Weaving Costa Rica
We had been to the airport in Denver the week before, hoping to catch a midnight flight to Atlanta and then on to San José, Costa Rica, but were turned away because we did not have the correct permissions from a Costa Rican consulate; we had to have special permission because I was not the father of our children, and though our daughters had two last names, neither of them were the same last name as mine. There were two bright sides to this disappointment: I thought that, after our carefully laid plans were hijacked by a legal technicality, and we had to return home carrying our unused, unopened luggage, I would never again panic over a missed flight––unfortunately not true; and also, that same night, our oldest daughter came down with a fever of 103. By the time we left Denver at approximately 500 m.p.h. the following Saturday, appropriate permissions in hand, our oldest daughter was again feeling quite chipper, as were we all.
Our first full day in Costa Rica, was spent lounging by or making waves in one of those swimming pools without a well-defined edge. Eternity? Infinity? What do they call that kind of pool? Travel-weary, having slept on the floor of the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Airport, it was a little disconcerting to see our daughters swimming toward the horizon of a flat world. Our daughters aged 9 and 12 at the time did not pretend to be mermaids when water was added, they metamorphosed into mermaids and could quote verbatim the entire script from the movie Splash in which Daryl Hannah plays a lovely mermaid opposite Tom Hank’s best buffoon. Our youngest daughter, Thalassa, wearing snorkel and mask, kept swimming toward the edge of the world, and when she reached it, she would surface briefly and call to my wife, “Hey, Bob! C’mon in Bob. The water’s great!” “Mom” becomes “Bob” when a child’s nose breathing is restricted by a diving mask.
Thalassa, as a child, was irrepressibly energetic. We often wrestled playfully before bedtime to wear her out and in the hopes her night terrors would leave her alone. Thalassa and I tussled around the room. I had her in my clutches, but she spun away and in so doing, accidentally clocked me with an upper-cut, and I bit my tongue. Mocking rage, I grabbed her under the armpits and dove onto the bed. We laughed and rested for a moment and then I felt a stinging pain on my right shoulder. I looked down and under the pillow there was a dark green scorpion. My breath stopped. Not from the venom, but with uncertainty. Thalassa saw the arachnid and screamed bloody murder. I stood up and tried to catch my breath while hoping to determine whether I might die soon. My wife ran out of the room. Oh, that’s helpful. Perhaps she. . . . So far there was only a throbbing, stinging pain. My wife soon returned with a waitress from the hotel bar who looked more concerned than I wanted her to. My oldest daughter, Sirena, reported later that she was mostly worried that my eyes were going to fall out from under their lids. The waitress, whose name we learned later was Hilandera, went to the bed and picked up the pillow where the scorpion still clung and began to walk toward the door. She smiled at me and gestured that the sting was not much more than mosquito bite, but from the way she held the pillow and the complimentary scorpion, it didn’t seem that she wanted to get stung very much. Hilandera handed me one of her shoes. She shook the pillow several times until the scorpion fell to the ground, and she started yelling at me about the hour of the day. Oh, I was supposed to, but by then the scorpion had skittered off, and I was left holding a strange woman’s shoe. Hilandera was then saying something about me being embarrassed, and I said no, and she said no, and made a spherical motion in front of her abdomen. Oh, pregnant? Would this somehow become the story of my life? Stung by a pregnant arachnid? Thank god it wasn’t a black widow. The way my wife left the room.
Moral: If your wife suddenly becomes someone named Bob and you get stung by a scorpion, and fellow hotel guests believe you have a thing for women’s shoes, you’ll probably live.