming pool), a convenient parking lot, and my room had a useful balcony with outdoor furniture on it (I could eat out there) and had a front and center ocean view.  There was a man who had a bar set up on the sand right there at the hotel, very convenient, and the people sitting there drinking (whom I joined) were very friendly.  This was as affordable as it could get and it had all I really needed.  It was a nice family-friendly motel in a very good location for enjoying the sand and warm ocean water.  It was a trip I would be happy to repeat, and, in fact, planned to a couple of years later, but was having some trouble finding the listing for the Days Inn of Sunny Isles.  The Days Inn website kept leading me to another Days Inn in a different location.  I finally checked out some other websites and learned that Donald Trump (ha ha!) had bought up that hotel plus the ones on either side of it, all of which were similar in being small affordable family-friendly beach hotels.  The more expensive beach hotels were in Miami Beach and probably pretty much out of reach for quite a lot of people.  But, like that strip mall in Hollywood that had the restaurant that I liked, somebody knew that that land underneath was useful for something much, much, much more profitable.

This photo from several years ago still blows me away:

This photo is what was being built on the land that had once had those hotels that Trump had bought. Huge difference from what was there before.  That is progress, but it still does make me sad, since I had enjoyed my trip and my stay there and would not be able to repeat that experience.  In other words, I was being pushed out by greater money interests.  On that same trip, the hotel where I stayed in Key West was also on the water, and it, too, was bought up and torn down so that something much more expensive could go there in its place.

Here's something ironic:  I was on a flight to Maui that I saw the movie War Dogs, starring Jonah Hill.  It was a story about two Miami guys mucking around not making very much money--one of them was an outcall masseur--and the other one had his brain tuned on "easy success ideas" a bit too strongly.  They got involved with an armaments deal in Iraq that was worth something like three hundred million dollars, and well, oh boy do they get in trouble, not only with some exceedingly dangerous characters, but also the federal government, but meanwhile, it was a phenomenal ride of financial success beyond anything they had dreamed.

The masseur guy and his wife bought an amazingly beautiful condo high up in a skyscraper on the beach somewhere in Miami with multi-story glass windows and infinite ocean views and many phenomenal, top of the line features.  I am not exactly sure what it was that clued me in (but I do have an eye and a memory for certain details), I had wondered where there actually was such a place like that to live and ultimately I discovered where or what it was.  I am pretty sure that where they filmed this condo was the "Porsche Design Tower"--the main unusual feature of the Porsche Design Tower (despite everything else it has going for it) is that there are two automobile parking spaces at the level of each and every condo no matter where you live in this 60 story building.  This also makes me think of a thrilling chase and fight scene inside a mechanical multi-level parking garage in the movie Mission Impossible 4, which is in my favorite movie series.

Having a condo unit like the Porsche Design Tower, which is so futuristic in its design and lifestyle, is something to lust after that you can't help but admire its existence whether or not you as an individual are able to have such a thing or not.  I don't envy or hate people who can have this or things like this and other things; I am just glad that that such things do exist.  The irony is that the Porsche Design Tower was one of the buildings that took the place of the Days Inn that I had enjoyed.    I was pushed out by greater money interests, yet I admire what those greater money interest bought in.

TO LOVE A PLANE

The popular Caribbean island of Sint Maartin is known for what might be considered a peculiar thing that to me is amazing and also hilarious.  Due to the terrain of their convoluted shaped island, their international airport is squeezed in between Maho Beach and Simpson Bay Lagoon--think of that as being the "liquid" version of being between a rock and a hard place.   When planes come in for a landing, they practically touch down on the beach, with only a small two-lane road and a chain-link fence between the beach and the runway.  I, myself, love to see airplanes coming in for a landing wherever they do, but rarely is that view seen with such intimacy as on Sint Maartin.

This island is also unique in that it is split between a Dutch side and and a French side, so sometimes the name is spelled "Sint Maartin" (Dutch) and other times "Saint-Martin" (French).  The island operates under two different flags.  Neither portion is a sovereign nation.  Sint Maartin, the Dutch side, is a constituent of the Kingdom of the Netherlands (notice that the Netherlands has a King), and the French side is described as an "overseas collectivity of France", like the islands of French Polynesia (where Tahiti is, for example).  I have ever actually been to the Netherlands (in Europe), but having now been to Sint Maartin, I have actually been to the Netherlands, just as if I had never been to the mainland of the United States, but had been to Hawaii, I nevertheless would have been to the United States.

The Kingdom of the Netherlands has other islands in the Caribbean such as the "ABC" islands, Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao--pronounced like "Kurasao", and the "SSS" islands, Saba, St. Eustatius, and the afore-mentioned Sint Maartin.  I think from the point of view of tourists, Sint Maartin (and Saint-Martin) is a place of amazingly gorgeous beaches, white sand, hugely friendly people, and a delicious choice of cuisines.  Perhaps for the residents of the island, the political make-up of the island is less than ideal, with maybe sometimes squabbling between the two nationalities (I don't know), but on the official tour that I took of the island as part of the cruise I want on last spring break, we were told that both sides operate in reasonable harmony and the people there are proud of that.

But I am not here to talk about the governmental aspect of Sint Maartin, but to concentrate strictly on the aspect of travel to this beautiful island, which perhaps is of special importance to an island whose economy is dependent upon tourism.

