Every winter when I was growing up, my parents would pack me off to my grandmother and steal away with the neighbors, the Klondikes, on a cruise. First they'd fly to Florida, where they'd catch a boat to the Bahamas or Jamaica or God Knows Where. It didn't really matter much where they were going. The men only wanted large uninterrupted blocks of drinking time; the women only wanted time in the sun. They didn't really care where they were -- that's my mom on the left, waiting with Sheila Klondike to board the boat -- as long as the sun was hot and high and they were in it. I don't know if they did this for themselves, glued together as they were, or their husbands, off in their lime-tinged alcoholic tropics. I do know that when my mom returned a week later, she was a rich black-brown, inscrutable, subcutaneous and glowing.

submitted by Eric Sorensen
Pullman, Washington USA
February 1997