I Really Did Like Her

There was a hotel with a pool at the top of one of the hills surrounding Port Antonio and the graduates were going to have their graduation party up there. Somehow, even though it wasn’t my graduation, I thought it was okay for me to invite Laura. She was friends with them all anyway. We were in the ship lobby when I asked her where the gangway enters the ship and everyone comes and goes.

Laura was kind of hesitant about accepting my invitation, maybe because she wondered if I was even supposed to be inviting someone. So there, in the very public lobby, with everyone coming and going, I got down on one knee and implored her to come. She was very embarrassed and quickly agreed so that I would just get up.

That night at the party, the other boys and I created a lot of commotion as we played a hard game of tag in the pool and I pretty much almost completely ignored Laura. It wasn’t on purpose. I was just having so much fun with the guys and she was mixing well with her other friends that we just never paired up. No hard feelings.

Every year, at the end of the school year, the ship held a school break-up night. All the classes did a presentation. Laura directed the preschoolers in their little show. It was also the night of the graduation for my high school friends and I participated as we sang and danced to “Lean on Me”.

I found out that a King’s Kids team was about to start on the ship and, of all things, my mom was going to come help with the leadership. I decided to go ahead and stay to help as well so I could spend some time with my mom after my dad’s passing.

The graduates all left the ship and since I was just waiting for King’s Kids to start, they put me to work in security, checking people’s identification as they came aboard. I had a little spot right at the top of the gangway where I would sit and listen to music and people would come visit me there. 

Laura was going on a beach trip with some friends later in the week and she wanted to invite me along. We were out on the aft deck when she was asking me and this time I was the one embarrassed as she got down on her knee to implore me. I agreed to go.

Before the beach day, the ship needed to send some supplies to the YWAM base on the other side of the island. Since they were sending the supplies in a local truck, they needed a representative from the ship to go along to make sure it got there okay. I volunteered.

It took the whole day to get to where we were going and the road was not always blacktop. There was also dirt and mud and winding and sometimes treacherous. I got to see the real Jamaica, stopping alongside the road for refreshments and bonding with the locals who were transporting the goods.

I had a lot of time to think and what I found myself thinking about was…Laura - pretty much the whole time. I suddenly came to the realization that I really did like her. After we dropped the supplies, we spent the night…outside…on the ground. I didn’t get much sleep and we did the return trip the next day.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Bit of A Wander

That summer our family went travelling. My father had a speaking engagement at a YWAM base on the island of Cyprus so he took us with him. Cyprus is an island in the eastern Mediterranean that has been contested by Greece and Turkey for many years. It is now an independent country but Turkey still controls the northeast. The YWAM base was right near the border between the two sides. We were told not to go up into the nearby hills because there were land mines. From there we traveled to Israel. We stayed in an apartment in the new part of Jerusalem, arranged for by a Messianic Jewish friend we had known in Hawaii. For some reason, Samuel and I spent a lot of time at the apartment playing cards but we did get to see a lot of the sights.  We got to run on the walls of the old city of Jerusalem. We went inside the Dome of the Rock or Al Aqsa Mosque, which is built on the site of the destroyed Jewish temple. It is holy to the Muslims because that is where Muhammed was supposed to have a...
Read more

A Challenge

Image
That first vacation in the Outer Banks began a seven-year tradition. As the kids got bigger, we moved on to a six-bedroom house in the same neighborhood so the girls could split up into two rooms. I found different adventures to break up the week each year like jet-skiing and go-carting or a trip down to the southern-most island. We also started a mini-golf night tradition for the dads and kids. The ladies were only too happy to have a night to themselves. As the kids got too big for my sand pools, I started to take them out boogie boarding, until we eventually held boogie-boarding competitions with me as the judge. I tried to not show favoritism but my kids usually won. In the later years, everyone started getting into surfing. We would play various games on the beach and made teams to compete in relay races. One year, inspired by the Summer Olympics, we set up all the boogie and skim boards to create hurdles. Back at the house, we began to teach the older girls how to play strategy g...
Read more

Outer Banksious

Image
We finally moved into our new house and just as we were getting settled in, we went on what was to become a vacation tradition. Just south of where we live, there is a string of barrier islands in North Carolina called the Outer Banks, which is a big vacation spot. For years we had been talking about getting together with some other families to rent a big house all together for a week. Our friend and pastor, Eric Hughes told us and our other good friends, the Waskos that, despite the fact that none of us had a whole lot of money, we should finally just go for it. We all agreed and I went to work. While Eric and Brian Wasko are the more visionary types, I am good at the details. I researched finding a house to rent at a price we could all manage. Both the Hughes’s and Waskos have four children so there were 17 of us all together, with 8 girls and 3 boys. The houses have a maximum occupancy so I had to find something with the right configuration of rooms and beds to handle all of us. I f...
Read more