When I go to a restaurant for the first time, I order the Caesar salad. In my experience, if the Caesar salad is yummy, it’s almost guaranteed that the rest of the menu will delight the taste buds. If the Caesar salad doesn’t triumph, I probably won’t be going to chow at that restaurant again.
Likewise, when I visit new places, I make a point of carefully checking out the sunsets there. Generally, if the sunsets are breathtaking, I have a stupendous vacation. Sunsets are omens. And the sunsets on Dauphin Island were good omens.
Bow Tie o’ the Day’s glasses helped me see sunsets and other sights on the island with equally super clarity. I especially liked looking at the ocean and the beach. Although Suzanne and I love the sport of people-watching, we enjoyed just watching the bare beach and empty ocean– since after Labor Day, almost all of the tourists and vacationers are outta there. Half the houses on Dauphin Island are summer homes, and when we set foot on the island, they were already closed up and deserted until next summer. The long and short of it is that really only the residents of the island were anywhere to be seen. And they were few and far between. We didn’t have just part of the beaches to ourselves. We had 99 percent of the beaches to ourselves. No complaints from us.
But one evening, we found ourselves eating at PIRATES, a beach-front restaurant with its own swimming pool. When we finished our meals, we walked twenty feet to the beach, where we sat on our butts to watch the setting sun. And then That One Guy– you know the guy– thought the whole island should hear his music. There’s always That One Guy. (His annoying behavior is not limited to music, although it was about music on this occasion.) Why is it That One Guy never plays any good music? I wanna say to That One Guy, “If you insist on taking over the general public’s sense of hearing, please, please, please…. take requests. And we request that you play ANYTHING that’s not the crappy-sounding crap you’re blasting right now!”
But nobody wants to get into it with That One Guy. He doesn’t understand you when you politely ask him to consider others around him, and maybe turn it down a notch or two. He can’t speak to you without using words with a lot of m’s and f’s– and in that order. To top it all off, That One Guy has always had more than way too much to drink, and we all know where that takes the situation. My advice is to leave That One Guy to his own obnoxious deeds. Trust me. He’ll get his due. He’ll eventually irritate That Huge Guy.
Anyhoo… Through the din of That One Guy’s blaring tunes, Suzanne said, “I’m done with this beach.” We got up and took our eardrums to another one. Luckily, That One Guy and his speaker (probably his only friend) never showed up anywhere in our vicinity for the rest of our vacation.
