Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
My cell phone rang one evening in June as we were coming out of a movie theater near our
apartment in D.C.
“Your new laundry room is awesome!” Jane all but screamed.
Frankly I've never been comfortable with phone calls beginning with declarative state-
ments. Most of the time I pretend not to know who's calling, even if I know all too well. It's
a simple but surprisingly effective survival technique.
“May I ask who's speaking?”
Short pause.
“Patrick?”
“Yes?”
“It's Jane.”
Deliberate, lengthy pause.
“Oh hi, Jane. You were saying something about our laundry room?”
This usually throws people off. As a result, the little speech (or, more often, the rant)
they've memorized before they called becomes so garbled it loses all meaning.
But Jane wasn't so easily deterred. In fact, she kicked back into high gear with impress-
ive dexterity. “You won't believe how fabulous it looks!”
“Oh, that's great.”
Michael was looking at me now, his face a huge question mark. I put my hand over the
phone.
“The laundry room. It's done.”
“Is everything hooked up?” he asked, practically panting with excitement.
I handed him the phone. They talked for ten minutes about lint traps.
We walked around the corner to our favorite Chinese restaurant for dinner. I had just
tucked into a platter of beef with black bean sauce when my phone rang again.
It was Jane.
“I'm sorry to bother you but I just had to tell Michael one more thing.”
Something about cubic foot capacity. Talk about a match made in heaven.
☼ ☼ ☼
We decided to go back to the island in July. Most people tend to avoid the Caribbean like the
plague in midsummer but we couldn't wait.
The more we thought about our return, though, the more convinced we became that the
clap-trap air conditioner in the upstairs bedroom was likely to conk out halfway through our
visit.
So we ordered a new one, a wall-mounted unit with a remote control. Amazingly (sus-
pecting this day would come soon enough), we had taken a photo and written down the spe-
cifications of a unit we'd seen in a little furniture store in Isabel on our last trip.
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