A DIAMOND JUBILEE PARTY
(for England’s favorite grandmother)

It was quite a party, a diamond jubilee party, for England’s favorite grandmother.

Queen Elizabeth II became the country’s monarch when both of us were in our mid twenties. It’s nice to know we’re more or less contemporaries. Of course, I was just a lowly newly-minted junior lieutenant at the time, with no particular claim to any significant distinction. She on the other hand had to assume her dynastic exalted position with an exceedingly heavy load of responsibilities.

Over the years since she has shown herself to be worthy of both, despite many vicissitudes both personal and national. Through it all she always displayed a steady and dignified presence, no matter how trying many of those situations must have been to her in private. Perhaps this is why so many folks both in England, and in the world at large, have come to admire her. Monarchy has rarely been so well served.

Ironically, we Americans, despite our revolutionary and republican break away from it, have always retained a bit of nostalgia for the pomp and circumstance of monarchy, especially for the English way and style of it. Which may explain why we have always had a strong streak of anglophilia rather than otherwise, throughout our history.

 I too have had my moments of that, namely because of a heavy crush on her late (somewhat wayward) younger sister, Margaret. But the closest I ever came to meeting the object of that crush was at Madame Tussaud’s famous wax works in London, while on RR from Saudi Arabia. There she stood (all five foot two of her) in life-sized  glory in a dazzling royal blue low cut ball gown, with a string of pearls, and a princess’s tiara perched neatly on a perfectly coiffed auburn hair do. At that moment, as far as I was concerned, she was the only reality displayed in that entire hall; and, I have a faint recollection of my prowling in an amorous daze round and round that lovely effigy, until the wax works guards began eyeing me with very jaundiced looks, and becoming ever closer to morphing into full-fledged attack guard dogs because I was also apparently talking to her, as if we were having a two-way very friendly private conversation. Apparently a bit of -lese majeste- not to their liking.

Alas, such a moment of fantasy soon passed, and shortly I was headed back to the sand and rocky wilderness of Arabia, with only the memories of that moment at Madame Tussaud’s to comfort me through another round of long lonely nights till my next RR. But by the time that came around again my dream princess was no longer on display. 

CENTURION