There are other people on the ship.
There's Richard and Irene. I've seen them on at least two previous cruises - he tells me this is his third time to hear my talks, and he still doesn't understand them. Two former international school teachers, so we share common ground. Irene has Alzheimer's. I spent an hour talking with them yesterday. Today after the talk, she introduced herself to me again, said it was nice to meet me. They're 80 and 83. After this 74-day cruise, they are getting on a 180-day world cruise just a week or two later. Richard told me that they've already been to all but four of the ports that cruise will stop at.
There's the 76-year-old lady down the hall who dresses like a pasteled version of a Japanese school girl. She comes to my talks and to the Q&A. She locked herself out of her room the other day, so I sent her off to guest services to get a new key card. Turns out she's a 76-year-old man dressing like a Japanese school girl who decided at age 71 to do so. Every now and then he wears a short dress cut to the navel and wide open, but, well, he's a guy, so it's not quite as dramatic, even though it's a dress.
Tom invited me to a beer tasting in his room with his friends Dave and Chris. Tom's been buying beer all over South America, decided to crack open a few. They are building a little boat out of trash on the ship to enter a boat-floating contest in a few days. Tom's room is 7085, deck 7 being the one where all the rich folks stay. His room is the same size as mine on deck 2, only he has a balcony. He's invited me to his birthday party in a couple of days. He's kind of a groupie, and the beer's not that great, but he's OK.
Another Tom called me on my room phone today, said he'd been coming to my talks and has written a poem he'd like to read to me. So I met him down by guest services, and he read me his poem. Funny, clever, good internal rhyme, and has my name in it twice. I think that's a first. I told him he was the first person to call me about reading a poem all day long. Used to be an industrial engineer, then became a Jungian psychologist. Said I was a perfect example of a "trickster".
Wikipedia defines that as "In mythology and the study of folklore and religion, a trickster is a character in a story who exhibits a great degree of intellect or secret knowledge and uses it to play tricks or otherwise disobey normal rules and defy conventional behavior." The Jungian archtype of the trickster is "a character type in storytelling that is often associated with disruption, mischief, and humor. Tricksters are known for their cunning, wit, and unpredictability, which often challenge the status quo and cause unexpected events in stories."
Hmm.
Darma and Deri are my room guys. Filipino. Just as my room guys always are, they are charming, kind, caring, friendly, warm, funny, unflappable, just the most wonderful human beings. They give me extra chocolates on my bed each night for Kam (I'll take them home with me. The chocolates, that is. Not Darma and Deri.) Darma hung a little hook on my door so that I could hang up my Christmas stocking. Nobody sees it. I'm at the very end of the hall. On a previous ship earlier this year, my room guys were named Genk and Gung. Really. They were as wonderful. Walking down a different hall the other day, a room guy named Nuri stopped me to talk. He remembered me from a cruise to Tahiti. I hope it's not because of something hideous I did to the room.
A young woman whose name I did not get (Never get the names of young women. It's a good rule.) joined me in the hot tub tonight. She's been coming to the talks, wanted to get my advice as a writer on a scifi book she's writing about a rogue planet sailing into the solar system and putting the Earth into long-term eclipse. Apocalyptic level eclipse. What did I think of the physics of it? I made stuff up. As is my wont as a trickster.
Another couple, older, came up to me at dinner. Randy and his wife. Said they'd heard me eight years ago on another cruise, were still talking about it together. Yet another couple (we cabbed together to go snorkling) was on a cruise with Kam and me to Iceland and Greenland, were two of the 168 people isolated in their cabins for 10 days with Covid. Saw most of the talks.
And there are folks off the ship. I paid a guy to take me to a beach on Tobago (of Trinidad and Tobago fame). Another Dave. Local guy, very black. Everyone in T&T is very black. About an hour's drive each way. Dropped me off, left me for three hours (didn't pay him yet), came back. Good news for me. On the way back to the ship, we went by his house to change cars. Went inside to meet family and have a whiskey. The language here is English, but it's Patois, a dialect. His daughter is in university in Jamaica studying architecture. He wants me to use him again if I come back, which I might in February. You never know. He's a good guy.
Some folks at dinner were getting their 100 day pins from the cruise line (a marketing gimmick to generate loyalty). I wondered how many days I had. So I figured it out. About 230 days on cruise ships. Or so. Wild.
I also wondered in what bodies of water I had given talks in. On. Over. Whatever. I only give talks when we're at sea, not in port, so I'm always talking on the water somewhere. Not "walking." "Talking." Like, for example:
In the Tasman Sea, the Coral Sea, the Arafura Sea, the Timor Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Balearic Sea, the Alboran Sea, the North Sea, the Labrador Sea, the Sea of Okhotsk, the Bering Sea, the Norwegian Sea, the English Channel, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, the Panama Canal, the Amazon River. And out in the middle of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
North and Central Atlantic ranging from Greenland to Bermuda, and the equitorial central and northeast coast of South America. North, central, equatorial, and South Pacific, from the Aleutians to OZ and NZ, Tahiti, Fiji, Hawaii, Alaska. Plus eastern and western Pacific, from San Diego to Japan. And from Chile to Vancouver all the way up the west coasts of South, Central and North America. East and west coasts of Canada.
Plus, off Tabuaeran (Fanning Island) in the island country of Kiribati (South Pacific), near Aappilattoq and Nanortalik, Greenland, in Prince Christian Sound, Greenland, near Ísafjörður, Iceland, inside the Inside Passage, Alaska, and in Glacier Bay and Prince William Sound, Alaska.
Apparently I kept a list. I don't get any pins, though. You have to pay for your cruises to get pins.
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