CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY EIGHT: HOLIDAY RAMBLINGS

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY EIGHT: HOLIDAY RAMBLINGS

It’s the day after Christmas – Boxing Day in the UK – and we’re having the hottest holiday season I have ever experienced. Mid-eighties with very high humidity during the day and high to mid-seventies at night. No relief. I’m sweating as I sit at the computer in the boat’s salon. Add to this unseemly weather my frequent hot flashes and – BAM – it’s clothes changing time four or five times a day. Or clothing optional. I see the merit of nudist colonies. Yesterday I was vacuuming the salon area rug and huge drops of sweat were falling from my face and arms on to the vacuum and the rug and the floor. I needed to wipe up the floor after vacuuming. There is one place that gives me a break from this intolerable humidity – the fitness room in the Courtyard Marriott. It’s air conditioned within an ounce of its life. I can work out – hard – for 40 minutes and get my heart rate up and breathe heavily – but no sweat! I love that place. But enough about the weather and my sweat glands.

We returned from our most recent road trip – to Pocono Pines, Pennsylvania and to Solomons, Maryland – on December 22. We had a great weekend visit with my brother, Rusty, and his wife, Lois, and their puppy, Hopi. Naturally a cold front had come into their area the day we arrived, and we were dealing with days in the 20’s and nights in the teens. It was glorious. I walked to Lake Naomi with Hopi and my brother and could see my breath. There were snow flurries, or else the snow the ski resort was making had wafted down the mountain side to us. There was no natural snow, and the lake was still watery. Rusty said it’s usually covered with ice by this time of year. After we left, the temps went back to their abnormal highs in the 60’s and 70’s. But so far we have had three days of winter. By the time we reached Solomons, Maryland on the 20^th and had dinner with Janie and Mike at the Texas Longhorn Roadhouse, it was warming up again.

At my brother’s home we did some indoor activities, in addition to eating pizza and fried chicken, which included watching the Democratic debate Saturday night and screening the movie “The Book Thief”. This movie was based on a prize-winning novel, which I read along with my Book Club a few years ago. The young girl was portrayed by Sophie Nelisse, who is an amazing actor at the age of thirteen. (Thirteen!) Her adoptive parents, played by Emily Watson and Geoffrey Rush, were both at their best – which is saying a lot for these two accomplished actors. This movie came out in 2013, so if you have not seen it, you can get it on any movie streaming app, or better yet, buy it for a song. The story revolves around Hitler’s Germany during the early war years, but somehow it is not nearly as depressing as “All the Light We Cannot See”. I loved the sign painter’s idea of teaching his daughter the alphabet and building her vocabulary by drawing each letter, capital and small, on the cellar wall, one right after the other at the top of the wall. That way, she could write down all the new words she had learned during the course of their reading the books she stole. The first book she stole was “The Grave Digger’s Manual”, which the grave digger who had dug her young brother’s grave had dropped from a pocket. Now that’s a diehard reader, to start out reading about how to make a grave! Then she stole a book from a huge bonfire of books which Hitler had ordered all the towns and villages to do, in order to get rid of any anti-Reichian influences. Then she hit the jackpot with the huge library of forbidden books in the house of the town’s mayor. That’s enough – you have to read the book or watch the movie to learn any more.

About the debate – I always learn something about foreign or domestic policy from Hillary Clinton, when she answers a question. She is loaded with information and she puts the information to good use by suggesting sane policies and programs. No carpet bombing travesty for her (or from Sanders or O’Malley, for that matter). No ban on Muslim travelers to the US. No wall to keep Mexicans out. (Hey Donald, they build great tunnels, have you heard?). No absolute ban on abortion – no ban at all. No homophobia. No restrictive voting laws. No obscene increase in military spending. But yes to climate change controls, yes to women’s equality, yes to raising wages, yes to taxing the top 1% appropriately (as we used to do under Eisenhower and Reagan). Let’s make some history this year at the polls – if I can’t be elected the first woman president of the USA (and apparently I cannot, at least not in 2016), then I strongly urge you to vote for my surrogate, Secretary Clinton. It’s John Adams and John Quincy Adams all over again, sort of, but with a former First Lady (it should have been Abigail Adams) moving into the Oval Office. Did you know that John Quincy Adams is considered the smartest president we have ever had (based on IQ)? His father is in the top 10. No word yet on where Secretary Clinton would rank, but President Clinton is also in the top ten along with Lincoln and Jefferson and Madison, among others. Yes, you guessed it, Reagan and George W. did not make the top thirty. They were both in the bottom fifteen. Still, their IQs were well above the national average of 100. What they lacked in book smarts, they made up for in their grandiose catch phrases like the “Shining City on the Hill” and “Mission Accomplished”.

