​            As soon as Sherrill graduated from college, her mother headed to Hawaii, leaving her in the San Jose apartment they'd shared.  After a year working  at the leper colony on Molokai, Pat moved to Honolulu.  (It didn't take me long to learn that she always followed her own path.)  From time to time over the years, we visited her, although not at the leper colony.  Sometimes, Pat visited us.  As time went by, we got to know to Hawaii fairly well; several of my stories have been set there.            

        December 1971, Sherrill, Simone, and I invaded Hawaii, ready to explore the islands and celebrate Christmas with Pat. Simone called her tutu, the Hawaiian word she had learned meant grandmother. We had no doubt that we'd have a good holiday, but, at the same time, Sherrill was nervous about us spending two weeks with her fun-loving, free-spirited mother. 
​
            We frolicked on the beaches, rode out from Waikiki on a catamaran, and visited the nearby Honolulu Zoo, where we tried unsuccessfully to stare down the pink flamingos.  Simone picked up shells on the beach until she had quite a collection.  After a while, they started to stink.  Sherrill explained that they must have had live creatures still at home in them, so, pretty as they were, they weren't going back to California with us.
            In those days, only a few big hotels marred the beauty of the beach.  Despite encroaching development, the two main hotels at Waikiki still were the historic Moana, built in 1901, and the Royal Hawaiian from the roaring twenties, as pink as the flamingos.  People were outraged that some *!%*&!* hotel had dared ruin the view by building a tower in front of Diamond Head.  Ever since then, postcard photographs of Diamond Head have been cropped to remove the unsightly hotel complex.  

            We may have been in the tropics, but Christmas was visible everywhere.  Passing the Ala Moana shopping center, we couldn't miss the giant Santa Claus in flowered shorts riding a surfboard.  The International Marketplace by Waikiki beach was gaudier than usual with a layer of holiday decorations over the Pacific island motifs.  Holiday visitors, including us, were buying aloha shirts, muumuus, and wide-brimmed hats.  
            We drove across the island to the Polynesian Cultural Center, created by the Mormons, who over the decades have worked energetically to convert south sea islanders.  (An uncle went on a mission to Hawaii in the 1920s with that objective.  He told me once that he wasn't successful, but had a hell of a time, anyway, and returned an unbeliever.)  The villages at the cultural center did celebrate the diversity of the Polynesian islands and cultures—even if it became somewhat slick in the process.  Walking between the villages of Tonga, Tahiti, Fiji, Samoa, and the Maori of New Zealand, we got a more or less accurate—although prettified and (dare I say?) condescending—sense of how the different groups lived, of their music and dancing, homes and food, weapons and artwork. 

            Vegetation grew to alarming size on those islands.  It reminded me of those old sci-fi movies in which atomic radiation caused ants to grow to the size of a Plymouth station wagon.  I could imagine one of those monster blossoms grabbing me by the throat and sucking the life out of me.  One day, we passed miles of enormous hedges of overwhelmingly fragrant plumeria followed by brazen displays of bougainvillea on our way to Sea Life Park, where Simone had a chance to watch dolphins, sea lions, penguins, and other creatures of the Pacific—all of them friendlier, I thought, than the grotesque plant life. 
            When we got back to Pat's apartment, she was entertaining a dashing fellow with a well-clipped gray moustache on his upper lip and a highball in one tanned hand.  She had one, too.  She introduced us and offered us drinks, but he left after a few minutes.  She turned to fix herself another drink, but stumbled on her flip-flops and nearly fell.  
            "Everybody in Hawaii wears flip-flops!" she explained, with an apologetic, yet defiant, smile. 
​
            A little turboprop plane took us to Kauai, which back then seemed mostly unspoiled by tourism.  In our rental car, we explored the spectacular variegated red and orange cliffs of the Waimea Canyon, the "Grand Canyon of the Pacific," then the rain forest and cliffs of the Napali coast.  While Simone and Sherrill stayed at the beach, I hiked on a cliff-side trail until I met two nearly naked, darkly tanned people who obviously were living up there in a cave.  We exchanged a few words, then I walked back to the beach.  According to those two, a surprising number of people were living in caves along there.  This was the time, as we knew, when more and more people were embracing alternative lifestyles.   
            Maui seemed only a little busier than Kauai.  In Lahaina, we stayed in the historic Pioneer Inn, where Simone became fond of a wooden sea captain who lived on the front porch.   We had great fun watching boats out in the water, some anchored, others passing by.  Somebody claimed that one elegant yacht with gleaming woodwork was Peter Fonda's, but we never knew one way or another.  

