. . . the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep.
- Dylan Thomas
We paid the price and boarded for the rough crossing catching whiffs of a paperback rider as we took our faded vinyl seats amid designer bags and backpacks with stretch marks. Once off, I escaped to the afterdeck under the glare of Ahab's understudy, preferring the romance of the sea to the chattiness of the Times until the waving of hands by the long-time-no-sees guided us to the island. Then on to the cobblestone slog from the wharf to white-haired Barbara's B&B, exacting its toll on the plastic wheels of space age luggage. Later, the shrill of smoke detectors, unaccustomed to the seriousness of eighteenth century hearths, would punctuate the much-touted Christmas walk, where a no-nonsense spaniel of some unknown vintage sat primly on a sofa in front of a fire, eyeing the intruding landlubbers traipsing through his home at this most ungodly of hours, decked out in - get this - blue-tinged booties as if we were all to be herded posthaste into a delivery room for the birth of yet another ne'er-do-well in swaddling; while outside one of the larger evergreens, bedecked with strands of multicolored blinking lights emitting the scent of whale oil, was soon set upon by hordes of down-filled stamping feet for canned poses to be Facebooked in nanoseconds. The evening capped by a graybeard, whose highbrowed delivery of A Child's Christmas in Wales, with two thespianettes acting out various images, would have been enough for Thomas himself to fall yet again off the wagon and tip a few with the furrowed seamen whose varnished visages bore down on us from their perches on the library's hallowed walls with eyes privy to sights to which even Thomas's words would have failed to do justice.
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Dylan Thomas by Bunny Adler
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