On YouTube, there are a great many videos showing the thrilling airplane landings at the Princess Juliana International Airport.  Here is a clip from one that shows what I am talking about:

That beach, called Maho Beach, is a very popular beach, with white sand, and very beautiful blue water, and I am sure that part of the appeal are these insane airplane landings and also the jet blasts that occurs when the planes are taking off. People line up along the chain-link fence right before take-offs, and attempt the challenge the blasts that come out of the jet engines and hold on for dear life in the blast until they can't bear it.  One woman was killed recently, by losing her grip on the fence and the air blast threw her backward and she smashed her head on a curb.  The experience is somewhat different for the people waiting on the beach.  The sand gets blown against them and it feels like being attacked by hornets.  Apparently if you go out into the water you are beyond the affects of the jet blast.

Here in the U.S., I actually like to go to Dockweiler beach (that is, when I go to any beach around here at all), which has an allure in that it has is plenty of free parking, and the other allure is all the planes overhead coming into a landing at LAX.  For some reason, I really like to see that.

When I went to Sint Maarten, I especially wanted to see the crazy plane landings overhead at the beach, as watching YouTube videos of those shockingly close landings makes me laugh and laugh--it's something that is so cool but also ridiculous, so it makes me laugh.  (However, flying to Sint Maartin isn't ridiculous, as it is a great place to go...although I went their via cruise ship.)

The city tour that I had selected mentioned that we would be taken to see the famous Maho Beach airplane landings, and indeed, the tour bus did park in a parking lot in the area and all the passengers walked over to the Sunset Bar and Grill (a very jumping outdoor place with a DJ) where we were given a free rum drink (paid for by the tour company) and had the perfect vantage point of the beach and airport.

The tour guide said that we could enjoy the area for about a half hour, but needed to be back on the bus by 3:00 PM when the tour would resume.  I enjoyed my rum drink and watched eagerly for the arrival of a large jet.  After a while, a little Cessna came in for a landing, but it was hard to generate much excitement over that.  I said to a woman standing next to me who had come in on a different cruise ship and was also waiting to see a huge jet come in, that the little Cessna just didn't do it for me, I wonder how long it would be before we'd see something really spectacular.  She knew the answer, 3:00 PM.  She said there was directory at the bar that showed the times of all the landings.  Even though I was right there and ready to see a large plane come in for a landing, I would have to miss it because our tour guide happened to want us back on the bus at the exact time a big plane was due.  I wondered why he wouldn't have consulted that schedule himself and made sure that we would be able to actually see a big jet landing?   I don't give that particular tour a lot of brownie points due to that little failure.

Back on the ship, I was envious of the people who had skipped the organized tours and gotten their own taxis and explored the island, enjoyed the beaches, and yes, did battle with the overhead jets and the departing planes' jet blasts on their own.  Their kids would chime in "it was a blast" even though they endured the hornet sting affect of the jet engine blasts.

What had long been the iconic flight to Sint Maartin is the Royal Dutch Airline's blue-painted Boeing 747 jumbo jets, an airline otherwise known as KLM, Koninklijke Luhtvaart Maatschappij (that's harder to write than Japanese), which really means "Royal" (you might see "kingly" in that word "koninklijke") "Aviation" "Society", "society" as used in some European languages means "company", or if a corporation (the liabilities of the officers are limited to the assets of the corporation and not their personal holdings) is usually called an "anonymous society".

Some time ago, KLM and Air France merged, which I felt was an interesting echo of Sint Maartin/Saint-Martin itself, which is a sort of merger between the Dutch and the French.

It's a nine to eleven hour air flight from Amsterdam to Sint Marten, as shown on this Google map:

A difficulty involved with this flight is the return from St. Maartin to Amsterdam.  It takes quite a lot of fuel and these jumbo jets are huge and filled with an immense amount of passengers, and with St. Maartin's short runway, the quantity of the fuel it takes to go back to Amsterdam is too heavy for the plane to take off (and when you watch the take-offs, you do worry whether or not the plane could make it), so what they had been doing have been carrying a lesser amount of fuel so that they could take off, and they would then fly to another Netherland tropical destination,  Curaçao, which apparently did not have this issue of a sort runway, to fill up with the requisite quantity fuel to get back to Amsterdam.

This wasn't necessarily a bad way to do it, in that many from Amsterdam were going to Curaçao anyway, so that longer trip included a stop at Sint Martin.  But for those whose destination was St. Maartin to Amsterdam, they had to have a flight that was two to three hours longer than if there were on a flight directly back to Amsterdam:

So ultimately, it was determined to use newer design, smaller plains for these flights and "retire" from that route the iconic jumbo 747 jets that had provided such great service for so long...this decision was yet another "end of an era".

So what I am going to show you now are two videos of the final KLM Boeing 747 flight to Sint Martin, and then back out again on its way to Curaçao.  It is fascinating to me to have something like this celebrated or understood at all, and yet I would say that for an island that has an intimate relationship with tourism, they would also have such an intimate relationship with a historically important airplane.

