Normal Ordering Kills Bubbles

 

Barefoot in black tie at sea.

The following blog will not follow what we perceive as a linear time line; but since Chico assures us that time is an illusion, I will take liberal artistic discretion on this. 

QM2 with Mimi was a delight…all passengers have their own style aboard- some play bridge and come to lunch early, some exit their state room accidentally in the middle of the night scantily clad  and are locked out semi naked in elevators. We say you do you. Indeed, what happens on the QM2 stays on the QM2: you don’t hear me recounting how many soft serve ice creams per day Thomas eats, or how KMH can’t tell Filipino people apart. No you don't. 

To begin, it was as exciting and wonderful as ever…same handsome Turk in the dining room, same beautiful teak deck, same view and sea air. We had gone down in life a bit, due to the fact that the very fancy state rooms were taken and we no longer had a private elevator in our room. But we are flexible people. 

They found KMH a bridge partner who had a PHD in mathematics. I think they wiped the floor with the competition, the only difference being only one woman did an end zone dance after they won.

What Kathy is at bridge I am at the soft serve. Or so I thought. As usual in these dark times, there always seems to be one machine out of order. This means only the brightest fittest people can get a mixture of both chocolate and vanilla at the same time. I approached my first machine and a little kid came up looking rather game without the usual cow like stare of so many of my competitors. I decided to throw him a bone on account of his age. 

“The chocolate is broken on this one. Don’t get your hopes up for a blended swirl.” 

He said: ‘There is another chocolate over there.”

And I thought..oh please….do I look like an amateur? Of course I know that. The other one is also broken, and I told him this, patronizingly. 

Then he dropped this bomb: “Port side, door C there is another chocolate working. 

Batons pass eventually people. It's much like Steph Curry -he is still the best; but the future without him is at least a possibility now. 

The lecture series on the ocean continued to be as sobering as you can imagine. Of course no oceanographer is going to congratulate us on the great things going on down there….So I will just tell you the worst thing: dolphins are getting their ear drums blown out when the floor is explored for oil, and the basic noise level is too high for the whales who need quiet to communicate and survive (that’s why we don’t see them on crossings anymore).

The answer is the usual: eat more plants, buy less Zara. 

So we sadly parted company with Mimi in England, but got to see Hanna and meet Lane (again!) flew to Portugal for a week; and then our triumphant return to the Cala di Volpe after a 12 year hiatus. It was wonderful, lots of the waiters were still there and remembered us and our weird habits. We saw the usual display of super models and soccer players and paparazzi and tried to resist the recommended 9,000 calorie a day diet there. The Marriot corporation has taken over so now instead of a night club there are two gyms (two) and a large section of the wine list offers 20,000 + Euro bottles of wine (not making that up), but it was nice to be where we have spent happy times with Eva and Frederick as a baby. (Lord I wish time did not feel so linear) I have a few favorites there and now in my advanced age was free to just chat them up. Whenever I could I would hail the most dignified man, a little older than we, gray head now, never smiles except with his eyes at my bleating concerns about which shape pasta will make my life complete. I told him he needed to write a book. He looked confused. So we starting asking him all the questions Thomas and I had asked ourselves to wile away the afternoon.

Has anyone ever died in the pool? No.

Has Sophia Loren come? Easy, yes.

Has anyone divorced at the beginning of the trip and married another woman by the end? Laughs.

Did he remember the night the Gypsy Kings came and no one but me and the Israeli grandmother danced and I was breast feeding so I looked kind of fat? Yes the gypsy kings played often. He added that they were good but nothing was as beautiful as when Elton John came and played for the guests. He lit up telling us, but then quickly recovered his insanely discreet demeanor  

Then Thomas asked: Did he ever see a wife come and discover her husband with another woman at the famous lunch? He nodded sagely:

 “It Happens…What would you like for dessert?”

In London we got a tour of Imperial. Hanna and I bought a bunch of sweatshirts that gave the impression that we attended the place and Hanna dazzled one and all by walking past in her shiny glory. I love the titles of things that are written on the message boards. One in particular seemed on point: "Normal ordering kills bubbles." Amen. 

As I write this we are flying to Portugal for the festival of Tom with a a rare re union of the Brigham foursome. Charles McCune will even make an appearance; alas Frederick will be squiring Peter T. From Exeter and another friend to Norway, and cannot attend. 

I have much more to tell, but I must eat my peanuts. Suffice it to say we got a lot of good baby physics out of our young student which was even more delicious with the addition of beautiful L and the philosophy angle. Poor thing, it was like having a pop quiz every night as we fired all our little questions at her. Luckily she was game, explaining Kant between bites of shrimp. 

So in the spirit of the deep intellectualism that is this blog- I’ll leave you with a quantum physics thought for the day: Individual humans are exactly as different as ripples in the ocean are from each other and from the ocean. We can tell the ripples apart, but none of them are really separate from the ocean, or each other. 

