Nevertheless, we like the Outback. The old girl hauls more than enough freight for our vacations and served as our crew's urban assault vehicle of choice in New Orleans over New Year's. The seats are almost exactly at Emily Butt Height (EBH); when I bought the car, perhaps my subconscious steered me towards a vehicle that would be appropriate for Emily and I starting our lives together?
What the car does not have, however, are a few critical pieces of my plan. I've forgotten them. Notably, the disposable cameras have vanished. I've also forgotten to bring a halfway decent set of trousers with a cargo capacity of their own. As a result, the intended Birthday Surprise clanks with jolly, sadistic abandon within a suspicious rectangular outline in my pocket.
Yes, it's a jewelry box in my pocket - but let's face it, who wouldn't be happy to see Emily?
She's radiant in her white-upon-red-upon-pink flowery sun dress, an escaped pixie from Titania's court flung through Atlantic Station, magnetizing bits here and there to look positively gorgeous. Her dark hair, cut into a pseudo-flapper-girl bob, frames her face, drawing attention to those steel blue eyes of hers. A wisp of gold upon her necklace and her rimless glasses complete the ethereal look.
"Ready?" she asks. I'm rooting through the bags with one hand while attempting to hold Moya's tailgate low enough to camouflage my intent. It's not working.
I resign myself to cramming my jeans pockets with as much of my paraphernalia - wallet, phone, keys, etc. as I can fit. Her present clanks in my pocket again. I turn, having nothing to offer but a big smile. A used-car-salesman smile.
"Right! Ready!" All pearly whites. It's about two hundred feet down the road when I realize it's just not going to work. The blasted jewelry box in my pocket is simply not cooperating, clanking louder and louder and forcing me to contort my gait into something out of a cheesy horror flick to quiet it.
Finally, halfway across the bridge to the Beach Club resort, I halt us. Better to blow the gig now than to suffer through lunch due to poor cargo-management choice in trousers.
"Hey Em," I say. "Surprise."
Out comes the box.
She grins up at me, feigning, well, surprise. I'm not a terribly subtle person, and I suppose it really should have occurred to me that she would have noticed me being a bit ridiculous trying to camouflage her present in such a shoddy manner. Now, to be fair, she only knew she was getting something, not specifically what that something was.
That said, she knows I'm terrible at subtlety. Paradoxically, I can use that. After all, if she's expecting nothing greater than me doing a bad attempt at hiding her present from her, there's a good chance that she won't see the real thing coming.
Regardless, she lights up. "Oh my gosh Jamie those are amazing!" she chirps. Spaces between words have been added for the convenience of the reader and without regard for historical accuracy.
Immediately, on they go, and the box disappears into the caverns of her purse. A new indentation upon my thigh thanks me.
Em throws her arms around me, locking the two of us together, standing there on the bridge between the parking lot and all the crab legs we can eat. "I am SO happy," she says. "Thank you so, so much for this. You are the best."
"No worries, love - let's go to Cape May and clean house." The Beach Club is a study in relaxing pastel colors and old Maryland architecture. It's quiet for a hotel lobby, but not the stifling quiet of a museum; more like the quiet of relaxation, soft wooden walls and white-painted beams absorbing the harsher notes of the conversation.
We stroll into Cape May Cafe and immediately - "oh god I'm so freaking hungry" - the jury's out on which of us said that first, but if it helps, just imagine both of us saying that simultaneously. My stomach grumbles audibly at the smell of steam and crab legs in the air, the mildly sweet notes of the meat mingling with the sharper aromas of seasoning and salt.
In the middle of the cheery New England clambake shop are the enormous stainless steel boilers into which three men are unloading entire platters' worth of crab legs. Quantities measured in the dozens of pounds apiece, coral-upon-white and steaming as they come out. Corn steams on the line's nearby platters and a fat potboiler holds savory beef and vegetable soup.
Em looks up at me and makes a face like the first cat must have made upon walking into that first cave at the dawn of time. It is the face of impending - if temporarily stalled - pure animal gluttony.
