Every Third Thought (2 page)

Who knew?

Not us Newett/Todds; nor did we make that happy discovery by doing a Captain John Smith in reverse and sailing from Chesapeake to Channel, New World to Old. Instead, we drove Mandy’s high-mileage, pesto-green Honda Civic through intermittent late-summer-afternoon showers from “our” Stratford (i.e., from the rented riverside condo in which we’d been making shift since Heron Bay Estates’ doomsday) up I-95 past Wilmington to Philadelphia Airport’s long-term parking lot and shuttled therefrom with our baggage to the terminal. Cashed one traveler’s check into Euros, tsked at the once-almighty dollar’s declining value, and boarded a Scandinavian Airlines A300 Airbus for the overnight economy-class flight to Sweden. A quite decent complimentary in-flight dinner, to our pleasant surprise, with champagne available at $5 U.S. per split, served at 10,000 meters (so the cockpit announcement informed us) above the already dark ocean. We treated ourselves to a brace of splits, toasted our survival, our much-blessed union, and our well-earned (and by Mandy well-planned) vacation; then sipped, nibbled, read, held hands, and dozed through the long, cramped flight, wishing we could someday fly first class, but impressed by how relatively more comfortable and better served
we were than on the several long-haul U.S. airlines we’d used for earlier trips abroad, earned with frequent-flier miles from our credit card accounts.
Adíos
, American Century;
hasta la vista
, USA! Safely landed after a
very
early breakfast for our maiden visit to Scandinavia, we reclaimed our luggage, cleared customs, and were duly met by a cheery/brisk cruise-line rep holding up two signs, one reading NEWETT/TODD and the other HADLEY (a large Pennsylvania couple also booked for the voyage). Were by him Volvo-vanned through a sunny-mild Swedish morning to the cruise-ship docks, the jet-lagging four of us admiring en route the handsome busy city: so many bicyclists pedaling to work in their office clothes, a thing rarely seen back home, and everything so
clean
!

Hefty, red-faced Tom Hadley, his accent more deep-Southern than Pennsylvanian, supposed to our driver, “Reckon y’all don’t have the
mi
-nor’ty problems we Amurkans have.”

“Or else you keep your panhandlers and drug dealers out of sight,” his wife teased. “Wish
we
could!”

“Or just maybe,” my Mandy suggested to the backs of their heads from our rearmost seat before our smiling driver could reply, “a more equitable economy, a better health-care system, and more enlightened drug laws do the trick.”

Without bothering to turn around, “Yeah, right,” Hadley growled: “Plus taxes through the kazoo.” We Todd/Newetts exchanged knee-nudges; I contented myself with opining that the correct idiom was
out
the kazoo, not
through
it, that term being a slang euphemism for the you-know-what.

Whereof, we agreed later, these particular fellow “Amurkan” tourists were prime specimens. But our professionally courteous driver-escort merely winked into the rearview mirror and declared in flawless English, “We Swedish have slang terms, too—and here we are, ladies and gentlemen! Enjoy our city and your cruise!” For we had indeed turned out of charming, canalveined Stockholm proper into its port area and specifically its busy cruise-ship docks, where half a dozen sleek, enormous vessels were tied up. By local time it was still only mid-morning; inasmuch as our ship’s embarkation was scheduled for seven that evening, and boarding not permitted before two in the afternoon, we tipped our driver, checked our bags as instructed at the loading area for delivery to our stateroom, and set out map in hand to explore on foot, per Mandy’s pre-planned plan, the nearby canal-side streets, shops, houses, and sidewalk cafés, pausing at one of those last for lunch and hoping we’d be able to stay clear of the Hadleys aboardship in the days ahead.

Because while we had enjoyed a bit of small-boat day-sailing in decades past and were no strangers to foreign and domestic travel,
cruise-ship
cruising—as may have been mentioned?—was not something to which we had thitherto been inclined, and that not simply because of the expense. A Volkswagen camper, backpacks, and Frommer’s
Europe on $5 a Day
had been our style back in the late 1960s (our early-professorial twenties and thirties); rental cars and modest hotels thereafter, through our less cash-strapped forties and fifties and on into our sixties. We were small-time academics, not CEOs! In the long summer
vacation-time, when not wrestling with our separate muses we liked poking about the cities, towns, and countrysides of our nation and others on our own, not in guided tour-groups; enjoyed getting lost, asking directions, coping with languages and local customs as best we could, following our guidebooks’ tips for lodgings and eateries within our budget. As a rule we preferred a country’s streets and plazas, parks and coast-roads to its museums and castles, and when touring the latter, inclined to do so at our own pace, not in a docent-guided tour group. And we had little taste for “nightlife” beyond an after-dinner stroll, if we still had legs enough at day’s end, before turning in. What use had the Newett/Todds for what we imagined to be the confines and enforced sociability of a cruise ship crowded with hundreds of fellow tourists? A cramped lower-deck “stateroom,” pre-set dinner hours and seating, bridge tournaments and on-deck shuffleboard, nightly stage productions, and the constant tipping of room-stewards and other functionaries—not our style.

