OK, so you are probably wondering why there is a stuffed penguin atop this blog entry.

My daughter Anne and her friend El came down to Portland from Seattle this weekend for a Merry Christmas and Bon Voyage visit. El suggested that I might want to get a garden gnome to take along on my cruise so I can take pictures of him in all the exotic locales I'll be visiting to prove that any photos I publish aren't just postcards or stock shots cribbed from the Internet. "Garden Gnome" didn't speak to my condition, but then I remembered the penguin.

The individual you see in the picture has been with me since freshman year of college -- 1961. He is the sole survivor of a set of three or four that I acquired for the inscrutable sort of reason young women acquire such things. One of them I named after a young man I was secretly in like with -- it felt like "in love" at the time -- but I gave that one away. The other ones disappeared as I moved from college to marriage to motherhood to career. But this one has stayed with me throughout and so has probably earned a world cruise for loyalty if for no other reason.

He had not, however, earned a name until this morning, when Anne asked what his name is. He is now officially Dmitri. Anne objected that there are no penguins in Russia, but on that point she's wrong, at least in a literary sense and if you're willing to count Ukraine as part of Russia. I recently read a book called Death and the Penguin by a modern Ukrainian author named Andrei Kurkov. Good book, even in translation. That penguin (fictional, but very clearly personified) lived with the hero of the book after a zoo in Kiev closed down and gave away its animals to anyone who wanted them. He (the penguin, not the hero) became a popular fixture at the funerals of (fictional) Ukrainian mafiosi. 


We'll pretend I'm not naming my penguin for my favorite Siberian baritone, because I am clearly beyond such adolescent behavior. 


You can look forward to seeing him (the penguin, not the baritone) admiring famous sites around the world and various locations on board the good ship ms Amsterdam over the next several months.

I only hope he's strong enough to complete the trip with me. After 40 years, some of his felt is a tad moth-eaten, and I'm not sure how the salt sea air will affect him.