"Feed me."
I glance down at her. "Yeah no problem." No punctuation there either.
As it turns out, it takes us about twenty minutes to get the table we've reserved. Sitting there, right outside the source of the maddening seafood smells, time dilates to a crawl. Ironic, isn't it, how I'm themeing this whole series of shenanigans around Emily's adventures in time and space and here I am at its mercy, right at the very beginning.
After the longest twenty minutes in the history of the universe, in we go. It's hard to express just how fast Emily rockets to the line without using a modern physics textbook, but she's practically on her way back before I'm halfway through the line.
The arthropod holocaust is swift and severe. In surprisingly little time Emily sits behind an oubilette of crab shells, with one mostly eaten half-ear of corn sitting off to the side for presentation's sake.
She's wearing the world's most satisfied smile.
I'm still going. I always have a difficult time pinning down just why crab (and its various arthropod cousins) happens to be so immensely satisfying to eat, but it's not just down to how delicious the meat itself is. (And it is.) Perhaps it's having to work for it, using that hidden talent of popping the leg open at the knuckle using a fork, without having to resort to that specialized plastic doohickey spawned from Joe's Crab Shack. (Surprisingly, the metal cracking tool is nowhere to be found. Perhaps Disney doesn't want kids trying to crack their siblings' hands in it.)
Emily toys with an Oreo bonbon while I stuff my face with crabmeat.
"You know what I like about these?"
"Mmhmmpf." I use my incisors to strip a chewy hunk of crabmeat off the sinew. The mild buttery-spicy-sweet flavor melts within my mouth. "Y'like'cndy."
Em giggles at my caveman speech. "These are great because they're Oreos that someone stuck in a blender and somehow mixed with cream cheese and then coated the whole thing in chocolate. And I'm going to eat every last one unless you get one," she grins.
"Fine'by'mhee," I mumble, still chewing as I crack open a particularly meaty knuckle. The carapace jabs me in the flesh of my palm but I have the last laugh as I extract the meat.
Five minutes, and about two entire marine ecosystems (and an Oreo bonbon) later, we're both sitting relaxed in the booth. "That...was amazing," Emily says.
She rolls her eyes and lays her head on my shoulder. Oh crap. I know what that means - like a satisfied housecat, Emily's threatening to pass out asleep in warm, content bliss. But she's got another envelope to open. I yank the second little blue envelope out of her purse and hand it to her. "For you, madam. Before you pass out on me."
I am so glad you made it to Cape May Cafe! Kindly sit back and enjoy your steamed crab legs and mussels. This is something I know you have been wanting for a long time.
It's okay. You don't have to have a long flowery explanation of the place or anything like that.
This illustrates one of my favorite things about you - you enjoy simple pleasures in life, but are not ashamed to appreciate the more elaborate ones. This is the first step to your mastery of time - and that is recognizing what you want to prioritize.
The future is an uncertain thing. That is just the way of things. But all good plans must start from good intel, and all good intel must come from a reliable source. You, my dear, are this reliable source when it comes to the things you enjoy. You thread together the simple pleasures of life - a seafood meal at a warm and comforting place like this - with an appreciation for the craftsmanship and the level of attention to detail that exists in a place like this hub - world in which you stay.
Now, for the next part of your adventure.
The first world we will be journeying to, appropriately enough, will be England.
Here is what you must do. Find the "Rose and Crown Pub" and try something new. Why? Because of any of the worlds in your multiversal hub, England is the one most tied to tradition. Upon the surface, it looks most towards bringing the past into the present. Certainly, America has a quaint recreation of the 1700s, but England most elegantly strings the threads of the past together with those of the present.
I want you to share a "Cider and Black" with your traveling companion. Why? The drink might be terrible, for all we know. But it might be glorious. It is the uncertain future. It is acknowledging the past while taking calculated risks in the future.
And let's face it, if you want to learn how to master time and space, England is pretty much the place to start.
See you there!
- The One Who Moves
