ESSAYS & SHORTS
The pool deck on the "Carnival Dream."
Photograph by Jeff Wilson
How I Found True Joy on a Four-Day Carnival Cruise
One of the first fellow travelers I encountered in Galveston was a woman wearing jean shorts, bright lipstick, and a T-shirt announcing, “Oh, Ship! It’s a Family Trip!” I quickly learned that wearing a themed-statement shirt to board your megaliner is a thing. Later that morning at the port, as my children and I wheeled our bags toward the Carnival Dream for a four-day round-trip cruise to Cozumel, we saw shirts proclaiming “I Like Big Boats & I Cannot Lie,” “Seas the Day!,” “Warning: I Bought the Drink Package,” and “Official Cruise Ship Buffet Inspector.” My personal favorite was worn by a tattooed fellow with gelled, spiked hair and aviator sunglasses. His sleeveless black shirt confirmed that he was “Single AF.”
My husband and I on our
honeymoon in Belize.
Survivor Honeymoon
I have no memories of a happy marriage: my parents were badly matched from the start, but it took them sixteen years to bitterly divorce. "I didn't know what I was doing," my mother told me. "I chose the wrong one."
I headed into marriage with a list of what didn't work: being naïve, having lots of expensive things, quitting your job to stay home with kids, being bored in the suburbs, hoping for the best. From this knowledge, I constructed a weird group of goals: be aware of every possible thing that could go wrong, live cheaply, always have a job and a way to walk out on your own, settle as far as possible from suburban New York, be ready for the worst.
My husband and I met at a keg party in Missoula, Montana. We were both graduate students-Tip was studying Geology, and I was moving toward an MFA in Fiction Writing. I had dated every creep in my graduate program, so was branching out.
Illustration: Laurindo Feliciano
A Relative of German Settlers Retraces Her Ancestors’ Arduous Path to the Texas Hill Country
My three children are sixth-generation Texans, and if you had told me, a roller-skating suburban New York girl, that I would ever type that sentence, I would have said you were insane. But here I am, married for 19 years to a man who says “pin” for “pen” and has three pairs of cowboy boots and a Stetson. The first time my husband-to-be visited my mom’s place in Rye, New York, he came downstairs in jeans and dress shoes, and she pulled me aside. “I told all my friends he was a Texan,” she whispered. “Doesn’t he have any boots?”