​If you enjoy these posts, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including to several complete short stories and excerpts from my novels.   

During our 52 years of marriage, Sherrill and I shared many wonderful times together.  One of the best was our trip to Japan with our daughter, Simone, in 1970.  Here's the second installment about that trip.
 
            Sometimes, as I explore this maze of memories from so many decades ago, I'm not entirely sure of the order in which events happened—or even where.  Did we talk with the group of visiting Spanish students at Mr. Aso or at Beppu?  Was it Kyoto where I had to go back for my camera?  Or Nara?  And Monkey Mountain?  Did we actually go there or did I just read about it?  It's bad enough when today I can't remember what room I left my eyeglasses in, but forget our past?  After all, it's our past that makes us who we are.
           These days, I can look up facts and even pictures on the internet, but that doesn't truly address these questions.  Where?  Here or there?  When?  How?  Really?  Mostly, I think, the memories return and organize themselves properly, but can I sure?
            So where are we, now?  Still in Japan, I think, on our way to the world's fair. 
 
          A busy day of traveling reminded us again that Japan is a collection of peaks thrust from the bottom of the sea, many of them still alive with volcanic energy.  By ferry and bus we crossed bays and bridges between maybe a dozen of those islands and then finally climbed into the mountains until we reached our next hotel near the top of Mt. Aso, the world's largest active volcanic crater.  From the hotel, we could walk to the rim of the bubbling caldera and a view down hundreds of feet to a green lake shooting gaseous steam and boiling mud into the air.  The few people we saw hiking closer had covered their noses and mouths. 
            Sherrill always wanted to see a volcano erupt, but it didn't seem to be happening there, only that churning and spitting.  And how close would we want to be to the action, anyway?  The mountain-top hotel we stayed in on that trip closed long ago.  Recent photos on the internet show the remains of rotting buildings in a jungle of steam and giant weeds.  By contrast, the ryokan we stayed in the next day at Beppu, another hot springs spa, has flourished.    
            "We're sleeping on the floor?"
            Simone gazed down at the low futons in our ryokan room.   
            "It'll be fun," I promised.  Hoped.
             She pounded one of the firmly-stuffed cylinders at the ends of our futons.
            "A Japanese pillow," I explained.
 
            Built over scores of hot springs continually puffing billows of steam, the town of Beppu seemed to float among gray-white clouds pierced here and there by pine trees.  Sherrill took Simone to the women's spa in our hotel and I tried the spa for men, bigger than I expected, with pools of varying size and temperature.  Those days we spent among forested mountains, hot springs, and slumbering volcanoes were a nice change from the exciting, crowded Japanese cities we'd visited earlier.  Soon, we'd be on the way to quite different adventures, including Osaka and Expo 70.  

