During her undergraduate years when she seemed angry about almost everything I did, and pretty much saw me, she once even said, as "the last living white man," my smart-as-heck daughter often felt compelled to expose my many travels for the rapacious, hegemonic colonialist "projects" that they were. At Thanksgiving or Christmas she'd idly ask where I'd been lately and I'd mention some island in the Caribbean or off the coast of Thailand and she'd start in on how my snorkeling was undoubtedly negatively impacting the coral reefs, and I'd swear I didn't touch anything except maybe an already dead starfish (which I brought home and had framed) and right there would be evidence of my integral part in the collective strip-mining of an indigenous culture and ecosystem. I'd answer that the locals seemed perfectly content to strip it themselves, given the number of shell and sponge and stuffed-bird shops lining the beachside streets, and then we'd get into the usual back-and-forth about the false-bottomed tourist economy (Theresa) and whether tourists should stay home so the natives could still weave their clothes out of coconut threads (J13) and the need for indigenes to control the mechanisms of capital and production (TB) and the question of who really cared as long as everyone was happy with the situation (JB) and the final retort of who could possibly be happy in this unthinking, unjust world (guess who)?
To which, when your once-sugar-sweet daughter, who used to hang on your shoulders and neck like a gibbon monkey, now just home from her impossibly liberal, impossibly expensive New Hampshire college, is glaring at you desperately with bloodshot all-nighter eyes from too much 3 A.M. espresso and clove cigarettes and badly recited Rimbaud (and other activities too gamy to think about), you're tempted to say, "I am," even knowing it would quite possibly put her over the edge. But then you don't, and hope you never do, just requesting instead that someone pass down the boiled brussels sprouts, which are as usual utterly miserable with neglect.
All this, it pleases me to report, has come full circle in our steady march toward maturation, as I'm now sitting at my desk at Parade Travel in Huntington comparing package prices for Theresa and her fiance, the purportedly semi-famous (and only semi-successful) Asian-American writer Paul Pyun. I'm to say
"Asian-American," partly because they always do, and not only because my usage of the old standby of "Oriental" offends them on many personal and theoretical levels, but also because I should begin to reenvision myself as a multicultural being, as my long-deceased wife, Daisy, was Asian herself and my children are of mixed blood, even though I have never thought of them that way. I must admit that I don't quite yet appreciate what all the fuss is about, but I've realized that words matter in ordinately to Theresa and Paul, and far beyond any point I wish to take a stand on.
They're planning to get married sometime this coming fall or winter, right here on Long Island (Paul's parents, both medical doctors, live down the Expressway in Roslyn), and have asked me to look into a moderately priced one-week honeymoon in a tropical location. I assumed they wanted a — que holiday (unique, boutique, exotique), some far-flung stay with plenty of cultural sites and funky local flavor, but in fact Theresa told me herself that they were thinking something "spring breaky,"
maybe even a cruise. Apparently after endless backpacking forays into Third World sections of First World countries, they now desire the fun and the tacky, perhaps on the order of certain beachfront "huts" I can book them in Ixtapa, where they can roll out of bed and lie in the sand all day and get served strong, sweet drinks and only if they wish exert themselves with a paddleboat or parasail ride. No forced eco-hikes here.
Theresa (and Paul, too, for that matter) can get her hair corn-rowed and they'll have dinner at a "sumptuous international buffet" and then dance on a floating discotheque where they'll exchange tequila body shots and maybe even catch a wet T-shirt or naked belly-flop contest.
Here at Parade Travel we gladly enable much of this, as people would be surprised to find that it's not just college kids but young thirty-somethings like Theresa and Paul and then much older folks, too, getting into the act, more and more of our holidays geared to reflect what seems to be the wider cultural sentiment of the moment, which is basically that You and Everybody Else Can Kiss My Ass. No doubt you readily see this in play at your own office and while driving on the roads and almost every moment on sports and music television. I have to suppose this is the natural evolution of the general theme of self-permission featured in recent generations (mine foremost), but it's all become a little too hard and mean for me, which makes me wish to decline.
I wish to decline, even if I can't.
Still, I don't want to send my only daughter on such a trip, even if she thinks she wants to go. This is her honeymoon, for heaven's sake, and I won't let her spoil it with some folly of an ironic notion. For all her learning and smarts she has always had the ability from time to time to make the unfortunate life decision, plus the fact that she has much to learn about romance. Paul I don't know so well, but I suspect he can't be much different, or else totally cowed by her on this one. Luckily I've found them a tony plantation-style hotel in Mustique and have called the manager directly to request that he give them the best room whenever we know the exact dates (#8, according to knowledgeable colleagues). They'll get a champagne-and-tropical-fruit-basket welcome, and a special couples' massage, and though I know the antebellum trappings might initially speak to Theresa and Paul of subjugation and exploitation and death, I'm hoping they'll be spoiled and pampered into an amnesic state of bliss that they can hold on to for years (and if lucky, longer than that). This will be my secret wedding present to them, too, as their arts-and-humanities budget is barely a third of the final cost, even with my travel agent discounts.
Kelly Stearns, my coworker here at Parade, with whom I share a double desk, will tell me that I am a sweet and generous father any girl would be darn lucky to have. Each of us works three and a half days a week, overlapping for an hour on Fridays. Kelly is late again, however, as she has been quite often this summer. I'm worried about her, as it's not like her to take her responsibilities lightly.
Kelly is an attractive, big-boned blonde with a pixie, girlish face that makes her seem much younger than her mid-fortyish years, the only thing really giving away her age being her hands, which are strangely old-looking, the skin waxy and thin like my mother's once was. Kelly comes to us from the South, the Carolinas, which I mention only because it's obvious what an unlikelihood she is around the office, with her dug-deep accent and sprightly way of address and her can-do (and will-do) attitude, all reflected in the fact that her clients know exactly her days and hours. After the clock clicks 3, there's always a surge of call volume for "Miss Stearns," which I field as best as I can, though mostly they insist on working with her, even if it's just a simple matter of changing a flight time or booking a car.
I suppose I come off like everybody else here on the Island, meaning that I'm useful to a point and then probably a waste of time. I completely understand this. Whenever I call a company or business and realize I've been routed to the Minneapolis or Chattanooga office, I feel a glow of assurance, as if I've been transported back to a calmer, simpler clime, and though I know it's surely all hogwash I can't help but fall in love just a little with the woman's voice on the other end, picturing us in an instant picnicking in the village square and holding hands and greeting passersby like any one of them might soon be a friend.