Gotham Diary:
Our Poseidon Adventure
At the risk of making a hash of the story, I’m going to try to tell you about this afternoon’s Poseidon adventure.
Megan and I were talking in the bedroom. Megan was leaning against the bed, having stood up to tend to Will, who is at the age of requiring a lot of maternal tending. As in, why should he settle for less. Nonetheless, at the moment the story began, I was holding him. I was seated in my reading chair, and Will was seated in my lap.
On the mahogany tea table next to me, there was the nice plastic tray from Feldman’s that I’d used, that morning, to serve Kathleen’s tea and toast. The breakfast things had been removed long since, but the tray remained, and it was now laden with Will’s things. There was the velvet rabbit-in-a-hat that Quatorze found three exemplaires of, all of which send Will into paroxysms of delight when his mother uses them to play hide-and-seek. There was Sophie Vulli, or Vulli Sophie; I’m never quite sure which it is — the French teething giraffe. And there was a baby-bottle cap, which out of context looks like a small clear bucket without a handle. The cap was lying inverted on the tray, its top down.
Will decided to exert his godlike physical powers on the tray, which of course slid over the mahogany surface like a piano on lard. The thing that I forgot to tell you about the tray, but which of course you’d have taken for granted if you, too, had some nice plastic trays like it from Feldman’s, is that it has a sort of rim or lip. Once Will began playing God, this rim was powerless to prevent the overtipping of Sophie and the rabbit, but but it checked the bottle cap’s toppling, notwithstanding the vertiginous angle. Will assessed the damage that he had done and decided that It Was Good.
“Poseidon Adventure! Poseidon Adventure!” I blurted in a mock-radio voice. Assuming the role of a sportscaster, I told the listening fans that the poor folk huddled in that bottle cap were in mortal fear for their lives, hoping against hope that they would not be tipped over the rim of the tray and into the abyss of the carpet. Then Will jerked the tray with a spasmosis befitting his age, so that it was suddenly at a different, equally precipitous, angle. The bottle cap had held on, amazingly. In my sick, downtown manner, I announced that cries of “Shoot me now” could be heard from the surviving passengers. Megan and I were chuckling mightily. But Will, who, holding the tray at the angle of dispose, seemed to have decided that It Was Not Good, burst into tears.
While we were quick to comfort him and to silence his sobbing (he was smiling in an instant), we burst out laughing. “He’s seen the movie!” I declared.
I wonder now if Megan was aware that the first Poseidon Adventure came out when she was rather radically younger than Will is now: still, that is, in utero. At least that’s what I recall. What I recall most clearly about the experience of seeing the movie was that I could hardly bring myself to fill pasta pots with water for weeks.