A Relaxing Cruise

Several months ago Ann said she'd like to participate in a Mah Jongg tournament that is being held on a one week Caribbean cruise, great prices with the group rate, so would I like to go?  We did this a few years before with our friends Harry and Susan, and as I did not want to "be on my own" while she played her games, I said, sure, if Susan goes, and Harry agrees, I'd love to, otherwise, please room with another participant and I'll stay home.  Harry and I had shared some fun times on the last cruise, so he readily agreed and therefore on Jan. 11 we departed on the Holland America's 'Westerdam' from Ft. Lauderdale and have just recently returned.

We've done many cruises in the past, so easy from neighboring Ft. Lauderdale, no planes to catch, just drive there and leave the car until we return.  And with group pricing, a nice, warm Caribbean cruise is so inviting.

Naturally things have changed drastically in the 14 years that we've been cruising  and I figure that we've spent nearly a year at sea, with several Atlantic crossings as well as one Pacific crossing, and a river cruise.  During those years, the cruise industry has been morphing from a select market to a mass market "product."  I don't mean to be elitist, but our tastes in theatre and traveling have been refined over the years and more and more they seem to come in conflict with the experience many cruise lines are now offering, mostly in an attempt to draw larger audiences, with each person a mini-profit center to whom they can sell drinks, services, tours, shopping, so-called art (at "auction"), cocktails and wine, and drinks (did I mention drinks?).  And of course there is the omnipresent casino to relieve passengers of any loose change left after the foregoing (although one of the Mah Jongg ladies at our table put a few quarters in a slot machine and won more than $1,000!).

To achieve their objectives, cruise lines are building their ships larger and larger -- Royal Caribbean International's 'Allure of The Seas' and 'Oasis of The Seas' topping out at about 225,000 gross tonnage, accommodating up to 6,200 people.  Other, larger ships are being built in the race for more passengers.  These are now small cities and their mere size makes them Disneyland kinds of destinations onto themselves.  Not every port can handle them, and tendering has to be a nightmare.

There is probably a direct correlation between the size of the ship and the nature of the services offered, one of the reasons we try to choose smaller ships, preferably under 2,000 passengers.  These now tend to be the older ships (old in the cruising business is anything nearing 10 years in service).  Oceania is now our choice cruising line, but some of the Holland America, Royal Caribbean, and Celebrity ships can be found in the smaller vintage.

And that is one of the reasons I agreed to this trip as it was on the classic Holland America 'Westerdam' and although some of the photos might make it look leviathan, compare its "mere" 85,000 gross tonnage and 1,800 passengers to the large ships being built today.  It is still stately, and Holland America does make an effort to maintain some of the traditional aspects of cruising and ship architecture.  I particularly appreciate the Promenade deck, harking back to the days of swift ocean crossing vessels, which makes for a perfect, unobstructed place for a morning power-walk, it's teak deck usually wet from morning dew or heavy seas.  Three walks around the deck equals one statue mile and as I usually walked very early in the morning, I normally had the entire deck to myself, or occasionally just a few others, fairly remarkable considering the number of passengers on board, most sleeping in due to their nighttime activities.

Nonetheless, there is the inevitable feeling that you are always being marketed to, and later in the day it is sometimes hard to find a quiet corner.  For us, one of the big negative aspects of Holland America is that they still allow smoking on the verandah balcony, including cigar smoking, so if you are a non-smoker (and militant non-smokers as we are  -- Lady, can't you read the sign, smoking kills!), and you have a balcony, you are left to the vagaries of who might be next to you or over or under you if you want to step out and enjoy your own balcony.

For this reason, we now only book ocean view (no balcony) on Holland America, the irony being, on this particular trip, our stateroom was (unknown to us after much research) under the specialty restaurant kitchen and for some reason they'd be banging away, perhaps throwing pots and pans into the dishwasher, in the middle of the night.  After four nights of being awakened, and complaining, HA finally moved us to another stateroom, our friends Susan and Harry also moving with us to an adjoining stateroom.  We had assurances that those next to us did not smoke and therefore we accepted these verandah rooms as compromise, despite the inconvenience of moving.

