ANNIVERSARIES, ARGUMENTS, WHALE PEE, & INNERCITY BUSES IN THE SKY

Under the low-hanging white puffy clouds that dotted the endless blue sky, my wife and I leisurely bobbed up and down for hours in the Gulf Of Mexico water. Peaceful carefree visits to the ocean have always cleared my head of accumulated day-to-day gunky baggage and rejuvenated my body and soul. This time, unfortunately, that inner peace came a little too late. 

Our relaxed conversation drifted and rolled like the soft low waves that gently broke on the beach’s warm sandy shore. Eventually, after debating what percentage of the ocean’s water is made up of various bodily fluids released by whales and other sea critters, we started happily reminiscing about our beach wedding that took place in the same area 21 years earlier. I don’t recall exactly how that topic then took such a grim turn, but after we fumbled through a head count, my math whiz wife put an exclamation point on our conversation by saying if our estimate was correct, 15% of the attendees of our wedding have since passed away (a scary high number, but a far lower percentage then the amount of whale pee we both assumed made up the Earth’s greenish tinged oceans)

Now I have never heard of anyone tracking that statistic before, so I am not sure if 15% is good or bad.  Well… it’s never good… but is it average?  Or is having attended our wedding the hidden common denominator linking some Perry Mason-ish murder mystery series of seemingly unrelated deaths?  Granted, we were not kids when we got married, but it wasn’t an old folk’s home sunset years ceremony either. Let’s just hope the percentage does not rise again anytime soon.

Celebrating a 21st wedding anniversary is a feat of mine that many thought would never happen. Not because I was an unzipped bachelor running away from reality for half my life… although that was true, but mostly because of the misconception that I am far crazier and more difficult to live with than I really am.

(Insert a dramatic pause here CLICK) 

Now despite the tremendous amounts of eyerolling disagreeing groans that the last sentence surely elicited from my family, friends, coworkers, teachers, distant acquaintances, old school chums, that neighbor that hides in his garage whenever I am outside, the yellow bearded guy that reeks of cigarettes who monitors the grocery store self-checkout lanes, and the people that sat around me on the plane we took to that Florida beach getaway… I will adamantly stand by my bold statement that my supposed sullied ‘reputation’ is far worse than my actual ‘reality’.

Oh, believe me, I am not saying I am not sometimes crazy or difficult. Just NOT AS crazy and difficult as is generally assumed. Just ask my wife; I am sure she will tell you through the last 21 years of marriage I am always a delight to be around (okay, I think that pushed it too far, maybe we should not ask her that. Especially after the stunt I pulled during that trip. But I am getting ahead of myself). 

I guess I’d feel prouder and more accomplished about reaching the 21-year mark of my marriage if it wasn’t so dramatically overshadowed by my folks having just celebrated their 74th wedding anniversary. And my dad has always been far crazier and more difficult than me. Although at times I am a close falling apple.  That’s insane though… 74 years!!!  My wife and I will never come even close to that, unless on one of our Florida trips we stumble across Ponce De Leon’s fountain of youth and rack up some Methuselah-like high age numbers together.

But to us 21 years is still a big deal, so to celebrate we took a long weekend anniversary trip to Florida. Unfortunately, we again did not find old Ponce’s fabled age-extending elixir dispenser. But the first day, we did have a lovely time visiting with my nonagenarian parents and my crazy sister’s family (or is that sister’s crazy family… or both).  Then the next day, after an early morning stop for Cuban pastries and eye-opening espresso, we headed down to the Gulf shore island we got married on.

Although it was way too short, the trip was really wonderful.  Well… except for the flight down where there was one of those incidents that make people think I am crazy and difficult to be with. Or as my wife pointed out, it again became obvious I am my, sometimes crazy and occasionally difficult, father’s son.

My father has always had a short fuse and could go from calm to full blown red-faced scream-fest in seconds. When we were all kids, it did not happen often, and he was certainly never violent in actions with anyone, but the man could go verbally ballistic faster than an over-the-top roid-raged professional wrestler in a pre-match interview.

I just have to say the name Valley’s Steakhouse, and my entire family will cringe in knowing recognition of the reference to one of dad’s most infamous and ill-timed outbursts. And while that notorious night’s service and food might have been abysmal, and his frustrated anger with the place might have been well-deserved, that is not the part of the story we remember.

Let’s just say, it was not a pleasant dinner, but it was a very memorable way for my brother’s future small-town soft-spoken in-laws to meet my boisterous big city family. When I was younger, I just assumed dad’s occasional outrageous overreactions were a New York thing, or maybe a generational way of handling stuff. But I’ve since realized it’s just a weird, tangled glitch in his DNA’s chemical make-up that I frustratingly have inherited a touch of.

Anyone that has flown recently can surely attest to the fact that air travel has become no better than taking a broken-down budget bus from Hoboken to Baltimore. Last month when my wife was taking a quick weekend trip, her Friday evening flight was delayed multiple times and ended up finally departing 14 hours late. So when we started getting the constant stream of gate change and delayed departure text notices the morning of our trip, we were understandably on edge.

