An "Old" Story (from 6 years ago!)

For some reason, I was thinking today of a trip from a few years back, when I met my parents in NYC for a few days. It was a year after my aunt, Dad's sister, died, and we were going to the unveiling of the headstone. In 2004, Dad's condition was starting to make itself known, but he still got around almost normally. In retrospect, there were a couple of small warning signs that weekend, but what I remember most had nothing to do with Dad's health.

We were there at the same time that the Queen Mary II was making its first trip to New York, so we thought we would go down to the water to see it. We asked about it at the hotel, and the man we talked to told us that he hadn't gone himself, but that another guest had told him it was very disappointing, that "you could hardly see it." We were a little disheartened by this, but decided to go anyway. We walked down the street toward the water, stopping on the way for breakfast at a diner, and eventually got to the end of the street. We turned around the corner ... and all three of us burst into loud laughter.

The thing was huge. Immense. It dominated the view in ways too large to describe. Can "hardly see it"? You could hardly miss it! Mammoth, colossal, tremendous ... we just kept laughing.

(Hard to believe that such recent history was still in the film-photography era! I had to dig out the old photos, and take pictures of them...must get a new scanner soon.)



And ever after, all one of us had to say was, "Oh, you could hardly see it", about anything, to set the others off again.