Until accumulating years began to make the prospect of on-our-own touring ever less appealing, to G.I.N. at least—been there, done that—and the accumulating resources of our modest lifestyle (two incomes, no dependents, adequate pension and medical benefits from our professorships at the College, plus a not-insignificant legacy from Amanda’s parents, who’d had more savvy than George’s in the estate-planning way) led Mandy to check out alternatives for her upcoming academic leave. After a bit of asking around among friends and colleagues and a
lot
of Internet chat-room research, “PrimeTime Cruise
Lines
Seven Seas
,” she announced in September of ’06, over wine and hors d’oeuvres on the screened porch of our second-floor Blue Crab Bight “coach home” in dear old Heron Bay Estates: “Stockholm to Dover this time next year, with stopovers in Gdańsk, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Bruges. Eight days aboard ship with no constant packing and unpacking, no scrabbling around for hotels and restaurants! King-bed stateroom with balcony! Three onboard dining rooms to choose from, with no pre-set dinnertimes! Eat by ourselves or with others as we wish—and no tipping! Then from Dover we take a bus or train to Canterbury, London, and Stratford–upon-Avon and say hello to Chaucer and Master Will—unless we feel like renting a Morris Minor, driving on the left, passing on the right, and shifting gears left-handed: your call. And after Stratford we fly home from Heathrow. Whatcha think?”

“Well, now,” her bowled-over husband responded when he could: “As the Bard himself might put it,
Wowee
, and thankee thankee thankee! Maybe on location we can even nail down the difference between Stratford-
upon
-Avon and Stratford-
on
-Avon!”

Itself worth the cost of the expedition, smiling Amanda agreed, but then confessed as we clinked congratulatory wineglasses, “Already did that, actually, on the Web:
On
is the district in Warwickshire—pronounced
Worricksher
?—and
Upon
is the town itself. Okay?”

“Okay! Did Professor Newett mention that he remains the humble and devoted servant of Professor Todd?”

“One suspects he did—and what she requests of said vassal just now is his meticulous review of all the shore-excursion and other cruise-crap stuff that she’ll be dumping shortly on his desk.” Another wineglass clink. “Happy seventy-sixth,
Giorgio mio!
”

For it was indeed in the near neighborhood of that anniversary, if not necessarily on its very date, that she announced this ambitious project, on which she had been laboring quietly, Amanda-style, for weeks. It would be, as she’d warned, more expensive by far than any previous junket of ours: The cost of its trip-cancelation insurance alone would almost have covered one of our early campground-and-youth-hostel expeditions to Iberia or the Canadian Rockies. But what the hell, we were Tenured or Emeritus Old Farts these days, with who could say how few healthy life-semesters remaining and no offspring to be benefacted. And as he expected, G.’s follow-up review of A.’s extensive research quite supported her enthusiasm for the plan, especially its Stratford-to-Stratford aspect. From StratColl’s “Shakespeare House” (whereof more presently) to the Bard’s actual once-upon-a-time domicile (ditto): Anchors aweigh! PrimeTime Cruise Lines being a justifiably much-indemand operation, we locked in our reservations with a whopping year-in-advance down payment.

Whereupon the goddamn gods, as if to demonstrate yet again that their heavy-handedness knows no limit, exchanged winks at Mandy’s “
Giorgio mio
” and saw to it just a few weeks later that the seventh named tropical storm of that year’s
season—yup,
Giorgio
—would spin up from the Caribbean and shift from tropical storm to hurricane strength and back as he passed under Puerto Rico, whacked hapless Haiti, crossed Cuba and the Florida Straits, and moved close offshore up the southeastern USA to his next landfall at Carolina’s Outer Banks, thence into the mouth of Chesapeake Bay and usward up the Delmarva Peninsula. Where to our premature vast relief he showed every sign of fizzling into mere more-or-less-severe thunderstorms and much-needed rain, the way most of G. I. Newett’s O.F. Fictions fizzle in the second or third trimester of their gestation. Except that (and how G. wishes
he
could pull off some narratively equivalent surprise, for a change) one of those t-storms, as if to give the finger to us Vastly Relieved Heron Bay Weather Watchers, farted out
en passant
the afore-noted short-lived but violent F3 tornado that miraculously killed only a couple of our number but quite destroyed the exurban gated community of Heron Bay Estates, including the over-and-under coach homes of its—of
our
—Blue Crab Bight subdivision.