​Early one morning, we boarded a small cruise ship to sail the length of Japan's Inland Sea to Osaka.  We had our own little room with a window, but much of that long day, as we passed hundreds of pine-covered islands, we spent either on the deck or in the ship's lounge with its large windows.  We didn't want to miss a single sight, not one port or fishing village or any of the continuing parade of boats and ships.  Sherrill often had said how much she loved being on water—and if she couldn't be on the water, she wanted to live by it, so we always did.  
            "Look!"  Simone pointed to one of the large whirlpools that appeared from time to time, shades of blue and green and foamy white, revolving  faster and faster around each other, as if trying to suck a passing boat to the blurry depths.  
            A Japanese boy about Simone's age and his mother sat near us in the lounge, opposite the doors that opened to the deck.  He and Simone eyed each other, then slipped into a mostly wordless game.  Sherrill and I smiled at the boy's mother, she offered us a modest smile in return.  Somehow, the two children communicated enough to spend a contented half hour or more together.  After a while, the boy's mother took him away, maybe to lunch.  Before long, we went in search of food, too, and eventually down to our room. 
            We napped, waking to see hundreds of bright lights in the growing darkness, many scattered over huge cranes and others decorating massive ships.  The spectacle went on and on, until we fell asleep again.  Later, we realized that it had to have been Kobe, then the world's busiest container port.  When we woke again, we were docking at Osaka. 
            At last, later that morning,  we bused to Expo 70, billed as the biggest exposition the world had ever seen.  Seventy-seven countries were represented, so we knew we'd never see more than part of it, even with the two full days we had there.  We wandered through a huge Japanese garden that traced the history of Japanese garden styles.  By now, you may have noticed a recurring theme in these memories: Sherrill's love of gardens and gardening.  Sherrill and Simone particularly enjoyed Singapore's pavilion, its traditional-style building set in its own garden that featured a lake, tropical birds, turtles, even alligators.  Although most pavilions were ultra modern, several others for countries Sherrill and I would visit a decade or two later—including Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam—were built primarily in their traditional architectural styles, emphasizing the natural over the futuristic.
            Lunch that first day took us into the air.  We were given a box lunch as we stepped into a closed-in gondola in a new kind of Ferris wheel and rose into the sky, where we could see all of Expo and had time to enjoy both the food and the view.  The expo grounds were so huge, we used the monorail and moving walks to help us get around.  We couldn't decide if it was significant that the Soviet pavilion soared upward, while the U.S. pavilion hugged the ground with its low translucent dome.  We made a point of visiting the Japanese Folk Crafts museum and Sumitomo's pavilion of fairy tales of the world.  The Scandinavian pavilion was ahead of its time with a warning about the impact of global pollution. 
            Starting with the first great exhibitions in London, New York, and Paris, the emphasis was on material progress, inventions, the advancing industrial age changing the ways in which people would live.  Each exposition sought to dazzle visitors with new technology more than the previous one had.  Expo 70, as I remember it, seemed to have a rather different goal.  Instead of featuring an Eiffel Tower, giant gun, or rocket ship, it displayed a more humanistic approach with its wide-eyed Tower of the Sun in the central festival plaza, a stylized, friendly, almost cuddly figure.  The most important nod to the triumph of science that we saw at the fair was the U. S. display of moon rocks brought back by Apollo 12 the year before.
            I suspect that few experiences can color our vision of the future as forcefully as a world's fair.  Walking past Expo 70's pavilions and wandering through some of them (after standing in lines, in many cases), examining exhibits and gathering souvenirs, did provoke new ideas and suggest new destinations  for future travels and experiences.  Why not go to these places?  Why not discover Southeast Asia, the Middle East, even places we'd never heard of? 
            The world is out there, so explore it.   

To be continued.... 

