Returning from the land of the palms
Okay, I admit it. I’ve no imagination. I did not want to go to the Dominican Republic. To Puerto Plata. To stay in a resort for a week and live like a Downton Abbey aristocrat, sleeping, eating, sunning, swimming in the pool, eating, sunning and swimming at the beach, eating, going to a live show, taking a sunset stroll under the palms, listening to the calming waters spill from the lion head fountains in the plaza, going to bed and sleeping like the dead for seven, eight hours, getting up and doing it all over again for seven days. Didn’t want to do that.
Didn’t want to walk through the cafeteria trying to decide, do I want the rib eye or the barbequed quarter chicken, the shrimp or the smoked salmon, or all of it? The many faces of pasta and rice? Make a hero sub at the sandwich station?
Or at breakfast, a ham and cheese omelette made right in front of me, or just some waffles or pancakes with maple syrup, whipped cream, chocolate mousse, a couple of croissants and or cream puff pastry? Nope.
Having my dishes whisked away to be washed as soon as I was done. Coffee cup filled. G’way, Bye. Didn’t want that. Wanted to stay here and suffer in the cold and snow.
Didn’t want to lie under a palm hut and read guiltlessly for days. Didn’t want to lollygag around in the pool with a beverage of my choice in each hand. Didn’t want a tan.
Didn’t want to relax.
In the end, I went to the Dominican because, well, even I got sick of my own whinging. I had to bow to the better visionaries around me. People smarter and more daring than me.
That and I couldn’t get the deposit back.
We went to Walmart and got a couple of bathing suits. Bought every kind of goop they sell from sunblock to Pepto-Bismol. Weighed down a suitcase with every kind of snack known to humanity from raisins to granola bars to nibs, to avoid the exorbitant prices at the resort.
Packed long pants for me. Ten pounds worth. I never thought of pants in terms of pounds, but I took ten pounds of pants.
Made sure that everybody knew that if the plane got hijacked or if the country suffered a coup d’état while we were there that I told you so. I won’t say it then but just remember.
And off we went.
Life is strange. The fact that we’re here walking around and talking let alone flying planes … the fact that we’re made in the womb and come out like apple pie, the fact that we don’t have to plug in, the fact that if we get cut, we heal, the cut disappears. That we’re a mere speck of dust in the universe?
That there are ants, the size of dust motes, with brains, imagining and building colonies and social systems; or eating your Wheat Thins that you took on the trip trying to save a buck, and carelessly put down by a Bougainvillea hedge while you tanned. Will miracles never cease?
You know, it took Jacob Marley and three other ghosts to turn Scrooge around late in his life. But they did it in one night. It took about that long in the DR for me to start singing Scrooge’s redemption song: “I don’t know anything; I never did know anything.”
The pool was wonderful, the beach was a slice of heaven; I never got so much as heartburn, the relaxation went deep, and I didn’t need one pound of long pants let alone ten.
I was determined in the beginning to say, “Never again!” Instead, I bought three new cabana shirts. For next year. On sale. 50 per cent off.
And you really need like four bathing suits.