Ironically, our one meal in that same specialty restaurant was a disaster.  My halibut completely dry and inedible, the shrimp cocktail served lukewarm, the maitre d insisting that that's how it's served at really fine restaurants!  Harry's porterhouse was tough and the coffee undrinkable. The main dining room on the other hand was consistently fine, food quality and variety, and in addition we enjoyed getting to know our table mates from Michigan.

We had been to all the ports on this cruise -- Puerto Rico, St. Maarten, Half Moon Cay -- but there was one new one for us, Grand Turk.  The latter and Half Moon Cay have great beaches, and what else to do in the Caribbean?  Grand Turk is a fairly deserted island, perhaps best known for when John Glenn's 1962 Friendship 7 Mercury spacecraft landed in the vicinity.  I remember anxiously following the flight in my college dormitory and Grand Turk meant nothing to me, a remote part of the world I would surely never see.  And here I was merely 52 years later. 

St. Maarten was a sea of humanity -- and that is how the newer cruise ships are impacting the cruising experience, even if you are not on one of the megaships.  There were seven ships at the dock in St. Maarten and one at anchor.  The ENTIRE island's population is about 70,000 and the day we were there those ships were delivering 24,000 tourists!  Imagine the lines and lack of facilities.  What's the sense?  After a brief walk, we returned to the ship for peace and quiet.

Puerto Rico's Old Town is always a fun place to walk around.  

Meanwhile, days at sea there were some 60 women engaged in Mah Jongg battle, including Susan and   Frankly, being with our friends, and being able to relax and read were the high points of the trip for me.  Poor Susan and Ann returned each afternoon slightly frustrated by the Mah Jongg games, Ann in particular who said she never played more horribly.  I don't understand the game, have no intention of doing so (actually, I don't play any games, too little time), but from what I do understand it is like most of them, a mix of luck and skill.  I think Chess -- which I used to play -- is the only game where pure skill prevails.  Any game that involves luck doesn't seem to be worth playing (it's too much like life!).  And Mah Jongg tournaments are intense, emotions running high, accusations of cheating, cat fights galore! (Again, too much like life!)

Ann, while Harry and I had to "endure" the hot tub, conversation with some of the other passengers (when they were awake) and then reading.

It appeared that Susan, with a very high score at the end, had a good chance of winning some tournament prize money, and we all had her hopes up, but it turns out someone incorrectly tallied her score and in the end, she dropped out of contention.  Meanwhile, Ann was in the running for the booby prize but at least escaped with her dignity.. On the very last night of the cruise, with suitcases mostly packed, she was invited to play in another "mini tournament" (these organized for the women who just did not get enough MJ during the day).  It turns out, she was on fire and came out not only the top money winner but with a final score higher than anyone had achieved so far.  Needless to say, she skipped back to our cabin with her $60 as happy a winner as anyone ever saw! 

All in all, it was a very relaxing and fun cruise, remarkably covering some 2,221 nautical miles in a week.  That's a lot of cruising and overall Holland America did a fine job providing enjoyable meals and excellent services.  I love being at sea when I have some time to read, and although there was a lot to do, I did manage to finish two books.  More on those in the next entry. 

 

"Existential Illegitimacy"

We recently returned from a week cruise in the Caribbean, something I'll write about once I have some photos assembled, but on our way home from the cruise terminal parking lot, between Ft. Lauderdale and our home, a message was flashing on I95 about a traffic alert.  I checked Google Maps, and there didn't seem to be any delays but a few minutes later, on an overpass, there was a terribly disorganized "protest" with few protesters in attendance (I guess the authorities thought this would tie up traffic), holding signs for the motorists passing underneath, reading "Obama is a Muslim").  How sad, I thought, wasn't this yesterday's "news" or are these zombies conditioned by the Tea Party media, condemned to be the walking dead for their propaganda?