First is a video showing the crowd on Maho Beach excitedly waiting for this "final arrival" of the KLM 747 at Princess Juliana International Airport.  At first the plane is seen over to the left but it has to complete a circling around in order to get into the proper position for the careful landing, so there is a period in there where it is all about waiting (you can enjoy the beautiful blue of the wonderful ocean there), but then the crowd is thrilled when the plane arrives for its final touchdown at Juliana.  I love the excitement of the crowd:

Link to 747 Arrival

This second video shows the landing and then the subsequent emotional take-off for the historically final flight from Sint Martin to Curaçao.  I am personally blown away by how exquisitely beautiful, graceful, and long that plane is, and the blue paint scheme can hardly be beat.  I've seen these plans  before, of course, many times, but somehow you never really get to see them this clearly when you are a passenger, seeing the plane at an angle from a waiting room window, or entering them from the gangway straight off the terminal gate.  I also never fully appreciated how many windows there are, and they go all the way up to the plane's nose.  I never was in the upper deck, and that was where the pilots were, too.

That water spray that the plane goes through as it taxis to the runway, at first I thought maybe they were "washing" the plane, but then I decided it was a respectful salute in honor of the plane's long and valuable service.  I enjoy hearing the conversation of between the pilot and the men in the tower, seeing the pilots wave from the windshield and the Bye Bye sign in the cockpit window. The pilots express their appreciation to the crowed waiting on the sand, and the man in the tower tells the pilots that they will be missed.  There is the take-off with the huge blast of air and the people at the fence and on the beach attempt to hang on.  There is such a sense of nostalgia as the plane lifts off and curves away from the island, the very last one of its so many trips there to Sint Maarten.

Link to Tower and Pilot Conversations Arrival and Departure

I found it all to be very touching and emotional, and worthwhile to experience and appreciate.

Overboard

Suddenly, after more than a year or so, I have begun to write entries for this blog again, starting with this one.  Especially due to my resigning from my position at Curtis School, several people have told me that they wished I had a blog, and since I already had one, the solution was to go back to writing in it, and I have accepted that that is a good idea!   I am thankful and pleased that they would like to keep in touch, as I would them, and in a way, this might be keeping in touch in a deeper way than the stolen moments of camaraderie made during normal working days.

As I have been saying goodbye, I have had the feeling that I may actually be seeing some people more, now (meaning, that moving away from a frequent connection with people you know from your workplace and instead coming closer to them in an outside setting, it is like "travel"), similar to how in your normal routine of living in a city (because you feel you can do this at any time), you never get around to enjoying some of the aspects of your own city, such as going to the museums, or, in my case here in Los Angeles, going to the beach.  And isn't going to the beach one of the reasons we live here (along with the weather, and the high-paying job possibilities)?  I don't think I have been to the beach here for about five years!  My "beaching" has been in Maui, the Exuma Keys of the Bahamas, the Amalfi Coast in Italy and several amazingly gorgeous beaches in Sardinia, some hidden beaches in the island mazes of Palau, and most exposed to water on both sides, my vacation by the lagoon of Fakarava, a coral atoll in the Tuamotos of French Polynesia.  In fact the only recent time I have been in the ocean "here" was in the water at one of the Channel Islands across from Ventura, which required taking a boat to get over there.  As far as beaches go, I may as well be living in Kansas if all the beaches I go to I travel to!

Peculiarly, though, on this last trip that I took, a week-long Caribbean Cruise out of Miami to Nassau, Puerto Rico, and St. Maartin, I didn't actually get into the water at any beach on an excursion (I opted for city tours, instead), but I did swim in each of the three swimming pools that were on board the ship.  My favorite of the ship's three pools (there was a fourth one I didn't count that was off-limits except for extremely VIP passengers) was the adults only pool.  I didn't decide it was the best pool because it didn't have children; happy children enjoying a pool is an enhancement for me.  For example, when I was in Exuma several years ago and swimming in the hotel's swimming pool, there were always in the water a young brother and sister and their older sister (who, with all her maturity, could have been their mother, but she actually was in high school).  All three of them were extremely appealing, personality wise, and sort of artsy/genius in their demeanor.

Even though it was daytime, the swimming pool light was on all the time and the little boy, who wore a snorkeling mask whenever he would get into the pool, liked to dip under water and look at the lighted pool light and then rise up to announce what color he had seen, as the colors were changeable.  The younger of his sisters informed me that there was a rotation of three colors.  So the boy would slip under water, look at the light, and then pop back up to announce that it was red.  Then he would slide under again, inspect the light and then pop back up to let us know that it was now blue.  Then he went back to red, and then back to blue in his announcements.

After several rounds of this, I said to his little sister, "I thought you said there were three colors, but he only tells us about two."  The girl looked at her brother, who had a marvelous name, but I have now forgotten it, darn it, something like "Mergatroyd", I kid you not, and she said, "Mergatroyd,  tell him what the third color is."

He looked at her for a moment, as if to say, "Are you sure?", as if there were some reason that he should not tell me what the color was, and she nodded that he was to tell me, and then he looked at me and studied my face for a rather long moment as if he were attempting to divine whether or not he could actually reveal to me this precious piece of information.   After a while, he said, "bumble bee."

"Bumble bee?", I responded, "that is the third color, bumble bee, or are you saying that there is a bee under there?"  The boy nodded in affirmation, that's the color, and then sank down under the water to look at the light again, waited long enough for the colors to go through their rotations, and then popped back up and announced, "Yep, it is bumble bee."

The big sister said to me, "Mergatroyd has his own color scheme.  He observes the world with unwavering  accuracy; is completely honest and not given to a need to simplify his observations to conform with the expectations of others."

