Daily Blague

My mother always wanted to go on a cruise, but she was realistic enough to see that this wasn't going to happen until cruise ships boasted golf courses.

Or until, as she did not foresee, my father's golf game went to hell, which it did sometime in his fifties. It may have been the change in courses, from Bronxville's Siwanoy to Houston's Houston (or the change in climate), but Dad never blamed anything but himself. He just stopped playing well enough to stay interested and to make the effort.

I can't recall how many cruises my parents embarked on when at last my father consented to take one, but it couldn't have been many. Whether my mother was aware that she was ill when this picture was taken is another thing that I don't remember, but if she wasn't, she would be soon. There is something slightly pinched about her face that suggests to me that the non-Hodgkins lymphoma was already at work.

I'm pretty sure that my parents took this cruise with a party of friends, made up of other St Michael's parishioners. Landing in Houston well into middle age, they had two sets of friends, one based on the pipeline business and one that my mother called, without fear or trembling, "The Catholic Mafia." The latter were, quietly, very rich. Some of them didn't even work - my parents had never known people like that. But they seemed to have a very good time together. The men were always saying things that the women found very funny. That hadn't been the rule in Bronxville. But my recollections are fragmentary. In my mid-twenties, and already a divorced father, I wasn't paying much attention to my parents. I knew that I was never going to take a place in the corporate aristocracy in which they had both shined (my mother was a born "company wife"), but I had no idea of where I was going to fit in. When this picture was taken, I had probably not quite decided to take the LSAT again, and this time to complete it.

I went to law school because it was a way out of Houston. But my father was all for it. "You'll make a great lawyer," he said. "You can write." It's almost funny.