Babyhood & Titanic Fusion

About once a year, when the holiday season rolls in, I get to see my Prince Charming as he looked on the night before his wedding. The way my father imagined a son-in-law to go to work everyday. He places a frantic call to me asking if I can dust up the old suit, since the holiday party dress code says it is formal. He swirls the word ‘formal’ around his tongue like it is something unpleasant. But I look forward with glee. I love to see people dressed in coats and suits – a lifetime of seeing all the authority figures in my life and school dressed that way no doubt, but I love the crispness of it. I love the way, it slaps your shoulders out of that slouching position and the shoulder pads make one looks like a gladiator in charge of his arena as you stride through.

So, once a year he gets out his suit, gets me to make the tie for him, and off we go – he resolving to lose weight as the pants remind him of a slightly expanding waistline, and me looking proud, happy and thankful that Women’s clothes are more forgiving when it comes to waists.

This year, the party was aboard a ship. I can’t tell you how romantic the notion was. Well…it was filled with folks from his office – that isn’t the romantic part, I mean…the notion of being aboard a ship finely dressed like the adventurers of yore. That is.

After a while of smiling my way through a banquet filled with things that moved till a few moments ago; we decided to take a walk to the hull. We stood there for a few minutes gulping in the skyline of the distant city, when I heard my man don a dreamy look.

How does one hear a dreamy look? Well…the husband likes to clarify these things with sound acoustics and switched on a look that in others would have had me asking if they needed a eye-check-up, but I refrained, because he had also started using his falsetto to hum a tune.

He had a Leonardo DiCaprio-ish air about him. I think he was thinking of spreading his arms, but was hesitating.

He was humming a  tune ‘Ta-na-nan-ta-na-nan-ta-na-na-na-do-da-ta-tan’. I scanned  the horizon for a running giraffe, and found nothing but a bay ahead of me. I looked at him quizzically to which the maestro said,

“Titanic…duh!” Confidence was clearly not one of his problems.
I looked at the poor fish with pitiful eyes and clarified
“No…that is the Baby Einstein tune for a giraffe running in the Savannah!”

Babyhood has finally got him. I told him it was futile to resist.