About two hours before our new boarding time, the updated notifications finally stopped coming.  We both were having difficult stressful days at work, so logging off for a long weekend was very welcomed, but also quite difficult. Being paranoid people and having once missed a flight through a series of airport snafus that were of no real fault of our own, we tend to leave ridiculously early for flights. But work caused us to cut it closer than usual and pushed us into thicker rush-hour traffic. We still got there reasonably early but more harried than usual.

The cattle-call security lines were woefully understaffed, so they were slower and more chaotic than normal. And because of an obvious trainee manning the luggage x-ray machine, the normally shorter priority / TSA precheck aisle we paid extra for, took longer than the regular lanes.  Then, what should have been a relaxed dinner at a grossly overpriced astoundingly average terminal restaurant, became a rushed gobbled stresser, when a combination of slow service and another last-minute gate change, forced us to wolf down our food and hustle to a different terminal building on the exact opposite side of the sprawling airport.

We knew it would be a bad flight before we departed. Everyone at the gate was agitated and annoyed with the delays and gate changes. Once aboard, a flight attendant sternly lectured the couple holding an infant in front of us about not following instructions with their stroller that they refused to check, and the woman seated in the row behind us had a dog that was better behaved then her bratty 5-year-old boy. Within five minutes of being seated, everyone around them learned the boy goes to a special “outdoor” private school without all the “stifling rules” that would require him to do something like keep his extremely long hair in a restrictive ponytail (later on when the woman next to my wife, who had been flying for the past 22 hours from Australia, complained to the woman about her son’s loud squirming and climbing horrid behavior, her response was “there is nothing else I can do, I have already asked him to behave.”)

Boarding in general, had been particularly difficult. Despite the repeated pleas of the flight crew to only put one of your bags into the overhead bins, a grumbling gentleman made a big scene rearranging other people’s already stowed belongings as he wedged all three of his bags into various compartments. Everyone was already uncomfortable and tense before additional delays forced us to all sit sweating in the sweltering unairconditioned packed full plane on the brutally hot 103-degree Texas tarmac for another 35 minutes while they sorted out a “paperwork issue” without the engines on.

About 20 minutes after we took-off, the plane finally started cooling down, but I remained annoyed and agitated after discovering my phone had issues connecting to the plane’s wifi, so I was unable to watch a distracting movie or listen to soothing music. To make things worse, I kept having to scootch forward to stop feeling the non-stop incessant kicking on the back of my chair. Over and over and over and over… kick after kick after kick… I thought it was the over-indulged long-haired spoiled brat behind us, but when my wife pointed out that it was the obnoxious guy with the three bags, I blew a dad-like old-generation aggressive New Yorker gasket. The cumulation of the day’s annoyances took their toll.

I said to my wife “if he kicks my chair again, I am going to recline all the way back” which is what I vigorously did two seconds later when I felt another kick. Although technically what I did was in no way wrong, since I have every right to recline, I was undeniably being a passive aggressive rude-ass. As expected, he screamed at me about not having any space. To which I reflexively yelled back “if you stop kicking my fucking seat for two minutes, maybe I’ll move it back up!”

Oh crap. I lost it. I felt like Mr. Spock going full pon farr and I imagined becoming another airline passenger gone crazy viral video. I could tell from my wife’s expression she was thinking ‘oh shit, when the airlines bans us from flying how will we get home, what happens to our zillion air miles, and how expensive will it be to rebook our future planned flights.’   

I immediately apologized to my wife for making a scene, and though El Schmucko (one of my dad’s famous terms) cried out “I never kicked your seat”, magically once I moved it back up, it never happened again during the entire second hour of the flight. At least I felt a little vindicated after we landed, when everyone around us was overly nice and chatty to me, but only shot cold silent stares at the arrogant ass.

Still, I felt foolish and embarrassed for losing my cool. Had the guy not immediately acquiesced, who knows if I might have become a viral bug-eyed meme akin to Mommie Dearest irrationally yelling about wire hangers. But more upsetting was how afterwards I sat there beating myself up for the rest of the flight. I flashed back to being a little kid, proclaiming I would never be like my dad. Don’t get me wrong, I do believe there are appropriate times to go off on someone, but that was not one of them. This was not the way to start an anniversary trip and I hate having put my wife in that situation.

The last time I saw my wife make that same expression was when we missed a flight a year after 9-11, back when the airlines were having an ugly labor dispute. Everyone was on edge and out of whack. We had arrived at the airport two hours early, but everything that could possibly go wrong, did. We ran up to the gate just as they locked the jetway door. While asking about how to get on the next flight, I was retelling our morning’s misadventures with the just closed parking lot, new TSA rules inspection delays, the ill-working tram, the gate clerk that checked us in but failed to tell us of the flight’s terminal change, when the woman at the counter rudely interrupted me and curtly asked “so are you going to take responsibility for anything in your life?!?!” 

Knowing that would (rightfully so) set me off, my wife physically put her hand over my mouth and forced me to walk away.  Whether we were right or wrong, at the time they were putting people on ‘no-fly’ lists for lesser reasons than yelling at a bitter counter clerk, and my wife was not going to let that happen.  And while the woman’s comment was unprofessional and uncalled for, there is always a drop of truth and accuracy in those things. As I sat on the plane blaming dad‘s ‘crazy and difficult’ genes for my overreactive outburst, I had to ask myself, “so are you going to take responsibility for anything in your life?!?!” 

Our Wedding Beach