When I mention my father’s favorite memory, he says, “That was the best day of my life — including when you three kids were born.” (We usually reply, “Gee, thanks, Dad.”)
It starts with this hotel in Connecticut that we used to stay in; it has an aquarium in it. “It was freezing,” my dad recalls. “Like, fifteen degrees [Fahrenheit] outside. The water couldn’t have been more than thirty degrees.”
He and my mom and a small group of other hotel visitors were being given a tour of the pools with beluga whales in them by a tour guide who seemed drunk on his one, tiny scrap of power. “He made a point of going into zones we couldn’t follow him into,” my dad explains, grinning at the memory. “He’d cross a rope and say, ‘You can’t cross here, because you might fall, but I can, because I work here.’ He was so smug about it, too. He was going into all of these zones and then talking in this authoritative voice about how we couldn’t follow — doing all of these things we couldn’t do.”
So, this tour guide was making another point to the hotel’s guests about how he could travel into all of these “employee only” zones, because he was professional and special and whatever. He was walking along some wet rocks along the edge of the water, gesturing at the whales inside — when, all of a sudden, he slipped.
