My Sweet Lord

The ship came out of dry dock and we moved back on. It was about this time that we first listened to music on the radio. My parents had a portable stereo or boombox, as they were called. While my dad was speaking in Hong Kong he bought another one and my brother and I inherited the old one. 

We didn’t have money to buy music but we would record songs off the radio onto old cassette tapes. We didn’t get the greatest reception out in the Bay so the songs usually had a lot of static. We were a little behind the times because we were listening to songs like Diana Ross’s, Do You Know Where You’re Going To? and George Harrison’s, My Sweet Lord.

We had no idea what My Sweet Lord was or who was singing it. We thought it was about our God. We were singing along with “my sweet lord” and “hallelujah”. Then we heard “Hare Krishna” and we were like, “Oh” and stopped.

For most people, the word boutique probably conjures up images of unique and perhaps expensive clothing stores. For those of us on the ship, it definitely brings up unique images. “The Boutique” was the place people would donate the clothes they no longer wanted so that the people who didn’t have much money had something to wear. Let’s just say our family did not fit into the donor side of things. 

It’s not that you couldn’t get good stuff at the boutique. It’s just that some people weren’t very discriminating and ended up with the some very interesting combinations. Of course, there was also a sense of inferiority at having to wear hand-me-downs but there were a lot of us in that position and it didn’t bother me. 

At the same time, I was anti-jeans. I had never had a pair of jeans. For some reason, I thought people who wore them did so because they thought it was cool and I didn’t want people to think I was trying to be cool. I thought coolness was just a state of being, not trying. To be sure, a lot of people wear certain brands and styles of jeans to be cool but not necessarily jeans in general. I have since realized that jeans are just a real comfortable pair of pants and when it’s cold, I now wear them whenever I can.  

My brother and I had a huge argument about whether Buddha was a good man. We were painting our bathroom with oil-based paint and you know how it says to make sure it is well-ventilated when you use oil-based paint? Well we did not take that advice and we got into an argument about whether Bhudda was a good man. Moral of the story, make sure it is well-ventilated when you paint with oil-based paint.

By this time, the toilet plumbing had been “fixed” but it presented new challenges. Because the system had been unused for so long, many of the pipes were rusty and leaking which would cause floods for some on the lower decks. The main challenge on our deck was that there was a lot of air in the system and when there is air in a pressurized sewage system, it can cause what we called explosions.

Most of the time we were prepared for it. We would put the lid down and hold it, hoping for a minor to no explosive event. If it was minor and the water didn’t erupt, all was good and you went on with your day. If it erupted, the water and any contents would shoot out the gap between toilet bowl and lid, you would clean it up and go on with your day. If you were stupid or absent-minded enough to forget to at least put the lid down, well…your day would go on eventually.