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            Sherrill collected dreams: file folders, envelopes, boxes, drawers of dreams—brochures, magazine and newspaper clippings,  books, postcards, and maps for future travels, all dreams yet to become memories, carefully organized and catalogued, places to explore, discover, someday remember.  She thought of herself as a practical, sensible person, but over five decades, she collected and brought out those dreams, some small, some big.  At the right time, she'd give me the file, open the box, spread out the map, and the dream would be on the way to becoming reality.  If not this year, then maybe next year, sometime down the road, often sooner than we might think.    
            We agreed that we couldn't miss Expo 70, a new world's fair just two years after our first.  Plus, it was a wonderful excuse to see Japan—but how would we do it?  It would be our first trip to a part of the world we knew little about.  One of Sherrill's clippings had the answer: the Japan Travel Bureau in San Francisco.  They put together a tour for us so we could travel independently, but with their help.  During the weeks we were there, an agent magically appeared at each stop, to get us on or off a train, take us to or from a hotel, guide us at a site. 
            When our Japan Air flight stopped in Anchorage for refueling, we had time to walk around a bit, despite patches of snow on the ground, and to buy four and a half year-old Simone an Eskimo doll.  By the time we reached our hotel in Tokyo, we were tired and hungry.  Simone was in the best shape because she'd slept the most on the plane.  We rested a while and then made our way to a restaurant in the hotel.  Most of the dishes on the menu were illustrated with color photographs, as we soon discovered is typical in Japan.  Some restaurants even had displays of plastic copies of the different dishes.  However, we didn't see much that looked familiar.  We ordered ice cream for Simone and then pointed to a photograph of something that maybe we'd seen before.  It turned out to be steak tartar, not what we'd expected.  With a flourish, the young waitress cracked an egg over the raw beef, then exploded in shy giggles: a double yolk!  A sign of good luck, she told us.  Good.  We had a feeling we'd need it.  
            "Here comes the Bullet Train," someone called as we waited on the platform for our train at Tokyo's Asakusa Station the next morning.
            Simultaneously, everyone on the platform turned to look, but it shot past without stopping in such a blur, that we could only laugh.  Then, a little later, by train and bus, we climbed to the great mountain shrine of Nikko, where we found scattered patches of snow like sugar dusting the rocks and gravel around the ornately carved temples and pagodas.  We let Simone play in it for a while, since that was only the second time she'd encountered snow.  There wasn't much of it, but it was real.  She also was delighted by the evocative, humorous carving of the Three Wise Monkeys at Nikko. 
            "Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" they warned us. 
            As the days swept us along, we visited tall Japanese castles like frosted white wedding cakes, massive statues of Buddha that astonished us with their rotund beauty, peaceful lakes surrounded by pine forests, and hot springs pushing up from the volcanic turmoil under the island.  A display of Japanese wedding kimonos impressed Simone so much that before we left Japan we shipped home a Japanese wedding doll in just such a splendid kimono.  Meanwhile, we bought her a blossom-covered kimono just her size.
            In a park next to one of the shrines, Simone gave a coin to one of the priests and then chose an o-mikuji paper fortune from a box.  Our local guide read it, explained that it was a small blessing for a small person, and then attached it to one of the fat little pine trees that already were dressed in hundreds of white papers.
             At last, early one morning, we boarded the famous 125 m.p.h. Bullet Train, then the fastest train in the world.  On the way to the city of Nagoya we glimpsed a brief, misty view of Mt. Fuji's delicate peak.  A mix of ancient and super-modern, Nagoya  surprised us.  At first, the white bulk of the huge castle on its hill, rebuilt after 1945, seemed to dominate the city, but much of the city also was commercial and industrial.  The neon signs of Japanese characters along the streets were beautiful, but we were glad that when it mattered we had Japan Travel's agents to help us.  On our own at lunch time, we explored an underground city of stores, restaurants, small shops, and cafes, one of which we stepped into at random—an informal place in which local workers were eating. A pair of them came over to our table to help us order from the photographs on the menu and to show us—especially Simone—how to use chopsticks.  
            In Japan, the Easter Bunny brings white eggs?  The evening we arrived in the ancient capital of Kyoto, Sherrill reminded me that the next day was Easter.  We couldn't let Simone think that the Easter Bunny forgot her.  After dinner, I left Simone and Sherrill in the hotel and went out hunting.  Candy was easy to find.  Street corner peddlers, I discovered, sold cooked eggs—uncolored but at least hardboiled.  I filled my pockets with them and snuck them into our room.  While Simone was asleep we hid the eggs.  The next morning, she found them all, including one stuck in the bathtub drain.  When she was surprised by their lack of color, we explained that was the way the Japanese liked them.  How odd, said her expression, but okay.
            A busy Easter day in Kyoto took us to the glittering Golden Pavilion, the old Imperial Palace, Buddhist temples, and Shinto shrines.  The next day, we rode a bus into the mountains to Nara, an even older city, where we visited many exquisite temples and shrines, plus the largest temple in the country, clouds of cherry blossoms floating above our heads and snow crunching beneath our feet the whole time.  Then we strolled in the deer park, where Simone fed crackers to the friendly deer.  Later, when we walked around in the hotel and went to dinner, she wore her new kimono.  Several times, Japanese ladies stopped us to adjust the kimono and retie the belt.  Apparently, they were charmed by this little girl in her flowery kimono.  The same thing happened whenever she wore it during the rest of trip.  To their eyes it always was tied wrong until they fixed it.
            The next day took us to both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the atomic bombs were dropped in 1945, a very different and sobering experience. Sherrill and I took turns in the museums.  Simone was too young to understand what she would have seen in them.  Between the two cities, we rode a ferry to Miyajima—the Island of the gods—to see the shrine, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the famous floating Tori Gate. 
            "It's not really floating," Simone told us, as we admired its austere beauty from the shore.  "Is it?"
            That evening, we bused past billows of volcanic smoke and boiling hot springs into the Unzen mountains and our next hotel.  Sherrill's boxes of clippings included articles about Japanese spas and hot springs since we both loved soaking in hot water, but we didn't realize then that Unzen was famous as Japan's deadliest volcano.  We might have been nervous if we'd known that it killed 15,000 people in the past, and that in the future it would destroy thousands of homes and kill nearly 50 people.  Fortunately, that was two decades after we were there.  We were lucky that this unpredictable mountain was quiet in 1970.  Even Sherrill's clippings couldn't have predicted the future.  

