“Foolish girl,” she mutters, panting along.   “Why you needed to buy that ridiculous bird and make us nearly miss boarding is beyond me.  As if you won’t see any birds ON THE OCEAN.”

I don’t have the breath to snort at her, or turn around and glare.  As if she was one to talk about foolishness, taking me on a cruise to a lost continent.   If my doctors knew the things she was up to, they would all look very disapprovingly at her, the whole row of them, peering over their horn-rimmed glasses.  I don’t know why my doctors all wear glasses.  Maybe they think they see me better with them.

But yes, they’d disapprove mightily if they knew I was trekking off to supposedly imaginary places.  Imagination, they say is not good for someone who can’t remember her own name or what she had for breakfast yesterday half the time.  But Droll Ruth says she knows of different types of medicine, the kind I will never find at home in bed.  And so, we are off, and apparently my no-good imagination is already out and being sassy, for as soon as I saw that bird in the window of the animal emporium on the way to the docks, I could not imagine not placing the cage on top of my luggage and walking up the gangplank with it.  Enter with a sense of the exotic, I thought. It’s good to blend in a bit.  That, and for some reason the idea of getting to see a tiny rainbow-burst  following alongside the ship, even on cloudy days, fills me with a strange hope.

We are on board now, doubled over, panting, breathless.  But I think we’ve made it.  Droll Ruth catches her breath, turns to me, and smiles, adding a thousand tiny wrinkles to her already lined face.

“Nothing like a desperate, last-minute scramble to show you what really matters, eh?  Bet you wouldn’t have run so fast if you didn’t want to come.”

Now I do snort, and turn to glare at her.   “I can’t remember what I packed,” I simply say.  “So I’m going to go get settled in and figure that out.”

She looks at me, and I see the center of those dark eyes soften. “Don’t try to think about why you packed them.  Just focus on how you feel now, resdiscovering them.”  I nod curtly, and as I turn my back on her to go find our cabin she adds, “remember to turn on a light for me before you go to sleep.”