lusting for the queen

My mother-in-law has a strange assortment of friends in Brooklyn. Most of them are people she met when she subletted their apartments – almost every summer, she finds someone who is going away for a month or two and she sublets their place nearby (this is a common NYC practice). When GMB was younger she babysat him while Wes was at work (and I was… yes, eating bonbons) but now she just likes to spend time with him as much as possible and to be in NYC, which she loves but cannot afford longterm. So she sublets a studio apartment each summer and somehow manages to stay in extremely friendly contact with nearly all of the subletters.

One is a violin maker from Austria who is moving back there today. My mom-in-law and GMB went to her bon voyage party last night and learned that it really was a voyage type deal – she would be returning to Europe on the Queen Mary 2. And that news, my friends, was the final straw. I was wildly jealous.

I lust for the QM2. I love her a rather inappropriate amount, particularly given that we are not even acquainted.

Yet.

My mom-in-law and father-in-law were interested in getting to Red Hook to see the ship leave New York Harbor. The QM2, you see, is not only the second largest ship at sea (the Freedom of the Seas took the title from it a couple of months ago – did you not know that I am your go-to person for cruise ship trivia?), it is also the first ship to call Brooklyn her home. And that just makes me love her all the more.

I have wanted to do a transatlantic crossing since I was very young. My dad’s parents went back and forth to Europe that way repeatedly – she was born in Holland and they seemed to take a lot of trips back there and elsewhere, often with their two daughters in tow. There are many dramatic and glamourous stories about the family on cruise ships. And thus, I was raised to love cruises even though my own father never took me on one until I was 25.

So, even though it made my heart hurt, I agreed to take the in-laws to see the QM2 pull out of Brooklyn. We needed to grocery shop, after all. The best and most comfortable view of the ship’s movement is, in my opinion, the cafe at the back of the new Red Hook Fairway, a massive and wonderful grocery store that is even newer to Brooklyn than the QM2 herself. We got cake and coffee and watched her pull out. It was quite a show – they seemed to be doing publicity photos or videos and thus had 3 or 4 helicoptors circling her. She also pulled back and forth around the Statue of Liberty, undoubtedly trying to get the best angle for them both together.

This was great fun and meant that I got to share my useless ship trivia with my father-in-law, who actually seemed like he might be truly interested – that was a change, let me tell you, since Wes doesn’t care one iota about which ships go where or how big they are or any of that. He is totally uninterested in a transatlantic crossing, feeling he would become bored and claustrophobic. This is why the QM2 will someday be the world’s most ridiculously expensive one week writer’s retreat for me, solo, floating across the pond all on my own. Heaven.

Things went downhill after our coffee. We told the parents that we had to do some grocery shopping, thinking they would stay put watching the ship on the lovely patio. Instead, they waited about 5 minutes, grabbed 2 or 3 things they needed, went through the checkout, and stood there looking impatient until we finished the world’s most frenzied and inefficient shopping trip. We didn’t get everything we needed and this will necessitate not only subsequent trips to Fairway but several other small-scale Park Slope ventures to smaller shops. The place was crowded, but the parents’ impatience was pushing us right over the edge, to the point that Wes became completely paralyzed with indecision in the toilet paper aisle and I had to take over.

I will grocery shop on my own in future, I think. We’ll just have the coffee and the patio next time.