But it is something deeper, sadder than that, and especially on this Martin Luther King Day it is propitious to be reminded of the racially charged roots of such "protests" (and the "existential illegitimacy" of Obama's presidency).  In this regard, Sunday's New York Times carried an especially insightful article by Greg Grandin, a professor of history at New York University, Obama, Melville and the Tea Party.  Melville, you ask?  Ironically, one of the books on my "reread" pile is Benito Cereno, a short novella that I had mostly forgotten (as I had read it in college ages ago) and Grandin makes the association between Melville's classic and Obama's ongoing problem as a black in a Christian white man's world: "Benito Cereno" is based on a true historical incident, which I started researching around the time Mr. Obama announced his first bid for the presidency. Since then, I’ve been struck by the persistence of fears, which began even before his election, that Mr. Obama isn’t what he seems: that instead of being a faithful public servant he is carrying out a leftist plot hatched decades ago to destroy America; or if not that, then he is a secret Muslim intent on supplanting the Constitution with Islamic law; or a Kenyan-born anti-colonialist out to avenge his native Africa.

No other American president has had to face, before even taking office, an opposition convinced of not just his political but his existential illegitimacy. In order to succeed as a politician, Mr. Obama had to cultivate what many have described as an almost preternatural dominion over his inner self. He had to become a “blank screen,” as Mr. Obama himself has put it, on which others could project their ideals..... Yet this intense self-control seems to be what drives the president’s more feverish detractors into a frenzy; they fill that screen with hatreds drawn deep from America’s historical subconscious.

Indeed.  One of my blog articles, written in May 2008 as the presidential elections were gearing up, was an "Open Letter" to the then Senator Obama, in which I said Today is not too far removed from then. [The "then" I was referring to was the 1970s] Our economic difficulties of mounting national debt and a declining dollar, a decaying infrastructure, and the lack of better healthcare for our sick and better education for our young can be traced to a needless war, and to being hostage, once again, to oil producing nations. Racial and religious divisiveness still erodes the fabric of our society. The view of America abroad has undermined our ability to effectively deal with terrorism and to address global environmental issues. Politics again slithers along a slippery Machiavellian slope.

Since then, I've had my problems with Obama's presidential style, his academic standoffishness (perhaps Governor Christie could have given him a few pointers in good old fashioned strong-arm politics). But, looking back, even with the brinksmanship of Tea Party politics he's had to contend with, there has been progress. The economy is one, unemployment still too high, but slowly declining.  And soon after Obama was elected, the Dow dropped a few hundred points and the conservative press was immediately crying, SEE! For months, it was all Obama's fault (although he had nothing to do with it) and now, years later, with everyone's 401Ks flush with gains from a rising market, and real estate making a recovery, not a peep about his being responsible (which I would only attribute indirectly anyhow).  And even now that Osama bin Laden has been killed and al Qaeda in disarray (although, admittedly, not entirely eliminated -- almost an impossibility due to its decentralized organizational structure), little credit is given to Obama, but only just imagine that if bin Laden was still at large, you'd never hear the end of it from the Tea Party.  And Obama supporting the efforts of NSA surveillance to minimize terrorist threats -- how many conservatives would have jumped on board that train until they discovered Obama was at the wheel?  Meanwhile, hydraulic fracturing has made us more energy independent, something Obama has supported in spite of certain aspects being under assault from environmental organizations. 

Obama's signature piece of legislation has been the Affordable Care Act, and the conservative press was delighted at the very poorly planned launch via the government web site.  But as a cynic about many aspects of government, I can only attribute that to the "a camel is a horse designed by a committee" syndrome, not to mention the inherent complexity of the entire program.  But it is a start.  For a wonderful tongue-in-cheek "news report" on the program, read The Onion's Nation Recalls Simpler Time When Health Care System Was Broken Beyond Repair

Are things perfect, or as far along as we would like?  No.  In the absence of sound fiscal policy from a dysfunctional Congress, the Federal Reserve has had to use monetary policy to stabilize the economy -- even to bring us from the brink of a depression (although deflationary clouds still gather).  We've substituted soaring public debt for private debt and a banking system gone wild (remember the days of unregulated CMOs?). And another Sword of Damocles hanging over the nation is its inability to balance the legitimate spirit of the Second Amendment -- the right to bear arms -- and the demands of the NRA. (I say "legitimate spirit" as the weaponry when the Second Amendment was drafted was nothing like today's.)

