She broke my heart

At sea, May 10, 2017

"She broke my heart."

We left Hamilton 5-ish on Tuesday afternoon with the usual sonorous blasts of that deep, deep horn. The route goes parallel to the shore for a while giving me a chance to window shop as it were, trying to decide which house I would choose. The island is hilly, not mountainous, but definitely not flat, so the buildings cascade down to the water, all pastel with those white, white roofs. The stuff dreams are made of.

Ordinarily after the we're leaving tooooooot, toooooooot, toooooooot, that's it for the horn but as we were majestically heading across the HUGE bay towards open water, the triple toot sounded again and a couple of 30 foot or so boats under sail quickly tacked and got out of the way. Then more toots to encourage the  kids in a dozen little sailboats to change direction, like NOW. And they did. However the  three of the America's Cup contenders out practically flew across the water ahead of us. Quite the nautical send off.

Jaya from the dining room, our former busboy, has taken it upon himself to personally supervise our meal service at dinner. Previously we knew him as Dewa so tonight I asked why the name change and he tried his best to explain child naming in Indonesia with many lists and diagrams to illustrate. If I understood correctly, in each class there are four names for boys and four for girls. The first born is always named Name #1, second born gets Name #2, and so on. This means that all the Indonesians in the crew are called by one of those names. Needless to say, chaos would ensue so he was called by his surname, Dewa. And now he's Jaya.

Then we caught up on each other's lives. Seems Jaya had a serious girlfriend in Indonesia but the long distance thing didn't work for her. The crew are all on contracts lasting many months. It's common to move from ship to ship so they could be away from home for a year or more. In his case absence did not make the heart grow fonder. He found it harder and harder to reach her (technology makes these long absences a bit easier--email, FaceTime, Skype--to stay in touch with family back home) and when he finally returned home she had married someone else. Thus "She broke my heart."

But there is a happy ending to this tale. While home he stepped on something sharp playing soccer so went to the hospital where his injury was tended to by a lovely nurse practitioner. You guessed it. Like a "Cute Meet Rom Com" they're getting married in October!