Keep that in your pocket for the next election day my people. Xxx

Big discovery- they will bring you a whole roast chicken. 

As you can see the room wasn't the usual palace size. 

cousies

watching a big match at the pub

Founder of Imperial. The kindness smartness function on this face is so enormous

Mama Ocean

It isn't that life ashore is distasteful to me. But life at sea is better. 
Sir Francis Drake

Ahoy mateys! I am sitting in one of my favorite spots for watching waves as my fellow travelers spin by in cropped leisure pants on their mobility scooters. Waves are “slight” today according to QM2 weather but Thomas says you wouldn’t be so sanguine if you were on a sail boat.  But all is well; and the ship is still facing the North Atlantic in style. Despite the large fleet Cunard has, the QM2 is its only ocean liner- so it’s the only one that can handle the rough stuff. I learned that she is 20 years old already but has 10-15 good ones left. I also learned that the engineers on board are tasked with watching the engine 24/7 in four hour shifts. 

KMH has taken like a duck to water to life on the ship. She orders all the special things that Osman suggests and even brilliantly invented an imaginary friend so she can have two caviars for herself. She then found a loop hole in the amuse-bouche law and got a second helping; a feat that has never been successfully completed in international waters. She prefers breakfast in bed and doesn’t run around the deck all day as we do, but she is fully into the spirit of things.

She does however have a growing list of enemies that she reports to us at meals. So far these include: The man who didn’t put enough dressing on her salad; the woman dancing as we left South Hampton (she was up with the band in spandex and K found her bad dancing while thinking she was good- offensive); the couple who stood in front of her as she was looking at the New York skyline; the woman who picked up her jacket to move it to another chair “with just her two index fingers like it smelled”; and I haven’t even gotten to the enemies at the bridge table where she arrives like a Godzilla of master points to these elderly bunnies. 

Thomas and I have been so sleepy it's hard to get through our lectures. There was one on being a kidnapping negotiator (don’t go to Mexico or Pakistan or Nigeria), one on the deep sea and one on Vietnam vets (lots of flag waving).

 

The formality aboard has gone way down- it used to be four formal nighst and now it is only two and the other nights all you have to do is put on a collared shirt like Town school. 

 

Indeed the sleeping has been epic. If we wake at night we are rocked back to sleep almost immediately. Best of all, we have added naps in the sun with towels over our heads. This morning I asked Thomas why one doesn’t invent a bed that rocks you like this and he said what is different on the ocean is one goes up and down very slowly perhaps as much as 10-15 feet .. so it is more like being in the womb than a rocking chair

Oh I just saw dolphins jumping through the gray freezing sea. There is nothing on this earth more wonderful than a dolphin. 

Nothing 

We had a very jolly English biologist speak about the ocean and she reminded us that the earth is 70% ocean and the Pacific alone is 46%.

 

The Mariana tench is 11k deep and Mount Everest would fit with room to spare. It is pitch dark down there and very cold, but of course never freezing. If it froze, we would be screwed. We have only explored 5 percent of our oceans; so we know almost nothing about the thing that is the biggest thing. 

More fun facts: sound  travels four times faster in ocean than in air, and elephants are the same size as a blue whale's tongue.

For her next talk she will explain why sharks are the most wonderful things and why we should hug one today. 

Osman looks exactly the same as he did 20 years ago -still very handsome and very funny. He said this past year he encountered the biggest waves in his very long career- 45 feet. Think about that. His room is in the very front of the boat and pretty low down so the sound must have been horrendous. I asked if he was scared and he said no- he had two whiskeys and slept like a baby. 

Thomas attempted to cheer up our sommelier this year by trying a new tactic- going very expensive with huge tips in the hope he will let us off the hook one or two nights. 

Nope. He is like mom’s hummingbirds after she bought the high sucrose formula and then doubled the sucrose. He actually hovers by the table; even Mimi has been trained in the dark art of Prosecco drinking. I can report she is doing a valiant job swilling her little glass.

Oh she made a new friend and a new enemy at the bridge table! 

Her partner is decent and she likes her but they played against a 95 year old English man who picked up the something before the something and she announced they would have to “call the director”

To which he mumbled he thought this was a friendly game on the seas and she in essence told him to fick off.

We told her never to speak to Osman directly and she ignored us so we are terrified that 20 years of careful sucking  up will go down the drain. 

Someone must speak to Nancy Pelosi because there is an arcane useless law that makes it impossible to get on the ship in the US and not take the entire voyage. Meaning! the QM2 is coming to San Francisco (!) and we can’t take it unless we are willing to stay on until Auckland New Zealand three weeks later. 

I love this ship but three weeks is a lot.

My good friend /masseur / spiritual guru only refers to the ocean as mama ocean and it is why we are friends. And even though I like to look at the ocean from a ship dressed in black tie, and he swims with great whites off china beach, we agree that the ocean is as mighty and beautiful and terrifying and necessary for life as your mother; and we never turn our backs on her.

At 11 pm tonight we will be half way across. How very sad that is.