To be continued.... 

            If you enjoy these posts, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including to several complete short stories and excerpts from my novels.  Feel free to share the posts with anyone you think would enjoy them.

         The world is changing!" each generation announces, but sometimes it really is.
      New ideas and attitudes erupted across the globe, especially among young people, as the nineteen-sixties catapulted to their noisy end—ideas about justice and what made a good life.  These ideas, of course, had been lurking around before, but now they were pushing out of the shadows, brazen and insistent.  In Berkeley, Sherrill and I were at the first "teach-in" about the Vietnam War, where Norman Mailer, Alan Watts, and Dick Gregory, among others, spoke.  Dr. Spock, whose book we were using to raise baby Simone, gave an impassioned appeal for salvaging the future for these and coming generations.  
       The musical Hair brought these issues plus a new inclusive approach to society to a wider audience.  When we drove through Toronto on our way to Expo 67, college students saw our Berkeley stickers and cheered.  The good life, it seemed, was not all about money. 
       Serious questions were in the air, like philosophical pollen.  Sherrill and I, not kids any more, began looking at who we were and what our family of three needed.  Part of this search included getting together with other families to look into the idea of communal living.  Our informal group met for what turned out to be more than two years.  A lot of reading, a lot of pondering, and a lot of talking were involved.
            Usually, we met in each other's homes, but on occasion some of us went further afield to explore places where we might settle, live, and raise families.  Mendocino on the north coast was a possibility, but so was the area around Santa Cruz on the central coast, as were parts of Oregon.  Sometimes, it seemed as if we were following the course of the nineteenth century settlers who came west looking for the good life.  We debated whether we wanted an urban commune or a rural one.  Discussions about this and other questions could expand into hours or weeks and still not be resolved.  We were better at debate, it seemed, than at consensus.
            "How can we live without the cultural advantages of the city—for ourselves and our kids?"
            "They may not live at all unless we get them away from these violent cities."
         Okay, we didn't always agree, but we had no doubt  that our talents and skills would work together to create a new paradise on this shaky coast.  Some of us were experienced at organization, others at carpentry or gardening, some at child care and education.  Some wanted to plunge ahead, confident that  problems would work themselves out; others thought that details should be settled first. One lesson we learned through all this was that people aren't consistent or easy to drop into boxes, but you can be pretty sure that their personal quirks are unlikely to change.
            One Saturday morning, Sherrill, Simone, and I set out with another family to spend a couple of days together in the redwoods.  Very cleverly, we divided up in two cars: the two wives in one car with the food, the other husband and I in the second car with the children.  Guess who got lost?  Eventually, we two guys managed to find the cabins and our wives, but we had some hungry little kids by the time we all settled down to eat.
          "Why a commune?" people asked us, a question that we often still discussed when we got together—and, even more important, why did the idea appeal to each of us?  Some reasons were practical.  In a commune, we could share household expenses and responsibilities.  Whether we lived in one large house or several smaller houses grouped together, we'd only need one vacuum, one washing machine and dryer, fewer pots and pans.  We could take turns preparing meals, cleaning house, working in the garden, caring for children.  We probably wouldn't need as many cars, so that would be good for the environment, as well as save money.  Some of us might work outside the commune, bringing in money, others might contribute by working only in the commune.  We had that part more or less worked out.