The next time I was in the pool, I brought along my scuba mask, which had lenses made in my glasses prescription.   The day before, I really couldn't have looked at the pool light myself because without my glasses, things are a blur and would especially be under the water.  I went straight for that underwater light and as I held by breath under water, I saw the red color, that completely turned every facet of the light's lenses into a brilliant and beautiful red.  The entire affect at the moment was one total redness.  Then the light clicked into blue, and it was similar to the red, only this time, every facet of the light's lenses burned a powerful blue light.  Then the color clicked again, but this time, only half of the lenses, every other one, were bathed in a brilliant yellow.  All the other, unlighted ones, seemed to shine out a diamond-like glistening and in the core of the those lenses was a metallic blackness that must have been the electronic components that plugged each facet into the fixture as a whole, which view was overpowered when the lenses were red or blue.

So there as plain as my eyes could make it, was an alteration of yellow and black, interspersed with a gossamer flicker of bumble-bee like wings; there could not possibly have been a different name for that "color" than the name Mergatroyd and given it, "bumble-bee"!  Oh how spectacular, oh Mergatroyd, how I salute you!

On the heels of this discovery of mine, the three children then happened to come out for their swim and the big sister took up her usual tanning spot on the chaise lounge near the water's edge, while the two younger kids slipped into the water.  I showed the big sister my goggles that I was now holding in my hand and said, "I saw the third color, and it was for sure bumble bee!" and she said, "Told ya."  As for Mergatroyd, his having fully gotten the pool light's number, was now deeper under water with his goggles, exploring whatever there was that was going on with the pool drain.

So children can add the spice that enhances the experience for me, but for the parents of children, it would be the adults only pool where finally they can rest, relax, and talk with me if they want, so I found I liked the adult pool the best, not because I wanted "no children", but because parents could enjoy the relief of not having to worry about their children and they were free to socialize with other adults.  So I made several friends in that pool.  The little kids had their own "Jungle" area on an upper deck which was replete with various slides, fountains, showers, and water canons that they could squirt each other with, all under professional shipboard staff supervision.

The problem with the biggest pool of the ship was that the crowd of people would take up nearly every chaise lounge.  I'd always easily find a vacant lounge at the adult's only pool.

There was a third pool, on yet another deck, one that could be indoors if the ceiling over it was closed, or half open, the way they had it when I tried it out.  Since I had gotten a second degree blistering sunburn on my face during the two hours in Miami that I had ridden on the upper deck of the "Big Bus" tour bus without a hat or any kind of sunblock (who knew I needed that, the day was overcast and almost no one else was wearing any kind of protection), I figured I would only use the pool that had a roof over it so that I could avoid even more sun.  But yikes, something about the water in that devil of a pool was like pouring acid into my eyeballs!  I guess maybe they had put in way too much chlorine, or something; whatever it was, I jumped back out of there and immediately went to one of the numerous fresh-water showers dotted all around and soaked my eyeballs better than if I were using an eyewash in a chemistry lab.  Never again did I use that pool, and saw to it that instead I wore my wide-brimmed hat that I bought in Nassau for when I was out in the sun anywhere on that cruise.

But the water that this blog entry is meant to be about is the Caribbean ocean that I would see, and enjoy from the various vantages of the ship.  Gloriously, I had a balcony cabin, the first time I have had that (instead of an "ocean view" cabin).

Speaking of water, I had made the mistake of buying a sparkling water drink package.  I had been avoiding for quite a while prior to the cruise (and still, today) plastic food and drink containers and will no longer drink out of a plastic water bottle unless there is absolutely no other choice. At home I got rid of all my plastic water bottles, using glass only, and for the office, I had only metallic water bottles.  What I am avoiding is the plastic that mimics estrogen and I have read several articles that said all plastic packaging will deposit much unwanted estrogen-mimmics into the bodies of men, and it is even dangerous to women who want estrogen in their bodies, but not too much.

The regular drink packages on this cruise ship were ridiculously expensive.  I'm too lazy at the moment to look up what the actual cost was, but for the unlimited drink package to be a good deal for me, I would have to drink something like 13 alcoholic drinks every single day.  Since I expected to drink maybe no more than two drinks a day, the cheapest option was to just pay full price for the drinks.  What ended up being my normal alcohol consumption was about two and a half drinks per day, which means two drinks one day and three drinks another day. But prior to seeing what my actual drinking quantity was, I figured that I mostly would be drinking water, and in order to avoid getting the plastic, I figured I would drink San Pellegrino, which I had only seen in glass bottles.

Wrong!  All the San Pellegrino they had on this ship was in plastic bottles, the very thing I wanted to avoid.  And as it all evolved, I found myself getting wine at dinner, instead of drinking the San Pellegrino.  And that damned sparkling water drinks package involved about 15 large size San Pellegrino bottles, so that meant two full bottles of sparkling water every day.  I figured I would be drinking water by the gallon like I do at home ("still" water that I purify and store in glass bottles), but somehow on the ship one bottle of sparkling water did for about two days for me, kept cool in the cabin refrigerator.

My table's waiter in the dining room had a remarkable memory, such as he always remembered that the woman sitting at our table wanted to order from the gluten-free menu, so every night he blessedly brought her the gluten free menu.  Me, he remembered as the man who drank the San Pellegrino, so the minute I sat down at the table, he would be over there with a big smile and a fresh new bottle of San Pellegrino, that he insisted on opening for me and then pouring with a flourish as if it were the finest wine, and he also had this little device that would process and then void the San Pellegrino bottle ticket from the drinks ticket booklet.

