Blackmail and Eternal Friendship

If you hear from a friend who says he/she has some "heinous" photos of you from a long time ago, what do you think your first reaction would be? Blackmail?

Several years ago in a happier time and place when I worked for United Airlines at OAK, I joined two of my friends and co-workers for a weekend in Honolulu. The photo above was taken as we taxied to the runway. Obviously Julie had been drinking before checking in at the airport. On the other hand, I must have been suffering from malnutrition back then. Yikes.

During the flight, I must have loosened up a bit myself! I do not remember this photo being taken but I do remember explaining to the girls what a "swimmer's jock" was.

We found a cheap hotel room and planned to go snorkeling at Hanauma Bay. Apparently these weren't the only photos taken that I had completely forgotten about.

The hotel room was one of the saddest little hovels I've ever seen. I can't remember the name but it was a hostel, I think, intended mainly for Japanese tourist students. We paid for two beds and a rollaway. I, being the luckiest, got the rollaway. No, it was I, being the MAN, who got the rollaway. Ha!

I wouldn't have fit on the bed anyway. They were only 4 feet long. At least that's what I thought until we realized that they were pushed under a table at one end. The room itself was a big problem. You'd have thought that a room with two beds and a kitchenette would be large enough for three people, right? Of course. No. Not at all.

It was tiny. The rollaway was too large for the room. It took up all the available floor space including the entry a.k.a. the kitchenette. So I had to use the mattress to sleep on the floor where my feet ended up under Anne's bed, one of my arms under Julie's and the other arm, if extended, went into the bathroom. My head was down the hall in the kitchenette.

Waking up crippled and miserable, Julie took pictures of me trying to make coffee. For some reason she gets a big kick out of these images.

(Well, I have one or two she might get a kick out of too. But since she just send me a nice birthday card, I won't post them..)

I had never snorkeled before and had never planned to. I'll never forget trying to walk with flippers on and then trying to float/swim with flippers on. If you take a close look, my feet already qualified as flippers anyway so they really weren't necessary.

But don't we look darling standing there with our faces all scrunched up in those little masks!

This must havebeen taken before we got into the water because after being in the water, to my horror, my trunks were 90% transparent revealing that alluring "swimmer's jock" I had been showing off on the plane.

Okay. "How I Learned To Breathe Through a Snorkel" happened when I finished practicing and actually got horizontal and started floating around looking at cool stuff. The very first thing I saw was an eel. I panicked like a little girl with a bug in her hair. I just started screaming into my snorkel pipe which must have sounded like part of the soundtrack from "Exorcist." I remember splashing, trying to swim/float backwards and get away. I'll never forget its beady little eyes looking up at my big buggy eyes on the other side of the snorkel mask I'd spit into and rubbed down to make the view clearer, as instructed by the girls. It was an awful sight, above and below sea level.

It took some coaxing but I did go back out again but never where I couldn't immediately just stand up and run back to the beach across the top of the coral if need be.

Ah, it was a beautiful day and one that we all remember well. Anne, unfortunately, has since passed on ahead of us. But we will be friends eternally and when I catch up I'm going to be so proud that I never, ever showed the picture I took of her in that hotel room to another living soul. (She made me promise.) She's tough and, yes, she scared me a little.