If those are cows this must be France

In early July of 1964 my parents, brothers and I sailed from New York to France on the SS United States.  As exciting and glamorous as it was, it was also the least expensive way in those days for my father to get his family across the North Atlantic for a visit with my maternal grandparents.  We travelled Cabin Class, the middle of three classes on the ship, and because we had booked very late, our cabin was way below decks with five bunk beds and no window.  But who cared?  My parents spent the five days at sea wrapped in blankets on deck chairs sipping bouillon and tea while we children had the run of the ship.  Many adventures were to be had, one involving my little brother Owen being swept along an upper deck, where we had no business to be, by a blast of air from an enormous exhaust vent on one of the ship's massive chimneys.  A diving save by his older sister (that would be moi) prevented total disaster.  Of course we never told our parents....

On the morning of the last day, my father awakened me before sunrise to go up and watch the arrival in Le Havre.  The eldest child, I was most like my father and had already a soupcon of an interest in his favorite passions, history and geography.  But as dawn broke, I was met with a scene that shocked me.  Instead of the green fields and graceful trees I knew to expect in France, or even the elegant but noisy boulevards of Paris, I saw a vast wasteland of an industrial port, one of the busiest in Europe at the time.  The leaden sky over the English Channel, as grey as grey could be, was ominous and gloomy.  "This isn't France!" I cried, as my father liked to tell the story.  "This cannot be France, there are no cows!!"  Although my experience of the French landscape was limited to Sunday lunches in country restaurants where we would meet my great aunts and uncles, I knew that it required large numbers of the placid beasts, swishing their tails and complacently munching on fresh, green French grass.  This was not to be seen in Le Havre.  Sensing my disappointment, my father assured me that once the ship had reached its berth and we had walked down the gangway with our luggage and gotten into the rented car (or were my grandparents meeting us and driving us to Paris?  no, their car was too small), we would drive out of Le Havre and into Normandy and there we would see more cows than man had ever known.

I do not remember if all of this came to pass as he described.  All I know is that to me on that deck, my father was was the tallest, most handsome man in the world, a repository of all knowledge and experience, the person who would teach me everything I needed, wanted to know in life.  Although gone these five years, when I think of those moments on deck, it is as if he is in the next room, saying "Come here Ali, I have a good map of Normandy, let's look at it together."