Dinner on the Ship

Well what do you know … a blog entry!  Working full time has unfortunately caused my little Third Culture blog to take a back seat.  Working at a public library has been everything I expected it to be; every day is a new day, variety is the name of the game.  I have met people from across the spectrum, from every corner of the globe (cliché, I know) and of many religions and creeds.  (What is a creed, anyway?)  I am just as happy to see the woman wearing a burqa as I am the young African immigrant studying for the GMAT.  I am thrilled to see the family that has adopted across racial lines.  

It's like working in a candy factory where you're not allowed to sample the wares.  Books pass through my hands, and just about all of them capture my interest.  I've even checked out a few, but returned them, unread, because, well, I'm just too darn tired.  

I hope I will have some time to write more about my experiences in biblio-land, but in the meantime I can only share this beautiful menu that my mother found recently.  (She is Susanna C. Dixon on the menu, and I, unfortunately, am listed as Margaret E. Dixon.  Margaret is my my first given name, never used .. I always went by Elizabeth).  It is from our last voyage from Yokohama to San Francisco on the SS President McKinley.  All of the passengers and crew autographed it.  (I'm impressed with the one from the Department of Philosophy at Niagara University!) I wonder what happened to them all.  It’s just a drop in the time-universe paradigm, a piece of ephemera from my history.  

I've written about my shipboard adventures in the past.  Mom says someone used to quiz me about capitals of the world, and I would run off to a huge map on the wall to search for the answers.  I think these trips taught me, in addition to nuggets of geography, that boredom is not an option.  (Imagine eight days without the electronica of today).