The master closet

     We Taylors are a competitive lot. At one point, Gwyne said to me, “You know, everything in life isn’t a competition.” I said, “Ohhhh. That attitude explains why you’ve been losing so much.” We both had a good laugh over that exchange. I’m in Maui now, visiting my brother who has a house here and my daughter, who has been living here for 10 years. He has two renters living in his 3 bedroom/2 bath house, which leaves Ed and I to share the master bedroom. And master closet. One of us will sleep on the master bed, the other will sleep on a folding mattress in the master closet, based on a mutually agreed upon competition held during the day. There are no friendly challenges because they are ALL deadly serious, but they are also filled with uproarious laughter and fun, as is pretty much the entire day. My laugh lines are getting a serious work out, ‘cause that’s how we roll.  The first night’s challenge came about organically -  we were talking about real estate and business cycles. He knows real estate, and I know business cycles. We decided on the first challenge to be based on real estate prices in Boulder, Colorado, where he owns a few homes and has lived for 30+ years. Advantage Ed? Not so fast there, buckaroo. He argued prices always went up, I said they were cyclical and said that if he checked, he’d see that in 2008, prices went down. We bickered a bit about the terms. Does a plateau count as a decline? No, the median prices have to dip. As we negotiated the terms of the challenge and finally came to a mutually agreeable conclusion, he did the research. Dip the prices did, and I had a fabulous sleep, blissfully thrashing around on the master bed, thank you very much. Ed enjoyed the master closet. I enjoyed his humiliation as he closed the door to the closet.
     Yesterday’s challenge was geographical - we found a site that had outlines of 197 countries in the world and we had 20 minutes to correctly identify as many of them as we could. The exchanges, or steam of consciousness, were absolutely hilarious. Kenya, Kenya, where are you Kenya? I’d adopt an African accent (which I do fairly well), “Please my Kenyan brothers and sisters, help me, guide me and take me to your ancestral home - YES, I knew you would! Ed would be muttering to himself at the same time and saying things like, “Really? C’mon, I don’t know where St. Lucia is. Is that a real country? AHHHHHH!” I plowed through the Middle Eastern Countries as they popped up, Iran, Kuwait, Iraq, UAE, Yemen, Oman and Qatar, as-slalam alaykum my friends and Ed killed it in South America. We both struggled in Africa and the Caribbean and we swore loudly whenever we incorrectly guessed where some of the countries were located. I lost due to a technicality, I accidentally closed my page on my iPad and lost my progress once, we regrouped for the second start and agreed if I dorked it up again, I would be relegated to the closet. And yes, I dorked it up again. It’s so serious, but it’s also so unbelievably fun.

     The first day was all about a visit to my daughter’s house, meeting her cat and picking up the pickled papaya (coco) she made me, then planning out the day’s food tour through Wailuku. I’m not here to do all the Maui things, I’m here to visit them, so they made all the decisions about what we did. We started off at a woodworking exhibition in the Maui Arts and Cultural Center that featured 25 pieces, each one was unbelievably beautiful. Then we started gathering food for lunch, Celine knows her way around the best places to get great food in Maui. They took me to a Foodland where they have a semblance of a live fish market and fresh ogo, seaweed that perfectly sets off a type of Poke, onwards to another old time Poke market and then we passed an Okazuya, a Japanese delicatessen where we picked up a few more treats. We enjoyed our picnic at a Korean pagoda, and wrapped the day up with a hike and a swim in a FRIGID waterfall/river and then dinner. And many, many more laughs.

     Todays gig is simple - a timed Words With Friends game using a chess clock, we haven’t decided the time each competitor will get, we’re still negotiating terms. Winner gets the bed, loser gets...the master closet. But the games in the next few days promise to be more serious. This is an 8 night trip. Taylors don’t like ties. One of us has to win. Ed suggested reviving a version of a game his sons played when they were here, jumping off a cliff into a river, swimming to shore, building a tower of 10 balanced stones and then swimming back to a pre-determined log in the river. The first to touch the log after completing the task(s) wins. This shit’s about to get real. The score is 1 - 1. And btw, the master closet last night was surprisingly comfortable...and Ed enjoyed my humiliation as I closed the door to the closet. :)