Sometime in April (2012), I got a call from Phillip, my “…little brother.” 

   “I have a question,” he said.   “Ok…” I said.

    “Well, I have talked to Elinor and J.C., Carlos and Tresha, and they all have agreed to go on a cruise in June.  What about you?”

    “A cruise?” I said.

    “Yeah, five days, leaving Jacksonville.  So how about you?

    My brother Phillip knows me.  After all we have always been brothers.  And although I say he is my “…little brother,” he is 58 years old.  That’s how long he has been my “…little” brother.  So Phillip knows me and knows my tendency to be fine being by myself. In other words, he set me up.  He asked everybody else first, and once they agreed asked me “…well, what about you?”  He set me up.

     Phillip and his ten year old son, Phillip II, had worked it all out.  The two of them had researched the cruise, chosen the Cruise liner and Cruise ship, as well as choosing the proposed dates to coincide with the beginning of summer and for me the end of my semester.  That is how it came to pass that on June 4, 2012, we boarded the Carnival Fascination for a five day cruise with a stop in Key West and one in the Bahamas.

      Let me tell you we had a good time.  The two Phillips had planned this very well.

 

     The two Phillips had a suite, with a large balcony.  On the same deck level, Elinor, our sister, her husband J.C. had a room that adjoined the room shared by their adult children Tresha and Carlos, which also had a balcony.  I was on another deck level with an ocean view window.  So the ocean was ever present.

     Phillip and I both served in the U.S. Navy with duty aboard ships that stopped in ports around the world.  He and I were not interested, and did not ever get off this Cruise ship.  For us, it was about being again on the ocean, out on the big water that mattered most.  Everybody else got off at the ports of call.  Phillip and I stayed onboard the ship and talked to each other as brothers, about events in our lives that we had never discussed with each other.  We discovered that we had the same psychological experience on our first cruise; being on the big water the first time felt like finding our place in the world; a place with nothing but adventures to be lived.

     What a time the family had on this five day cruise.  We sometimes had lunch together, but we always had dinner together.  Before dinner we would gather in the suite of the two Phillips and sip wine, talk, tell stories on each other and on our now dead parents (grandparents to some in the room). On the dress-up dinner night, we had a little celebration for Elinor and J.C. to honor their fiftieth wedding anniversary.  Fifty (50) years of marriage!

  

    When we weren’t together, we did our own thing.  Me, I was in my room reading Stephen King’s 11/22/63.  What would you do if you found a way to go back in time?  Would you try to change history by stopping some awful event?  If you did try to go back to stop that event would doing so be easy? If you fought through the hard parts, changed history, would the change work out for the better?

    Up to this point, the only book of Stephen King’s I had read was his masterpiece, “On Writing.”  I just was not attracted to his novels since they were all horror.  Yet I wanted to read something of his because of two movies made based on his fiction writing, “The Shawshank Redemption,” and “The Green Mile.” I was intrigued because those two movies told a story, were about something, and were filled with the poetry of life.

      When I came across his novel, 11/22/63, I was drawn to it because I was a teenager in Louisiana when John F. Kennedy was assassinated.  Not only that, but my father was a local, grass-roots politico and staunch supporter of Kennedy in the hope that he would lead the federal government to improve the situation for black people in America.  King’s novel was about changing what happened; preventing the assassination of one of our most important Presidents.

    I have so many things to say about reading King’s novel while on this cruise.  First King’s book is a master class on how to write a compelling, can’t put down, intelligent, thought-provoking novel. Every detail brought up was used to strong effect in the novel, somewhere, and usually after you had forgotten the detail.  Second, King’s research on Lee Harvey Oswald and that time in America is impeccable.  Third, I found out King is a romantic in the best sense of that word; a believer that there is hope in what we try to do, hope even if we fail, and hope for the relationships we are willing to really work for.

     In his novel, King reminds us, if not teaches us that time is obdurate; resistant to change.  Time will fight you.  But dancing is life.

     During the cruise I read for hours every day. All twenty-four hours a day, the ocean was under me, dancing.

1. Wael Says:
   September 22nd, 2012 at 8:58 PM

   i had a choice to go on the oasis or caiarvnl dream but i heard caiarvnl was for a younger crowd which i like. besides the dream is 532$ with everything included while the oasis is 900$ just for the room it self. sooo dream it is lol. plus i heard mixed reviews on the oasis about it being hard to get into certain restaurants, long line because there’s over 6,000 passengers, and you have to pay if you wanna go to the boardwalk. it looks nice but maybe next year if the price goes down alittle