            Other reasons for being part of a commune were more varied and personal.  Two of the children in our group had no siblings; if we all lived together, the children would grow up like brothers and sisters.  Sherrill admitted to everyone during one of our meetings that when she was a child most of the time she wasn't part of anything that could be called a nuclear family.  Often, she was alone with her mother, although  for a while also with a stepfather and stepbrother, sometimes with her grandmother or other relatives, sometimes mostly taking care of herself.  A commune, she hoped, would be a stable family for all of us, sharing everything, taking care of each other.  
            We didn't spend all of our time talking, although looking back it often seems as if we did.  We made serious efforts to develop practical ways we could support a commune.  For a while, we planned opening a nursery school.  As a children's librarian who worked with school children in both public schools and the library, Sherrill had an up-to-date teaching credential.  Others of us would bring musical, artistic, and other practical skills to the mix.  Then it turned out that the place where we hoped to open the school couldn't be changed enough to pass safety inspections. 
            We knew that we weren't the only people exploring ideas about communal living.  We corresponded with active communes in other parts of the country and from time to time families and individuals dropped by to find out if we all were heading in the same direction.  Occasionally, they stayed for a while, but then for their own reasons moved on.  
            We never did pull ourselves together into a working commune.  Maybe we were too busy studying the options and talking about them to follow through.  After a couple of years, we brought in a facilitator to help us work out with a 24-hour encounter group any issues we might have had.  Encounter groups were a popular concept then.  I seem to recall spending most of ours under a coffee table.  
            Whatever the reasons that the commune didn't succeed, the time wasn't wasted.  Along the way, we each discovered the kind of life that suited us as individuals and as families and made life-long friends—as did our young children, who, years later, have adult or soon to be adult children of their own. 
​
To be continued....  
  

            In case you are just joining us: My wife, Sherrill, and I were married 52 years, during which we visited more than 60 countries.  This is number eight of a projected series about our lives and travels.  If you scroll down, you'll come to the previous posts all the way to number one, when we were married en route to Mexico.  I plan to post a new chapter every Monday. 
​
            Growing up, neither Sherrill nor I had much money, but we were lucky early in our marriage when some came our way from my writing, giving us the opportunity to travel, which we'd both always wanted to do.  When we weren't seeing the world, she was back at her job as a children's librarian and I was at my desk writing.  We never would've dreamed that we'd be able to spend four weeks driving around the British Isles, but there we were, near the end of a month doing that.  After saying goodbye to our Mini, we took a cab to the Victorian Russell Hotel in London's Bloomsbury, where Virginia Woolf and her circle once ruled.  Sherrill had been heroic during the past weeks, but she was liberated from driving for the rest of the trip.  
            The next day, we rode the Tube out to Kew Gardens, where the huge greenhouse and the plants inside teased our imaginations.  Most of them were exotic for Britain, but some, Sherrill pointed out, would have no trouble thriving in California, with its Mediterranean climate.
            "But where would we put them?" I asked her.
            "I'd find a place," she smiled, "if I wanted to."
​
            Sherrill and I took turns going to plays rather than trying to find a nanny.  One evening a dessert we saw on the menu in the hotel dining room intrigued us.  The waiter told us to order it with the rest of the meal because it took so long to make.  Dinner, however, took much longer than we'd expected. I had a ticket for the new John Osborne play at the Royal Court Theatre across town and began to wonder if I'd get there on time. Finally, I had to abandon Sherrill and Simone and rush out to a taxi.
            "There I was, alone with a little girl in that huge dining room," Sherrill told me later, "when the waiter brought that big dessert covered with fancy meringue—and lit it.  Everybody in the place stared at us."
            "But did you like it?"
            "It was okay, but I've decided that I don't care all that much for candied fruit."