While I still want the next president to be committed to equal rights for women, I would also very much like her to protect Social Security benefits and Medicare benefits, and if it’s not too much trouble, to increase Social Security benefits on a yearly basis. The cost of living goes up each year; so should the benefits. I am grateful for the work of AARP in advancing these positions for me. All politics is local, except when you’re dealing with the bureaucracy of the federal government. Then it’s good to have a strong lobbyist (the hated word) in D.C. advancing your agenda. I may be able to organize my neighbors to lobby for “no parking” signs in Harper Canyon. But I don’t have the juice to mount a movement to protect Social Security and Medicare. I felt pretty all powerful in the sixties and seventies as a law student and then as executive director of the Connecticut Women’s Education and Legal Fund (CWEALF). I wrote a law providing for equal credit opportunity. I worked for passage of Connecticut’s Equal Rights Amendment to its Constitution. I rewrote Connecticut’s sexual assault laws, eliminating the element of “earnest resistance” on the part of the rape victim as part of the definition of rape. Yes, that was a really good change.  I wrote briefs for the U.S. Supreme Court on the woman’s right to reproductive freedom. All of our victories in that arena came crashing to a halt in the mid-seventies when Justice Rehnquist gave us Roe v. Maher, denying poor women the right to reproductive freedom.

Anyway, I was writing about our road trip, not a trip down memory lane.  We stayed at so many Hilton hotels along the way that when we returned the Admiral learned that he had achieved “Diamond” status. We had been “Gold” before the trip. This means automatic upgrades, where available, and complimentary breakfasts, and more points. The Admiral is ecstatic. Now if Hilton could just design a sensible room for a disabled person, we’d be in business. Their designers come up with the dumbest things – like a bathroom that you can’t enter with a wheelchair or walker, because the hallway is too narrow and the door to the bathroom is hung on the wrong side, blocking access to the bedroom. Or how about putting elevated slabs of wood or marble across the entrance to the bathroom, so a wheelchair cannot enter or leave easily? Or how about putting grab bars in the shower stall, but not installing a seat for the amputee to sit and take a shower? Or installing a regular bathtub with high sides, with no seat or stool in the tub to allow the amputee to sit to shower or bathe? I would gladly offer my services as a consultant to Hilton so that they can avoid these embarrassing mistakes in their hotels across the country. At this point, however, they lead me to believe that they just don’t know what they’re doing, and perhaps that is because they also just don’t care enough to design and build functional rooms for disabled guests. Compare and contrast: the Hilton Garden Inn has automatic doors at its entrance, while the Hampton Inn has heavy manual doors. Same owner, what’s the deal? Are disabled guests who go to the Hampton Inn supposed to be stronger than Hilton Garden Inn guests? Just asking.

On Christmas Day Sonja arrived. The Admiral picked her up at the Ft. Lauderdale airport, and when they arrived in Key Largo, she took us to dinner at Skipper’s, the restaurant on the canal. Generally our only experience with Skipper’s is the music that travels across the water to Slow Motion, much of which is execrable. But last night the music was festive island “steel band” music – no wailing vocalist – and quite tolerable. The food was better than that. The Admiral had squid cooked in an exquisite combination of seasonings, Sonja had blackened fish in tacos (after they returned the fried fish to the kitchen and got her what she ordered), and I had a well-cooked hamburger and fries. Okay, my food selections are not imaginative, and I rarely eat fish in this ocean/bay paradise. But sometimes a hamburger hits the spot, and last night it did. Besides, the food took a back seat to the reunion of the Admiral with his oldest daughter, a brilliant tax attorney from Chicago. She came in her winter clothing, so the Admiral took her shopping for some summer stuff today. And now he’s baking a sweet potato, which he will top with curried vegetables. The Admiral knows how to please Sonja’s taste buds. They’re sharing the fish dip which they both love. It’s great to observe them together again. Sure, the Admiral can be a curmudgeon with Sonja too, but she knows it’s an act to try to hide the fact that he is a pushover who would do anything for her – within reason – to make her happy.

I’d like to give a shout out to all of you who sent us greeting cards and to Marlea, who sent pears and cheese from Harry and David. You made our Christmas special. The Admiral doesn’t exchange gifts, but he helps me send out the Sierra Club calendars, so he’s not really a Grinch. I’m glad you all enjoy the wilderness photos and that you have room to fill in your doctor appointments and other engagements. I say this with trepidation, knowing the kind of hell on wheels year that 2015 was for me, but here’s hoping that 2016 can erase all the bad memories of 2015 and that I’ll be hiking again in Toro Park with Zorro – pain free. Is that too much to ask for? I hope not. Happy New Year to you all.