No matter how great things are, they can always get worse
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- January 15, 2018
- 1494
For you it might not be all that unusual. In fact you may have experienced it more than once in your life. But it stands alone in my memory as a singular reminder that no matter how great things are at the moment, they can always get worse. Much, much worse.
This is the story of how I learned that lesson. In the winter of 1978, Northeast Ohio was blizzard country. On the surface of it, that statement might seem to be rather self-evident, obvious to the point of irrelevance.
I was born in the Snow Belt, 23 winters before, and I understood that from Halloween until Easter, you were guaranteed nothing if not misery.
Mom used to joke about it. “Michael,” she’d say, touching a forefinger to the surface of the iron, testing its heat, “the doctors all told me you’d be a St. Patrick’s Day baby.”
I nodded patiently, having heard the tale many times, waiting for her to put the finishing touches on my altar boy’s cassock so that I could serve the early Mass.
“Well,” she said, “turned out you had other plans, always in such a rush to see what was out there.”
Mom began to smooth out the wrinkles of my surplice, taking her time knowing, the way that all mothers do, how to keep a child’s attention, even one as impatient as me.
“You know all about the winter of 1955,” she said, making perfect creases in the alabaster fabric. “Your father was working for the tax department and studying for his doctorate.”
I nodded, getting into the rhythm of her cadence, the timbre of her voice. She could cast a spell, spinning her stories.
“All that February,” she said, “I could feel you kicking, just making an awful fuss. And never having been through it before, I was curious too. What would happen? And when?”
Ah, my mother and her tales. One never knew when the truth took a back seat to the facts. So it’s with that in mind that we’re going to jump ahead to the aforementioned winter of 1978.
My best friend and I were just completing our first years of gainful employment after college, he in advertising, me in journalism. We were single, untethered by any serious romantic constraints and eager to set off on some kind of journey. After all we were making a living the best we could and had been stashing aside a few dollars every two weeks or so, looking for the best way to explore our freedom.
“Jamaica,” he said.
“Passports?” I asked.
“Don’t need ’em,” he said.
“When?” I asked
“New Year’s Eve,” he said.
“Let’s go,” I said.
And so it came to pass that we left the worst winter on record and — for the cost of a couple of $259 round-trip tickets — flew out of the state capital and landed, sometime just after midnight, in Montego Bay.
We had no reservations, no plan, no sense of how it would all come together, but we did have confidence, which always comes in handy. So we found a cab driver who amiably set us up with currency, undercutting the legal exchange rate, and a few other essentials.
“Where to, mon?”
“Negril,” my friend said, settling into the shotgun seat. “We’re going to need a place to stay the night.”
Our driver nodded. “I know some people,” he said. “They help.”
He was driving a late-’60s American car, a big boat, maybe a Chevy or an Oldsmobile, and he drove that winding ribbon of coastline road in the dead dark at what I thought to be an astonishing speed.
An hour or so later he braked in front of a house that was unlighted. He tapped the horn a time or two. A woman appeared on the front porch. Ten minutes and five dollars later, we were in for the night.
Our cab driver asked when we’d need him again, and my friend said, “Meet us here in a week.”
And so the time passed. I spent my days on the beach as my friend went cliff diving or snorkeling. We’d have breakfast in a place called the Yellow Bird, savoring the best coffee I’d ever tasted, and meet up around sunset before heading off to find a place for dinner.
One morning we passed a place where a turtle the size of a child’s wagon was tied to a post. A man was feeding it.
“Come back tonight, mon,” he said with a smile. “Turtle soup.”
Jamaica back then, particularly Negril, was utterly without pretense when it came to tourists. You got used to the way they lived, not as it is now, the other way around. I just loved that.
Too soon it was time to leave. True to his word, our cab driver arrived at the assigned place at the precise time, and we left Negril, heading for the Montego Bay airport. Had we not caught that particular flight, as we found out later, we’d have had to stay another week, owing to a national strike.
As it turned out, we left Jamaica and its 90-degree heat and landed at Port Columbus, where it was 10 below zero. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s a loss of 100 degrees in a matter of just a few hours.
The Ohio winter clamped its vice grip on us, and there we were, sporting Caribbean tans, shivering in shorts and T-shirts.
“How about Ireland for St. Patrick’s Day?” I asked.
“Your birthday?” he smiled.
“Close enough,” I said.
Mom would have loved that.
Mike Dewey can be reached at CarolinamikeD@aol.com or at 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560. He invites you to join the fun on his Facebook page.