There have been twenty mass shootings since Obama became president and he is helpless to do anything about it without the complete cooperation of Congress.  After the shooting in Newton, Connecticut, only a few miles from where we lived for twenty plus years, there was a ground swell (verbal only) in Congress to do something to control the sale of certain automatic weapons, but by the time the NRA got finished with their lobbying campaign, that effort was AK47ed to death.  Explain that failure to the parents of the children slaughtered.

So if Obama's presidency is finally judged as mediocre at best, read Benito Cereno to understand the historic etiology of his predicament.  As Grandin says, it represents a new kind of racism, based not on theological or philosophical doctrine but rather on the emotional need to measure one’s absolute freedom in inverse relation to another's absolute slavishness. This was a racism that was born in chattel slavery but didn’t die with chattel slavery, instead evolving into today’s cult of individual supremacy, which, try as it might, can’t seem to shake off its white supremacist roots.

Russo's Elsewhere

Richard Russo's Elsewhere is a painfully honest memoir.  It is lovingly detailed.  It appears that we have some shared family history, his novels focusing on many similar issues particularly his relationship with his mother, the theme of Elsewhere.  He is among the many contemporary American writers I admire most, such as John Updike, Pat Conroy, Anne Tyler, Anita Shrive, John Irving, Richard Yates, Richard Ford, Russell Banks, Philip Roth, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver (among others, I'm sure I've left someone out). They speak directly to me.  And somewhere in this blog, I've connected these writers to many of my own family issues.

But of all of them, Russo's writings seem to come closest to my own family angst (see my entry on his novel, That Old Cape Magic), and Elsewhere hits my funny bone as well and reveals the roots of his fictional world. Russo had almost a symbiotic relationship with his mother, but it was an approach-avoidance issue, a mother who on the one hand he tried to keep at whatever distance he could (without much success), for the sake of his individuality and for the sake of his family, but, on the other, obligingly (and lovingly), took responsibility for, particularly as she aged. 

When Russo was a young child, his mother worked for GE in Schenectady, living with Russo's grandparents in Gloversville and commuting (after divorcing her ne'er-do-well husband - the kind portrayed in Russo's Nobody's Fool and The Risk Pool), asserting her independence by paying her parents rent.  During WW II, when my father was away at the front, my own mother worked for Atlantic Burners (a local heating oil distribution company) in Queens, NY as a secretary/administrative assistant and for years I would hear about how much she missed being a professional woman.  We too lived with her parents at the time, with my primary care being passed onto my grandmother and great-grandmother, who lived with us as well.

 

Russo details the decline of the leather business, it's impact on his home town, Gloversville, and his family, a story eerily close to Philip Roth's family's leather business, and the decline of Newark, as told in his novel American Pastoral, perhaps one of the best novels of the late 20th century.  These were generations of families in the same business, as mine was in the photography business for more than 100 years, and, that kind of business too changed to such an extent that it eventually just faded away.

I was amused by Russo's statement My mother did love mirrors, often practicing in front of them.  My mother liked to pose and preen in front of mirrors, painstakingly putting on her make-up. In fact, she was very caught up in her appearance and good looks.  She knew she attracted men, something that infuriated my father at times. 

 

But from there, Russo's relationship with his mother, and me with mine, diverge greatly, mostly because, unlike Russo's parents, my parents stayed married (when they should have been divorced) and I was not an only child.  There was my sister in the mix, and that changed the dynamics.  During my troubled teenage years, I made it a point of being out of the house as much as possible as my parents waged war.  And after college I moved further away and by the time of my second marriage, I was hardly speaking to my mother (or vise versa), not that I'm particularly proud of that period, but I had to protect my wife and kids.  She was a rageaholic, perpetually assigning blame for her unhappiness to others. She also was a borderline alcoholic which only fed the flames. Nonetheless, we had some kind of reconciliation before her death, for which I am grateful. 