But then around the third or fourth day on the cruise, our table was given free champagne for each one of us and that did it, from then on, I had a taste for some kind of wine (or champagne) each dinner, which meant that I no longer really needed the San Pellegrino (that I had already paid for) as my dinner beverage.  The next day after the free champagne (clever trick, wasn't it--whetting our addiction like that!), the waiter brought my bottle of San Pellegrino (and his hand was out for the little ticket to void in his device), when I said, "No, I will have some wine tonight, instead, so no thank you for the bottled water this time."  Well, his understanding of English was not up to the standard of his memory...he thoroughly new me as the San Pellegrino man, and my saying, "No thank you, I don't want it tonight, you can take it away," or any other variation on that theme did not stop the opening of the bottle with a flourish and then his elegantly pouring it into my glass.  Okay, so the San Pellegrino is clearly an unchangeable "definite" and "always" in this waiter's routine with me.  And I swear, that MSC Cruise Ship (and truly I did and do very much LOVE it, so I am not really complaining) could have suddenly turned into a Disney Cruise Ship as far as I was concerned, and my waiter could have put on a Mickey Mouse robe with stars and galaxies emblazoned on it and donned the Sorceror's black and white pointed hat and commanded a platoon of enchanted broomsticks, because it got so that he was like "da dum dumpiti dumpti dumb de dumb dumpiti dumb de dumb" with that San Pellegrino water and soon enough the whole large dining room seemed to be awash with sparkling water and we all were floating away in a tsunami of relentless San Pellegrino!  I took to screwing the cap back onto the bottle and taking it to have during the big show later, but I still had so much of it left that I would sit outside on my balcony and watch the sea as I drank it, unless I went to a dance or a party or to a movie on the deck or to my favorite of all the lounges to hear the Bossa Nova music or to drink a martini, or, heaven forbid, go to the chocolate place and...but we won't talk about THE CHOCOLATE PLACE where I surely did very much sin, Father....

I alluded to this already.  From every vantage point, the ocean water was enchanting. Walking up on one of the high decks, the water below was entrancing.  And so it also was walking on the various glass walkways that curved off and out beyond the actual decks of the sides of the ship so that you were walking on glass directly over the water, the water below was mesmerizing, as was going to the very rear of the ship and up to the highest deck where they also had a clear glass curving walkway out and over the stern and walking over the water below, a feature they called "The Bridge of Sighs", which I think they figured most passengers would interpret romantically, such as the sighs of lovers and their mutual contentment, but I have been to Venice and I know that the Bridge of Sighs crosses over a quiet canal from the Doges's palace to a terrible dungeon and so the actual "sighs" of that bridge are the sighs of the prisoner who realizes that his one quick glance out the window on that bridge is the very last time he will see the outdoors for the rest of his life.  I marvel over the concept of designers who know the reality but purposely give a name to a feature that truly means nothing that applies to what they are trying to imply.  Still, in a actual use, the water below those over-water walkways was entrancing.

But even with all this, no view of the water was quite as alluring as the water you could see while sitting on your own private balcony with a bottle of San Pellegrino (or some other beverage) in your hand and a cool breeze gently blowing your hair as you watched the blue water swash by and periodically there would be little currents of white caps and other intricate pasterns that were like a siren's song, luring you into the cool embrace of the delicious and wonderful water below.  I literally would feel its pull, like it was calling "why don't you just jump right in, this water will feel so fantastic, it would be ecstasy to experience this floating embrace, just try it, you wouldn't regret it for the rest of your life...."

Then I would suddenly shudder and think, what are talking about, what are you thinking, this isn't like standing on the sandy ocean's edge in Maui where you can walk into knee deep refreshing water and feel the gentle surge and pull of the waves and then settle down in the incoming surf and ride the water movements back and forth like a baby swinging in a bathinette.  This beautiful water that you are looking at, splashing and sparkling so seductively, is fathoms deep and who knows what sea creatures with merciless jaws might be right under there, ready to chew you down in three razor-sharp bites.  That is HELL down there, especially at this hour when most people on this ship are partying somewhere not in their cabin until much later tonight and as you with panic realize what you had done, it would be way too late, nothing to grab onto as this immense ship, like an entire New York skyscraper lying down on its side on the water, plummets relentlessly forward with over 5,000 passengers, not one of them seeing you desperately treading water in this surging ocean next to the only chance you have at saving your life, with rapid knots speeding away from you, leaving you in an immense merciless sea, alone.

Shudder shudder shudder, I actually did have thoughst like that, like how there really was a siren call tempting me into a fantasy that at least I wasn't mentally ill enough to give into, but even the mere thought of such a thing calling like that made me make a pact with myself, promise me you don't do something foolish!  Well of course I wouldn't do it, I wouldn't climb overboard or take one fantastical leap without a thought of what would happen in two minutes after I finally came to my senses, too late, or too too too, oh God, what I am going to DO, too late?  This whole fantasy stream had one purpose, to warn me, to put me into alert so that nothing like that would ever happen.

