I broke down today and followed some vacation protocols.
First, Tim and I went swimming in the pool with our cousins. Almost everyone played pool baseball, a seriously simplified version of the land version of the game, while I swam laps between them. Afterwards, we held a couple of swimming races, both of which I won. But I have to admit that most of my competitors were under fifteen years old. Still, we had fun. We haven’t seen the Grant girls in quite a while, and they were cute and full of personality (personalities).
The weirdest point of the day was when my daughter Erin called to talk about her life at school and to discuss details about her fall semester (which will take place in Dublin, Ireland). At one point, I tried to tell her something that had happened yesterday, but she stopped me, explaining that she’d read it on the blog. I wonder if blogging is the best way to communicate with one’s children.
In the afternoon, Tim went with the Grants to the beach, and they stayed there, playing, for hours. When he returned, his entire body was white, except for his even brighter red neck. I think he forgot to put sunblock on the back of his neck this time. So we now call him a redneck. (Which reminds me of an interesting lexicographic tidbit. In Barbados, rednecks are called redlegs, apparently because they walk around in shorts all day. A redleg, of course, has to be a member of the minority white population.)
After Tim’s return, we went out to dinner to Mad Sam’s, off on a key but still in Englewood and with a good view of the water. The dinner was reasonably good and plenteous in the way American meals always are. We watched a giant brown pelican (the national bird of Barbados, by the way) plunge headlong and furiously towards the water only so it could sit down. And we listened to Tim’s best memory trick: recounting meals we had had at different restaurants.
It is always wonderful to find out what strange scraps of information different people keep in their minds, but I was not ready for my own son to tell us exactly what he had had for dinner at particular restaurants up to two years ago. And he didn’t just know what he had for dinner; he also remembered what the rest of us had ordered. For instance, at the Knickerbocker Grill in Greenwich Village in August of 2002, on the day we dropped Erin off at college for the first time, Tim reports that he had crispy duck breast (duck is a favorite food of his), I had branzini (which Tim reminds me is a fish dish that comes complete with head and tail, yet is missing its eyes), Nancy had tuna steaks with blue potatoes (he remembers the type of potatoes!?), and Erin had raviolini (but she didn’t eat any because she was so sad about being left off at college—a sadness that reached deep into her second day at college before disappearing altogether and for good).
After dinner, four of us went to Manasota Beach to watch the sun set. When I first saw the sun, I wondered why it was no longer gibbous—before realizing that moon is that occasionally gibbous object in the sky. Nancy and Mr Mike watched the sun set and chatted. Tim and I skipped shells on the surface of approaching waves (a skill I honed when Lake Erie was literally in my backyard), and I ended up drawing little glyphs in the sand and watching the waves wash them away.
This was a good day. All I have to do now is read the large packet of work that arrived via UPS for me today.
Quote of the Day (Geof to Tim, talking about the mockingbirds outside):
Why are you reading the book if you’re not learning how to kill them?
Sign of the Day (at the entrance to Polynesian Village):
