Power to transport

I love when mid-afternoon sun floods through my living room bay windows, lighting my eclectic collection of colorful curios from around the world. The other day the elegant shadows cast by two sculptures I bought in Jamaica transfixed me. The ladies, made of wood, wear gowns fashioned from dyed sand glued to their sultry frames. I often pick them up when I pass their perch atop the piano, but when they're bathed in amber sunlight, I just stare and let them take me for an instant back to the tropical brilliance and gentle, easy friendliness of the island where they were made.

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Bookstore souvenirs

I traveled to Cape Cod last night to see a dear friend and to sign books at a fundraiser for her daughter's school. The event was in Falmouth, one of my favorite Cape Cod towns, and was hosted by Inkwell Bookstore, a beautiful shop on Falmouth's Main Street. If your travels take you to the Cape, pop in and browse and say hello to owners Kathleen and Michelle.

Books make wonderful travel souvenirs. Forays into stacks and along shelves of booksellers around the world have netted me a collection of interesting and quirky titles. Among them:

From Jamaica: Mi Granny Seh Fi Tell Yu Seh: The A to Z of Jamaicanisms, with advice on topics like Grief, Family, Confidence, Patience and Aspiration. From the chapter on Opportunity: "Hog wash enna de fus wata 'im ketch." Translation: "A hog washes in the first water he sees/Take advantage of the first opportunity."

Also from Jamaica: A Code of Conduct For Police-Citizen Relations. The "Attitudes of Approach" section offers this advice for citizens approached by the police: "RUNNING AWAY: Whether you have committed an offence or not, irrespective of how frightened you may feel, DO NOT RUN AWAY! TO DO SO MAY MAKE YOU APPEAR GUILTY."

From China: A dutifully well-thumbed, pocket-sized copy of The Quotations of Mao Zedong, known in the West as the Little Red Book. I can't read the copyright date because it's in Chinese, but it's clearly Cultural Revolution-era, when carrying the book and studying it daily were compulsory. I bought it from a sidewalk bookseller and paid him his two dollar asking price without haggling. Pleased with the ease and profit of the transaction, he threw in a free antique porcelain teacup.

From a Bergen, Norway souvenir shop (photo) that stocked trolls and kiddy lit: colorful chapter books with blond, rosy-cheeked tots on their covers and Il-Vjaggi Ta' Gulliver. Gulliver's name's the same, but, being plurals, Lilliputians become Lilliputjani in Norwegian.

From an antique and used book shop in Eton, England, home of 15th century Eton College and a short footbridge walk over the Thames from Windsor Castle: How to Lay a Nest Egg: Financial Facts of Life for the Average Girl, copyright 1950. It begins: "Ladies, this book is about You. Some girls (that includes the author's wife) have long wished they could lay eggs instead of having children the cumbersome human way... But laying a nest egg is something else again; something quite within your power -- yours alone, no daddy required, not even a sugar daddy."

From Kenya: Wisdom of Maasai. The introduction tells us "these proverbs reveal the knowledge inherited by the speakers of Maa. It is good that the children read this wisdom so that they do not forget completely. Proverbs are an integral part of the Maasai language. A Maasai hardly speaks ten sentences without using at least one proverb." A sample from the "Conduct" chapter: "Menyanyuk enchikati enkutuk o eno siadi/ The odour from the mouth (words) is stronger than the odour from the arms."

In Perros-Guirec in Brittany, a region in northwest France that sits on the sea and has deep Celtic roots, I picked up a little green book of Breton proverbs, Krennlavariou Brezhonek. The book delivers its gems in Breton, French and English:

"A bep liv marc'h mat, A bep bro tud vat/ De toute couleur bon cheval, de tout pays gens de valeur."

Translation: "Good horses come in all colours, good people come from all countries."

Jamaica: An Olympic moment

We’d had a laid-back time in Jamaica. A mellow week of food, drink, sun and fun at Montego Bay’s Sunset Beach Resort, a moderately priced, snob-free, family-friendly all-inclusive that I highly recommend. (See 11/30/04 post: “Ya mon! In Jamaica, even the soup is smiling” and read other travelers’ reviews on TripAdvisor.com.)

Other than a daily run, my heaviest lifting was getting a Red Stripe from the table to my mouth. Between beers I engaged in solo pursuits like kayaking but resisted the staff's best efforts to recruit me into group activities like the water aerobics fests staged in the main pool. Holding hands with strangers in bathing suits while swaying to Enya held no appeal.

I did pry the clan away from the free food, drinks and watersports long enough to take a road trip into the mountains above Mo’ Bay. In Anchovy, the narrow main street was alive. Women in rainbow-colored dresses shopped, men lingered outside Jerk Joint and Jerk Place, and laughing kids in uniforms walked past the Baptist and Seventh Day Adventist churches on their way to school. Cars and trucks sputtered, and the sun turned everything to gold.

