titanic

The last survivor of the Titanic died today.

For some reason, this is significant to me. I have always been fascinated by the Titanic. When I was little, somebody bought me a kid's book about it. (I know, right? How odd to make a kid's book about a bunch of people drowning to death.) Ever since then, I've been fascinated.

I read a ton more about it, and of course watched the Leonardo DiCaprio movie when it came out. I visited traveling exhibitions of memorabilia in the UK. I went to see the exhibit at the Widener Library at Harvard (which was built as a memorial by the mother of a recent Harvard grad who died on the boat).

As a result of all this childhood fascination with it, I've always been scared of cruise ships. As you know, I've been on a couple cruises, so I overcame the fear. But I still have a HUGE phobia of being in the water next to a big boat. I don't even like being on a small boat in Long Beach harbor because of how close you can get to the Queen Mary. I hated when my cruises would use tenders to get us to shore, because you'd have to step out of the bottom of the boat right next to the water line.

I don't know if they still have this, but when I was little you used to be able to go down to the very bottom of the Queen Mary, where they'd cut a hole out of the bottom of the ship so you could see down into the water and look at the propellers. AGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It still gives me the creeps just thinking about it. I was plastered so tight against the wall of that little room. I had NO interest in going anywhere near that water. I don't even like the idea of sunken ships. If anybody ever tried to make me go scuba diving to a sunken ship, I'd probably faint.

Anyway, needless to say, the Titanic still has a profound effect on my psyche. In other words, it fucked me up. But I do like the history, and I think having a survivor still alive in the world gave us all an interesting direct connection to that history. Maybe now it's time for me to put that phobia to bed.