I had even experienced that one time walking across the Golden Gate Bridge and stopping halfway to look over across the golden bay at the sparkling fairyland of San Francisco off in the near distance. Until I had stopped right there on the sidewalk of the very bridge where so many people actually do kill themeless by jumping off, I used to think the whole concept of it was horrifying, but being there on site, I could see that it doesn't seen horrifying at all.  The entire view is so glorious and wondrous.  the expected danger of the bay below instead looks benign, even friendly, gently inviting you to a fantastic angelic leap into space and then the cushioning softness of the water waiting below.  I had to literally push myself way away from the barricade, not that I was afraid that I would actually leap off the bridge, but that I could see how beautiful it seemed in contrast to the fear I would have imagined, and the awareness that it wasn't a suicide's misery at life so great that no potential or perceived danger was too horrible to trade for a final exit out of this life, but instead it could look so good to someone whose life is so bad that they couldn't contemplate another day of it.  If a person is in such a state, how can they fight it if they actually get up here to this spot?  It was that that scared me so.

There is a man I like to watch regularly on YouTube, Don, of Don's Family Vacations.  He specialty is cruises, what to do, what not to do, which cruise lines are better than others for the particular things you want to do, he is quirky and nice and I like him.  Well, tonight he talked about a woman who supposedly had "accidentally fallen" off the rear of a Norwegian Cruisline ship in the Mediterranean.  She did not have a life preserver of any kind, just her regular clothes, and she was out there for ten lone hours, treading water, without any reasonable hope of getting rescued.  How could somebody stand to be in a situation like that?

But she was ultimately rescued and claimed to be extremely thankful for that rescue.  But Don, telling this story, said it seemed to him that there have been more "accidentally falling overboard" on cruise ships than he had remembered happening before. He asked his audience if they felt that there were more overboard fallings than usual, and did his readers think people really were actually falling overboard, or were they really attempting suicide, but then regretted it as they struggled out there in the vast ocean, treading water, and therefore became grateful if they were rescued, never revealing that it was they, themselves, who had put themselves in that a situation.

Well, I don't know, of course, but the concept of the whole thing petrified me, because I think of the impossible to bear fear and misery you would feel if you did put yourself out there and then changed your mind once you had done it, with nothing to face, now, but the horrors of the vast, cruel ocean, no genuine hope of rescue, and no ability to stop the struggle to keep yourself alive, as exhausted and panicked as you now would be.

My question is, do more people "fall" overboard than have falls within the ship?  My view is that it is extremely difficult to actually "fall" overboard.  I don't think you can do it at all as an accident, unless you're seriously drunk and do something harebrained such as attempt to sit on the railing of your cabin's balcony and then accidentally slip off (trying to take a selfie!).  But just standing there on your balcony, or sitting in a chair with a drink in your hand, you aren't going to "fall" overboard any more than you would from your bed into the ocean from inside the cabin.  And if there happens to be more overboard fallings than "regular" falls such as on the various stairways, for example, inside the ship (if anyone is keeping track of such things), then I think that such overboard "accidents" would have to be suicide attempts that failed.

And that woman that Don was talking about, where she happened to fall, as she said, was at the stern of the ship (where, by the way, the churning of the ship's wake is particularly appealing, it looks like slipping into a huge benevolent Jacuzzi).  The special appeal of somehow going over the railing at the rear of the ship is that of all the places of a ship where you might be able to jump into the water, the area where there is the least chance that somebody would see you would be there at the rear, where its not like the sides where there are hundreds of balconies, many of which would have occupants who would see a body in the water and sound an alarm, the rear is where the least amount of people would be there to see anyone, and meanwhile, the ship is rapidly getting farther and farther away from the person the water.  I say that if a person truly wants to kill themselves by jumping off of a cruise ship and didn't want to be rescued, then the rear of the ship would be the best spot for that.

I think that woman did it on purpose, and how sad is that.  But she was rescued and she claimed to be very grateful.  I hope that is the truth.

Let me end on a positive note.  I think it is true that in moments of the worst danger, being stuck in what seems to be the most impossible situation, where there can't be any hope, instead of screaming one's head open in a moment of unbearable panic, there actually is a calm that washes over one and all time compacts and awareness tightly focusses on the most immediate tasks that have to be done.

Such as a man I read about who had been the only survivor of an airplane crash somewhere in Canada's Yukon.  He had never been anything like a Boy Scout and never even camped in his own backyard.  He was anything but an outdoorsman.  Yet he survived something like half a year out in the cold frozen North until the weather got to be better and somebody searching for him finally found him.

He was asked how he possibly could have survived this.  He explained this concentration of attention, where he focussed in on just one immediate step at a time and wasn't conscious of much of anything else.  It was almost animalistic:  "Warmth, need warmth," so he reasoned that parachute material that he was able to find in the crashed airplane could became his mobile shelter.  Water he needed, well, there was snow...you don't get a lot of water out of snow (I know all about that, trying to obtain water from snow when I was stuck in a blizzard in my house in the Sierra Nevada mountains for a week without electricity, telephone or water (because the water was electronically pumped up from a well).  I did have heat due to a word burning stove and many cords of split wood.  I joked that instead of the Zen principal of "chop wood, carry water", I said for me it was "carry wood and chop water".

The next thing in front of the man surviving northern Canada was food.  He could find lichens if he dug down under the snow.  It went on like this from day to day until his ultimate rescue.