Our tire went flat near an orange grove in Shettlewood, so we pulled off to change it at a small bar that was attached to a house. Out came the owner, Sharon, smiling big and sporting pink plastic curlers. While Mike changed the tire, the kids hung out in the bar with Sharon and downed tall glass bottles of Pepsi. Between sodas, Dana would step outside to chat with Sharon’s chickens.

Flat fixed, we said goodbye to Sharon and meandered past orchards of citrus trees and through villages of yellow and turquoise houses and rolled at day’s end into the parking lot at Sunset Beach, where we resumed doing absolutely nothing meaningful. We were in a Jamaica frame of mind, and life was sultry, steamy, slow, its tropic tempo a sweet, leisurely largo.

Which is why we were unprepared for the sight that greeted us when we entered the airport terminal to check in for our flight home.

There, standing next to his gleaming machine on skis was a fit, muscled member of the Jamaican bobsled team. Cool Runnings in person. The team had plans to be part of the next winter Olympics and was out to create awareness. They trained in cold, high, wintry places, but they came home to Jamaica to stir up support and funds.

So, before they boarded their planes to places like Boston, Chicago and Toronto, sunburned tourists in shorts and straw hats had their final Jamaica experience. They were lined up ten deep to have their pictures taken with the Caribbean athlete who rockets breakneck down slick chutes of ice chiseled into alpine peaks.

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Ya, mon! In Jamaica even the soup is smiling

"Git me a...a...a...vodka hamburger!" Overheard about 11 am at Sunset Beach Resort in Montego Bay, Jamaica. This was our first all-inclusive. We've crossed that threshhold -- teenagerhood -- that gives the kids some say in where we go on family vacations. They wanted other kids, discos, water sports, unlimited soda and snacks, video games, billiards, basketball, license to stay out late, and as few "mom's road trips" as possible. They got all that. And Mike and I had a blast.

My travel journals usually run over 50 pages. I record everything. (If you travel with me, watch what you say, because I'm writing it down. It can and may well be used against you in a forum more public than a court of law...say a blog post, a book, a magazine article. I know on which day of which trip one of my family members tried to put a Cheez-It up his or her nose, and I know exactly what he or she said during the attempt...)

That my Jamaica journal contains only four and a half pages of brief, choppy entries -- most of them snippets of dialogue or staff activity narration heard around the fun-filled, family-friendly compound -- attests to the fact that I was either having too much fun or was too affected by the combination of hot sun and endless free alcohol to either want or be able to write much.

Some entries: "The lady Felicia is in the house!" "The man Glenroy is in the house!" "Give it up one time for the lady Janet Jones!" "Show some love!" "Hello, lady. Hello, girl. Hello, mister." "Six square meals a day. What more could you ask for?" "What did we do in Negril? Went to Burger King and had bammy and fries." "Give it up nice and lovely for the man Rohan!" "We always winter somewhere warm, usually Thailand or India." "I just heard at the front desk that all the flights are cancelled. You're takin' a canoe home." "Fine with us, as long as it's a booze cruise..."

We went off campus a few times (but only for a few hours. Didn't want to miss out on too much of the all-included fun back at the ranch). Dana spent a morning in horse heaven at Chukka Blue's Horseback and Swim Tour. She prizes the souvenir 8x10 of her riding through the surf in a bathing suit. We rented a car and took the mountain road up to Anchovy, passing a thin, brown, totally buck naked man walking along the highway. Sent Dana into shock in the backseat. We had a flat tire outside Sharon's bar in Shettlewood. Mike fixed the flat while Adam, Dana and I sipped Pepsis with Sharon, bright pink curlers in her hair. I pointed to the bursting orange groves across the road. "Time to pick?" "No, not time. Still bare." Dana sat on the stoop and chatted with Sharon's rooster. Pet-deprived Dana asked me, wistfully, "Can we get a chicken?" (This is Dana talking. She meant a chicken to have and to hold, not to eat.) Tire fixed. "You coming back?" asked Sharon. "We love Jamaica. We might just be back." We waved to Sharon as we passed her place on our return trip down to the coast. She was sweeping away the brown water that seeps from the broken pipe under her driveway. "Government pipe. I call them every day, and they say they will come, but they don't come."

I went off campus for my daily run. The resort guards would open the gate, and I'd pass the knot of cab drivers waiting outside the property for fares. One cabbie timed me every day. "Slow today!" he'd say, pointing at his watch. "Too many Red Stripes last night!" I'd shout.

Vodka hamburger in paradise. Come to Jamaica and feel alright.

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