In later years, my mother turned to art and she was an accomplished painter of still life, portraits, mostly working in oils.  I'll give her credit for seeking a creative outlet, and she was a good artist but sadly, except for this pencil sketch she did of me (a very idealized version of what I looked like at about 12), I have only one of her oil paintings.

But getting back to Elsewhere, Russo had the devotion of a saint toward his mother, who had declared, basically that it was he and she against the world, making him promise (as a child) to always look out for one another, almost as if he were her spouse, not her son.  Even in later years, after Russo had married (his wife, Barbara, another saint as well) and had daughters of his own, she reminded him of their "pledge" to one another:

One of my mother's most cherished convictions was that back on Helwig Street - she and I had pledged an oath, each to the other. She and I would stand together against whatever configuration the world's opposition took-her parents, my father, Gloversville, monetary setbacks. Now, forty-some years later, I was a grown man with a wife and kids, but this original bond, she believed, was still in force. However fond she was of Barbara, however much she loved her granddaughters, none of that altered our original contract, which to her way of thinking made us indivisible. She'd never really considered us two separate people but rather one entity, oddly cleaved by time and gender, like fraternal twins somehow born twenty-five years apart, destined in some strange way to share a common destiny.

His dissection of her motives, self defense mechanisms, lack of friendships, dependency on him demonstrates that great writers are great psychologists.  Later he learns that his father's offhand foreboding that "she's crazy" had some grounding in that she was OCD

Still, his mother taught him to persevere (although never understanding why he would want to be a writer with his fine academic credentials that would assuredly lead to a tenured, secure position).  He even chose lower paying positions. teaching less, to pursue his writing objectives, not succeeding at first, sort of like when I decided to go into publishing rather than into a more lucrative insurance underwriting position (at the time), as well as choosing not to go into my father's business...

Long after she returned to Gloversville from Tucson, I began a decade-long academic nomadship during which I jumped from job to job, trying to teach and be a writer at the same time. For a while, after our daughters came along, we were even poorer than we'd been as graduate students. And I was a bad boy. Caring not a whit about tenure and promotion, thumbed my nose at the advice of department chairs about what I needed to do to succeed in the university. I left jobs for other jobs that paid less but offered more time out of the classroom, In the summer, when many of my colleagues taught extra classes, I wrote stories and spent money we didn't have on postage to submit them to magazines. I wrote manically, obsessively, but also, for a time, not very well. I wrote about crime and cities and women and other things I knew very little about in a language very different from my own natural voice, which explained why the editors weren't much interested.

Later in life Russo finds that voice, and a discipline, and has an epiphany one day as he is looking at the books and periodical articles he had published -- that his writing was the result of an obsessive personality, like his mother's ...

The biggest difference between my mother and me, I now saw clearly, had less to do with either nature or nurture than with blind dumb luck, the third and often lethal rail of human destiny. My next obsession might well have been a woman, or a narcotic, a bottle of tequila. Instead I'd stumbled on storytelling and become infected. Halfway through my doctoral dissertation, I'd nearly quit so I could write full-time. Not because I imagined I was particularly gifted or that one day I'd be able to earn a living. I simply had to. It was the game room and the dog track all over again. An unreasoning fit of must. That, no doubt, was what my mother had recognized and abhorred, what had caused her to remind me about my responsibilities as a husband and father.

It didn't take long for me to learn that novel writing was a line of work that suited my temperament and played to my strengths, such as they were. Because - and don't let anybody tell you different - novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy. Feeling your way around in the dark, trying to anticipate the Law of Unintended Consequences. Living with and welcoming uncertainty. Trying something, and when that doesn't work, trying something else. Welcoming clutter. Surrendering a good idea for a better one. Knowing you won't find the finish line for a year or two, or five, or maybe never, without caring much. Putting one foot in front of the other. Taking small bites, chewing thoroughly. Grinding it out Knowing that when you've finally settled everything that can be, you'll immediately seek out more chaos. Rinse and repeat. Somehow, without ever intending to, I'd discovered how to turn obsession and what my grandmother used to call sheer cussedness - character traits that had dogged both my parents, causing them no end of difficulty - to my advantage. The same qualities that over a lifetime had contracted my mother's world had somehow expanded mine. How and by what mechanism? Dumb luck? Grace? I honestly have no idea. Call it whatever you want - except virtue.

