TORONTO (June 4, 2007) -- The various writings on the Tienemen Square anniversary has reminded me of an anniversary much closer to home.  This is the eighteenth anniversary of a cruise Daddy and I took to Alaska.

Daddy has had a bad heart for a long time, and this was before his first pacemaker was installed (he's had four or five since then).  The doctor had told him how the land lay, and advised that if he had things left in life that he had been putting off, it was time to start doing them. (My sensitive younger sister called me to demand that we sue the doctor.  I finally convinced her that she was overreacting.)  One of the things Daddy had still on his To Do List was an Alaska cruise.  Mama would have nothing to do with cruise ships; she saw the Poseidon Adventure, and the fact that I had taken a four month round the world cruise 19 years before and had returned completely unscathed (as far as swimming out of upside down ships go anyway) buttered no parsnips with her.  I was fresh from my first triumph against American Express, convincing them with my best feminist rhetoric that I knew why every time I met their financial requirements and applied for their Card, they turned me down and said I needed to make more money; within hours they called me back to confirm that I was the proud owner of an AmEx Card after all.  I was scheduled to take my usual trip to England in July, but I discovered that cruises were not that expensive and that Holland America Lines catered especially to elderly people with health issues, so I booked the cruise and told Daddy we were going to fulfill one of his remaining dreams.  (I flew so regularly that I had air miles enough for free air fare to and from Seattle, where we would catch a bus that took us to Vancouver to catch our ship.  We booked into the Sheraton Hotel, another first for Daddy, and spent the waiting time for the plane in the Admiral's Club, a third one.  Despite the fact that, in Daddy's estimation, the plane we flew in was the one Moses used to ferry the Children of Israel across the Red Sea, and despite Daddy's costly misunderstanding about the mini-bar in our room (and the panic stricken hotel clerk who looked at us and finally blurted "Do you and your, your, your, um, husband want one bed or two?"  I informed him politely that this was my father and we wanted two beds please -- having done plenty of travel with boy chums I was used to this kind of question, believe it or not -- we had a nice trip out and a wonderful cruise.  I was under 50 at the time and was about the youngest passenger on board, but we had an idyllic ten days and saw some beautiful sights, met some interesting people, and enjoyed ourselves every day.  Mama was sure we would wear tennis wear to the cocktail party and bathing suits to dinner, and everyone would blame her; we agreed early on that we would not nag each other about clothing and would tell Mama that we had kept a sharp eye on what the other person was wearing at all times.  We met a woman of 80 at the cocktail party the captain threw for those who had cruised Holland America Lines before, who told us she had asked to be seated at a dining table with all the single men on board and had ended up at a table with the priest.  We met a couple of gay businessmen -- the first time Daddy had sat at a table with gay men and he handled it beautifully -- who made the big mistake of letting the wine steward choose a bottle of wine for them and having to grope around the floor for their eyeballs which had popped out fo their sockets at the size of the cheque that resulted.  We had a young woman Indian guide who could not start the bus; Daddy advised her how to do it (problem with the clutch) and joked that no General Motors product would run with him on board (he is a Ford man now that Kaiser has gone out of business).  We had a wonderful cruise.

And on the daily update on board we saw the word about the death of the Ayatullah and the face off in China.  And Daddy reminded me that it was time I started teaching the kids why we fight.  Today they are both fascinated by Daddy's stories of World War II and the fact that he was a teenager when he went to war.

On the way home we stayed with some people from the Hospitality Exchange, an organization originally started by hippies that allowed a person to stay with a fellow member (at the member's discretion)  for free in cities and towns everywhere in the world.  And there for the first time I heard the full story of the time Daddy and Mama were kidnapped by a deranged Black prison escapee -- Daddy had lost his license to drive temporarily due to his I Can't Drive 55 Mantra and Mama had to drive him to work, leaving four of us under the age of 8 peacefully asleep alone in our beds at home.  Justice was meted out by our local Mafia Judge, fortunately, once the situation had been resolved with no harm other than Mama's lasting terror of strange Black men.

It is 18 years later and Daddy is still talking about that trip; and incidentally, he is still reminding the doctor that reports of his impending demise were definitely premature.

Yes, revolution is worthy of note.  But the anniversaries of adulthood and family dreams are worth remembering, too.