            One June day, Sherrill went off in a taxi to the annual Chelsea Flower Show, while Simone and I amused ourselves exploring the city.  We especially liked watching all the boats on the Thames and walking among the battalions of hungry, bobble-headed pigeons in Trafalgar Square. 

            A classic black London cab, tall and roomy, carried us to Waterloo Station to get the boat train for Southampton and our ship back to the United States.  At the station, uniformed porters snatched our luggage, made marks on it and on the luggage tags, then our cases vanished.  It was like a scene in an old movie, much hustle and bustle and excitement, but, I wondered, gazing in the direction our luggage had gone, what if it turned out to be a Hitchcock story with people and things abruptly vanishing? 
            We had just settled ourselves in our compartment on the train when a bouquet of plump middle-aged ladies in flowery dresses blew into it and arranged themselves in the empty seats without any apparent concern about where their suitcases might be or if they'd see them on the ship.  Okay, I decided, if they're not worried why should I be?
            When we reached our stateroom, our suitcases were waiting for us.  It was larger than we'd expected, with two portholes. The bathtub, I discovered, had faucets for salt water and fresh, both hot and cold.  Before dinner, we wandered around the ship. The public rooms were all decorated with patterns of inlaid woods.  I hoped four and a half days crossing the Atlantic would be enough time to explore the ship.  It turned out that 1968 was the final year for the Queen Elizabeth to carry passengers on the Atlantic route.  Airplanes had stolen too many passengers.  An outdoor swimming pool and an informal Hawaiian-style cocktail lounge had been added so she could cruise the Caribbean when she wasn't crossing the Atlantic, but this didn't save her. 
            One afternoon, we left Simone in the children's playroom, presided over by a nanny and her assistant and full of wonderful toys and structures, including a model ship that kids could steer.  Unfortunately, she didn't much care for any of it.  The evening of the Captain's Reception, we managed a fair impersonation of being civilized, Sherrill in the dress she'd brought for the occasion, I in my best suit, and Simone her prettiest dress, vivid red and white. 
            Sherrill and I didn't dance that evening—or ever, really, because she'd never properly learned how.  All  through high school and college, she was always in the dance band—as well as in the school marching band.  She played both the clarinet and saxophone.  For the rest of her life, though, she could give a good critique of any band she heard and any player in it.  Nevertheless, she usually forgave me for the ignorant things I often blurted about music because I wasn't musical and had the ear of a boulder. 
            When we reached New York, we docked next to three other passenger liners, the Italian Line's Michelangelo beside us—it was really the end of an era. The crew helped us through customs and to a taxi for our hotel.  One morning, Sherrill stayed with Simone while I visited my agent.  We did a little sightseeing, but after a couple of days we rode a train south to Washington D.C.. where we stayed with my aunt and uncle for two more days before getting on the transcontinental train heading west to the bay area.  In that pre-Amtrak era we had to change terminals in Chicago so we could transfer trains.  The double-decker California Zephyr observation cars were too tall to fit under the old bridges east of the Mississippi River.  Today, these long-distance trains that give us a chance to see America and not just fly far above it are endangered by government budget cuts.  
             
​
To be continued....