It's a writer's astute introspective view of what writing is all about.  And how one's upbringing and genes ebb and flow in his fiction.

His mother passed on a love of reading, and as Russo says, you can't be a writer without first being a reader.  My own childhood was spent bereft of books and I can't remember my parents reading other than the occasional potboiler, Time and Life magazines, and my father's subscription to the Reader's Digest Condensed Books.  Essentially, I grew up without books, except, of course, at school, and I think that did damage to me as a writer, in spite of writing this blog, and making half assed attempts at short stories and poetry. I rarely read anything on my own other than Jules Verne.

On the other hand, my father instilled a work ethic in me and my mother taught me typing and encouraged my attempts at music (except for the guitar which she condemned).  I still consider typing 70 WPM (unusual for a young man in the 1960s) to be the basis for a successful career, as silly as that might seem.  That is how I got my job in publishing.  And the piano has blossomed into something central in my retirement, a place where I can go to express myself and be at peace with the world. 

Russo was looking at his mother's book collection during one of her many, many moves, all of which Russo was left the responsibility for engineering, commenting...

She claimed to love anything about Ireland or England or Spain, but in fact she needed books in those settings to be warm and comfy, more like Maeve Binchy than William Trevor. Not surprisingly, given that she'd felt trapped most of her life, she loved books about time travel, but only if the places the characters traveled to were ones she was  interested in. She had exactly no interest in the future or in any past that didn't involve romantic adventure.

Still, illuminating though literary taste can be, the more I thought about it, neither my mother's library nor my own meant quite what I wanted it to. If my books were more serious and literary than hers, that was due more to nurture than nature.  If I didn't read much escapist fiction, it was because I lived a blessed life from which I neither needed nor desired to escape.  I wasn't a superior person, just an educated one, and for that in a large measure I had my mother to thank. Maybe she'd tried to talk me out of becoming a writer, but she was more responsible than

anyone for my being one. Back when we lived on Helwig Street, at the end of her long workdays at GE, after making her scant supper and cleaning up, after doing the laundry (without benefit of a washing machine) and ironing, after making sure I was set for school the next day, she might've collapsed in front of the television, but she didn't. She read. Every night. Her taste, unformed as mine would later be by a score of literature professors, was equally dogmatic; she read her Daphne du Mauriers and Mary Stewarts until their covers fell off and had to be replaced. It was from my mother that I learned reading was not a duty but a reward, and from her that I intuited a vital truth: most people are trapped in a solitary existence, a life circumscribed by want and failures of imagination, limitations from which readers are exempt. You can't make a writer without first making a reader, and that's what my mother made me

I can't help but think of Pat Conroy's My Reading Life which is also a memoir, and in which his mother plays a central role in Conroy's love of reading and then writing.  There are so many similarities, including their mothers' shared love of the same novel, Gone With the Wind.

I had a dream after I had read Elsewhere, during the early morning hours when I can at least remember a snippet of what I dream.  I was sitting with Richard Russo's son (he has only daughters), and I mentioned to him that I would like to meet his father, something I didn't feel daunted about (as I felt the one time I might have had the opportunity to meet John Updike at a PEN conference, but did not have the courage or the opportunity, I can no longer remember).  That little boy I was talking to in the dream was obviously me, and as I talked to him, I gradually woke up with a sense of sadness overcoming me, for the lost opportunity, wanting to ask my mother one last question: Why, Mom?    

But Russo's childhood was far from "ideal" as well (is there such a childhood?), such a burden -- the "pledge" his mother made him take as a child.  And yet, he is one of our finest storytellers today.  Richard Russo, thank you for sharing your story with us, for your honesty, and for being the writer you've become.  You were a good son.