Advice

Geysers

Never soap a geyser.  Yes, I know your mother and I did it, but we’d been drinking a lot of martinis that night.  And the head ranger egged us on.

On the Rooftop of the Uffizi

Oh drink up your champagne, you slow old thing.  We can’t sit here all afternoon, that waiter’s giving us the evil eye already.  Tell him we want the bill—il conto—the next time you see him coming out.  And he should take away this bottle, not just upend it in the ice bucket like that, ridiculously vulgar.  People will think what lushes those ancient British types are, abroad, when not at home riding to hounds.  Just like the Raj all over, they’ll say.  Oh catch his eye, can’t you.  I want to get back to that little shop before they close for the day, get some leather gloves for Ginny and Phyllida and the girls.

Blue Margaritas

The only way to get through hurricane season in Baja is to live on blue margaritas.  Trust me on this, sweetheart.  You won’t sleep, for the heat and the humidity, you’ll lie there dripping, that awful fan like a big bat flying around above you, not to mention the scorpions dropping onto your pillowcase.  You get up early and go straight to the bar, order a blue Curaçao margarita, one of those heavy two-handed glasses, it’s all you can do to survive.  And at that hour all the Europeans will be coming in on the night flight, and you can catch some great-looking Italian at the bar, before he’s had a chance to find his footing—or some woman with a boat.

Directions to Our House

Be very, very careful coming down Deer Creek from Page Mill; there are often horses rearing in the road, whose riders can’t control them, or tearing up one of the bus stops.

   Pass the Stanford vineyard on the left, what looks like a hillside of wooden crosses like one of those battlefields in Normandy, or the graveyard behind a Mission church, those who didn’t take too well to religion.

    Don’t hit the giant pinecone in the center of the drive.  There’s always one there, sitting glaring at you.  Avoid it.  Remember the Mynaeds’ giant pinecone in the pictures of those Dionysean rites!

    Ignore The Manse as you come past it.  The owner is almost never out shooting at squirrels.

—Christie