For me, suddenly alone in a truly dangerous situation scuba diving in Australia (I was halfway down on my air so had to turn to go back to the boat, but my "dive buddy" refused to came back with me because she had plenty of air, so why waste the full amount of diving time that she had paid for?  She turned around to catch up with the rest of the divers, leaving me alone with no choice but to go back by myself.  But where exactly WAS the boat?

I had to rise up the surface so that I can see where the boat was, a shockingly large distance away, and I had discovered that there was a terrible storm up there on the surface of the ocean (which could not be felt 100 feet down below).  Very very dangerous.  But I kept the screaming panic at bay and did what the man in Canada had done...just one step at a time (in my case, one stroke at a time) whatever was in front of him to do.  For me, I had to get back to that boat.  I could not go back underwater like they tell you to do, because I was afraid I would lose sight of where the boat was.  So all I did was keep on swimming forward, no matter how many waves I had to fight and no matter how far it was.  The dive master had done an inexcusable thing and that was take the divers away from the boat with the current.  You are supposed to go against the current on your way out, so that you ride with the current when you are tired and lower on air and need to get back to the boat.  Well, this was just the opposite, so beyond the storm, I also had the strong current against me.  But I didn't analyze all the pieces, I just kept pressing on forward and not stopping until I got there.

I guess that woman alone out in the ocean for ten hours did the same thing...she just kept on swimming like her life depended on it...as it did depend on it.

The Noisening of America

Among all the other changes that we are enjoying or enduring these days, mostly somehow attached to technological changes, is what I am now thinking of as the "Noisening of America".  I do not know that that is intentionally detrimental, such as that the goal is to prevent the populace from having any thoughts of their own or to distract them from quieter, more private pursuits, but more and more that is the resultant affect.

What led me to determine this concept was that I took my car to my local Infiniti dealer for a major service, more than the usual and normal oil and oil filter change and tire rotation.  This one was going to be giving the car a thorough going over and changing a lot of things that do require changing, but less frequently, such as various belts and other filters, and who knows what other parts might be wearing out too soon.  Instead of being a, let's say, $40ish dollar service, it is more like a $700ish service, and, as it has turned out in my case, based on what additional parts need repairing, an extra $300ish, and then in addition to all that, an extra $1,700 repair that is most likely covered by the extended warranty (but, uh oh, maybe not, we will see), but even with the warranty coverage, involves a $50 deductible.

For my normal oil change type services, I have chosen to simply wait while they do the work.  That is not a situation that requires me being shuttled back home, or even worse, using a loaner car.  The dealer's waiting rooms were perfectly fine.

At the beginning of my using this dealer for my car service, they brilliantly had three different waiting rooms:  a "regular", what I call noisy, waiting room, with a TV and piles of magazines; a children's waiting room that had puzzles, games, and toys in it; and a third waiting room described as "the quiet" waiting room, which was, to me, a blessing found nowhere I else I have been to for waiting in quite a while, including doctor's offices, where what is king is always a TV being on.  To me, a TV is the brain killer, because while it makes noise, the noise isn't really quite loud enough for you to really hear it well enough to fully understand what is going on, so if, perhaps, it is a show you might actually want to watch, you can't actually enjoy it.  And beside that, you usually aren't going to be waiting in the waiting room for the complete duration of a program, which in order to enjoy properly, you would need to see from the beginning, and then stop waiting after it comes to an end.

But my Infiniti dealership had the choice of a quiet waiting room, so I could wait in peace, reading a book that I brought (what a concept, bringing a book with me, or even reading one at all; suddenly such a behavior seems to be an anachronism these days).

But, alas, three months ago, I had gone to my dealership for a more routine service and saw that they had gotten rid of the three-waiting rooms concept and now just had one large waiting room that not only had a brand new gigantic extremely high quality wide-screen TV, but some kind of "radio" playing music, a  WI-FI laptop bar (if you brought in your laptop or iPad) for doing work on your computer), and a free snack bar involving bottled water, different kids of coffee, and some sweet snacks.  This, they felt, was more appealing to "today's" Infiniti customer, who, apparently, isn't satisfied to sit quietly and read a book, but must have their eardrums vibrated and their gullet stimulated by food and drink constantly.

As for me, on that service visit three months ago, I found a quiet place in the main new car showroom to plop myself down and read the book that I brought.  Don't ask me why they had a seating arrangement in the car showroom; perhaps only one person in a couple would be interested in car shopping but not the other spouse, so they had a place to sit while their spouse was being shown all the features of the latest Infiniti models.  But for me, it was fine; I could sit there quietly and read and ignore all the shiny new Infiniti models.

Except that various salespeople kept coming over to me, thinking that I was a car-buying customer, cheerily asking if they could show me something.  When I said that I was there because my car was being serviced, their face would turn "crestfallen", no, I am not a sales prospect, and they would walk away downcast.  Nobody ever said, "Well, you know, you should be waiting in the service waiting room," they were too polite for that even if that was what they were thinking, but nevertheless, the "atmosphere" was that this was not a place where you were supposed to sit while getting your car serviced.  I am not describing this as being something wrong with this dealership, because I really do like this dealership and their service is excellent.  Instead, it is more of an issue of the economics involved with being a car salesman.  So it became uncomfortable to sit quietly and try to read when every ten minutes or so some car salesman would be getting his hopes up.

Also, it made finding me difficult for my service writer when my car was ready, who expected to see me in the (noisy) waiting room.