Our library! Our home-office files and work in “progress,” such as it was! Not to mention furniture and clothing, photo albums, and other irreplaceable souvenirs of our decades together, no more than half of it salvageable (unlike many other buildings in the development, our particular duplex was left standing, but its windows, doors, and half the roof were gone with the wind). Ourselves physically unharmed, we happening to be on campus at the time—Mandy in her office in StratColl’s Shakespeare House, the modest frame-bungalow headquarters
of the Creative Writing Program, and Yrs Truly looking up something-or-other in the college library-stacks when shit hit fan—but our so-agreeable routine life
kaput.

Not the cheeriest kickoff to one’s seventy-seventh year and the half-time of one’s partner’s sixty-fifth. Through the remainder of that academic semester and into the next (from ingrained habit, we Todd/Newetts think of a year as divided primarily into fall semester, spring semester, and summer break, and only secondarily—or for particular literary purposes—into seasons), as with our fellow Heron Bay refugees we salvaged what we could of our belongings, scrabbled and scrambled to set up housekeeping in new quarters (less of a crisis, though still a major headache, for the more affluent with already-established second homes elsewhere, but a particular problem for us middle-income single-homers, “exurban” to a small college town in a semi-rural county with limited available housing), we more than once considered scrapping our proposed and already down-paymented Stratford-to-Stratford adventure. How afford such an extravagance now with so many unanticipated expenses straining our budget? And what was that costly trip insurance for, after all, if not to cover our butts in unexpected setbacks like this? Wardrobes to be replenished, salvaged possessions to be put in storage until we found new permanent lodgings, insurance adjusters to be negotiated with—and for Mandy, classes to be taught as well, lectures prepared, and papers graded! Not to mention bye-byes to our separate, not-all-that-busy muses. Anchors
away
(until some next life, maybe)....

But rather to our own surprise, after lucking out of our post-Giorgio motel-squatting into a well-furnished riverfront condo in Stratford (leased from a history-department retiree who’d recently moved with his wife to Florida and might even agree to sell if they decided to remain there) and making shift in office-space at the college—Mandy in her official departmental quarters, G.I.N. at the desk of an ex-colleague on leave—while setting up our new home work-spaces and negotiating a reasonably reasonable insurance payout on our total-loss Blue Crab Bightery, by mid-spring we found ourselves managing not badly, all things considered. Well enough, anyhow, to begin looking forward again to that upcoming September PrimeTime Cruise Lines fling as a welcome, well-earned reward for so much cataclysm-coping. After which—who knew?—we might even get back to doing some Creative Writing ourselves instead of merely supervising its apprentice creation by others. Anchors aweigh? Especially since, as Mandy discovered and reported, trip cancellation because of financial setback resulting from natural disaster was not covered by our travel policy?

Anchors aweigh, and off we by-George went, as aforereported, by car and plane from tidewater Delmarva to Sweden’s handsome capital; strolled same with pleasure until embarkation time, admiring its quaint old Gamla stan byways while giving the figurative finger to its Swedish Academy for never having awarded their Nobel Prize in Literature to such now-late worthies as Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, and Italo Calvino—each of whom would have done at least as
much honor to the prize as it to them—while often bestowing it instead upon writers whom even we lit-lovers may scarcely have heard of, and many of whom, to put it mildly, must lose a
lot
in translation; then boarded that sleek palazzo of a cruise ship and were escorted to our stateroom, duly impressed en route by the elegant atriums, wide staircases, glass-enclosed elevators, and endless amenities, including a bouquet of fresh flowers and an ice-bucket of champagne awaiting with our already-delivered luggage. We unpacked, agreeing that our quarters were every bit as commodious and well-appointed as advertised, and then convened with fellow passengers in the main ballroom for a welcome-aboard orientation/reception (more champagne and hors d’oeuvres) followed by lifeboatdrill and, if not the literal weighing of the vessel’s anchors, the casting off of its mighty dock lines, the revving up of its sundry side-thrusters (no tugboats necessary these days, we were told, in most instances), and the
Seven Seas’
departure from Stockholm’s harbor into the Baltic.