Well, today when I went there for what I should have known was going to be a longer service (three hours to be exact), I brought a new book I wanted to read, totally forgetting (or not quite believing) that they had gotten rid of the marvelous three-waiting-room concept.  After we discussed the service that I needed, my service writer asked me did I want a loaner car, or to have the shuttle take me back home, or was I simply going to wait in the waiting room.  I told him that first I was going to go across the street to get breakfast, and then I would come back and wait.  Then, suddenly, I remembered about the waiting room, so I asked him had they really gotten rid of the "quiet waiting room" (I hoped that they had brought it back...or that maybe they had created another one), but he officially confessed that, no, they had only the one.

After breakfast, when the time came for me to wait there, I realized that it was not going to be a relaxing experience.  I had not brought in a laptop, so I had no use for the WiFi laptop bar.  I did get a coffee from their machine, though.  I sat down on one the chairs in the waiting room, put my coffee on the end table next to me, and pulled out my book.  But the noise made it almost impossible to concentrate on the words. Yes, the TV was on, just enough to hear noise but not loud enough to understand what was being said.  The music playing otherwise (the radio, playing throughout the whole dealership) was louder than the TV volume, and loud enough to be distracting and conflicting (so you really couldn't enjoy either).

But, loudest of all (but the least objectionable of the three "noises") was a little boy.  Because, you see, not only was the quiet waiting room lost, but so was the children's room.  Now everybody was all together in the big room with the TV, the radio, and the snacks.

I first saw the little boy (and his dad) when I was getting my coffee.  The dad brought his little boy over to select for himself his choice of a cookie or a small doughnut.  The boy could barely stand tall enough to see these choices, but on tip-toe he did take a good long look at each offering until finally he proudly made his selection.  He held his chosen snack in his hands very carefully, and looked up at his father with utterly adorable and adoring eyes (my immediate thought was that the boy's mother must be one beautiful woman) and pronounced to his father what he had chosen, treating the treat as if it were a precious jewel.  It reminded me of a concept I developed from observing countless children at the school where I work, or flying on an airplane, or being at an amusement park--children like to have things in their hands.  It almost doesn't matter what it is, a stuffed toy, a ball, a cookie or a piece of candy, it seems that they aren't really "here", comfortable and secure, unless they have something in their hands.

The dad then wanted to get some coffee, waiting for me to get mine.  It was taking a while, so I said to the dad, "This machine not only brews the coffee, it picks it from the Colombian fields and roasts it for us."  He responded with something like, "It does it all for us," but then for some reason, his coffee came out instantly whereas mine had seemed to take forever.  Anyway, I sat down in the waiting room before they did, but soon after, they came and sat down right next to me.

The man also had a second little boy, but this one apparently wasn't feeling well, so he spent the entire time curled up in one of the waiting room chairs and never once made a single sound.

The man sat down and lifted the first boy up to hold him on his lap.  The boy had brought along with him a high-tech toy, a sort of child's iPad that played some kind of videos, had on it computer games, and I think some kind of basic educational content.  At any rate, it was enough to occupy this boy for nearly the three hours that we all sat there waiting for our cars to be serviced.  The boy talked the entire time, describing every single thing he saw on the iPad screen and every operation he was doing.  I never knew before that a child could and would do that, talk constantly for the entire time he is awake (and what a contrast to the other boy who never made a noise).  Continually punctuated among the boy's talking was the dad "shhhing" him, which was, of course, entirely ineffective.  It was actually so useless that I decided that it was not truly meant as a command, but that it was a display of fatherly embarrassment issued out to an anonymous crowd, as if to say "I am sorry that he is bothering you, but at least I realize that he is and am attempting to correct it."

I wanted so badly to say to the dad that the boy's talking is the least objectionable of all the noises that are going on in this waiting room.  Worse, to me, were the radio and the TV that were a constant noise, interfering with each other, while at least the boy's talk had a purpose and he was being so extremely cute and it was so great to see these moments between a little boy and his father, who clearly utterly loved each other and were having an essential interaction here on a Saturday morning.  The father's "shhhh" was more like the guards in the Sistine Chapel, shhhhh at all the tourists walking round with their heads craned up, looking at the Michelangelo-painted ceiling, the only difference being that in the Sistine Chapel, no tourist is saying a word, the only noise in there is all the guards saying "shhhh", whereas with the boy, listening to him was a pleasure.

I didn't get very far in my book.   Instead, my three hours was taken up reading a sentence, getting caught by something that appeared on the TV, and being entranced by how many times the little boy said the word "Daddy". That's got to be one of the most precious sounds that a father ever hears.

As it turned out, both the man with the boys, and I, needed more work than could be done in the three hours we had already waited.  The job the man needed required him to get a loaner car, since his car wouldn't be ready until Monday.  When it was my turn, my service writer said it would be another three hours due to the additional replacements they discovered I needed.  Well, I don't think I could endure the noisy waiting room for yet another three hours, so I chose having the shuttle take me home and then come pick me up again once my car is ready, later this afternoon.

Now that this shuttle service has been introduced to me, I think that is what I will be doing from now on, instead of waiting in the noisy waiting room.   The noisening of America has driven me out.  And this next generation, starting out so cute and with such adoring eyes, I wonder what kind of constant distraction they will be demanding?  I fear that no longer will "daddy", or even any human interaction, be enough to fill that potentially hungry maw.