On your frame of reference
Art and vacationing may have some things in common
When it comes to a special trip, what things should you pay attention to and what things should you let go? Maybe it just depends on what catches your eye.
I’m lounging on a deck chair on the top level of the cruise ship as the sun filters through the thick humidity. The constant rocking of the past few days has lessened, and the ship is anchored for the afternoon in the middle of Lake Gatun. It’s Christmas day and all of us passengers spent the morning watching from our decks as we inched through the first three locks of the Panama Canal. Now, nearly everyone is off the ship on a tour in the jungle and my sister-in-law Agni and I have the better part of the upper deck to ourselves.
“How often do we allow ourselves to do nothing like this,” says Agni on the lounge chair sipping her Pina Colada. My thick paperback book lies beside me near my foot, but I haven’t been able to get through more than a few pages in the past six days. Weeks ago, I convinced my spouse Janyce that we needed the unlimited fitness class package, and we should book spa treatments ahead of time. I also thought we should convince her dad to take an off-ship excursion and all of us should try the two fancy restaurants despite the extra charge. In other words, we should do all the things on this cruise because, why not?
The pool deck waiter dressed in white and carrying a small round tray walks past my chair and stops.
“Can I get you another one,” he says, referring to the empty beer bottle I’m still holding in one hand.
“Sure, I’ll have one more,” I say.
“You know, if you order four beers the fifth one will be free,” he says, “I’m just saying.”
“But I can’t drink four beers. I only want one more,” I say.
Janyce is a few levels down on the ship working out with the free weights because we’ve missed our fitness classes for the day. I’m not exactly sure where my father-in-law George is right now. “You girls don’t need to keep tabs on me,” he said more than once. I take a swig from my bottle of Corona, the wedge of lime sloshing around inside, and stare up at the sky. The boomerang shaped birds are gliding against the bright blue above us. They look almost artificial like the mega-size movie screen they are swooping behind, black silhouettes backlit by the midday sun.
“What are those birds?” says Agni.
“I think they are pelicans,” I say.
“I’m going to google it,” says Agni.
A few days ago, Janyce and I collected our tour stickers right after breakfast and waited with a large group of people in one of the ship’s dark barrooms. I felt compelled to take at least one of the day tours offered at every port and chose the half-day excursion to a bird sanctuary in Colombia. For a minute, as we were boarding the bus, I allowed myself the fantasy that was marketed on the treadmill screen the other morning. With sweeping camera angles from an overhead drone, it showed a couple walking hand-in-hand all alone through a lush rainforest surrounded by exotic birds.
“For the entire tour, you are all my family and I’m your uncle. You will follow my lead and call me Tio Rafi,” said our smiley Colombian guide for the day. From the bus window, I tried taking photos as we spent the next hour driving through impoverished small towns on the Caribbean side of the country where our ship was docked. That same morning, I took my only Instagram-worthy shot of white skyscrapers rising up along the shoreline. Our guide called the gleaming cityscape, “the Miami of Cartagena.”
I swap my warm bottle of beer for my Iphone and start scrolling through all the poorly framed shots I took that day of birds held captive behind wire and net enclosures. I managed to snap some giant Iguanas that resembled miniature Godzillas crawling around in the brush while the sweaty group of us walked the concrete pathways. Only one photo I took that day from the bus arrests me now — it’s of a cinder block house open to the elements on one side. An ornate metal gate is swung open to a well-worn dirt path that leads the viewer into the photo. A Colombian woman, maybe my age, is leaning forward and seemingly walking fast out of the frame. The bright pink stripe on her tank top leads the eye back to the pink flowers dotting the green bushes. Over to the right, a tiny pink flower is braced against the white cement wall.
In physics, a frame of reference is a perspective that one uses to determine if an object is moving. I took that photo from the bus window as we were traveling away. Something about the scene caught my eye and I managed to capture a single moment in time. Now, when I look at the composition, I’m reminded about the impact that any good visual art has on the viewer. It makes you wonder about it.
I read a New Yorker article yesterday about two Indie filmmakers based in New York City. The magazine was given to me by my seat mate on our flight into Ft Lauderdale. We chatted for several hours before we departed the plane, each of us headed for separate cruises. “Now this is your homework,” he said, pointing to the article. I watched him fidget with the mailing label glued to the outside as we talked, peeling it at the corner and rolling it halfway up into a tiny paper straw before smoothing it back down again. On it he wrote his email address, and the idea was that I was to report back to him later. I can see now why he wanted me to read it. There’s a line in the article that says: “any place can be interesting, provided you look carefully enough.”
When it comes to a special trip, what things should you pay attention to and what things can you let go? Maybe it just depends on what catches your eye.
I wanted us to do all the things with my father-in-law because this was his idea, his cruise, and I wanted it to be special. At my urging, we all went to hear the staff sing Christmas carols but it was too crowded to see. We sat through the dismal holiday variety show on Christmas eve, the one that Janyce later called a missed opportunity for us to learn about holiday customs from all the ports on our stops. Instead, the show was recycled American Christmas music and outdated holiday tropes from the 1950s. During the Christmas elf skit, I looked over at George a few seats down and he was having a nap.
Now that we’re in the final days of our vacation, I can see that none of these special activities were necessary at all. As we sit together at breakfast day after day, I notice the repetition George gladly chooses over novelty. His meal from the buffet is the same each morning: a big bowl of fruit, followed by a scoop of eggs, several slices of tomato, sliced salmon, a bit of cheese and a hard roll sliced in half and slathered with butter. And he’ll sometimes top it all off with a special dessert if it catches his eye. Mostly, though, he’s simply happy that we are all together.
The other night, the four of us sat out on the narrow deck of our two adjoining staterooms in the balmy breeze wondering about the sea and the night sky as the sunny day slowly melted into dark.
“Dad, see the water isn’t any closer when we are docked,” said Agni, “It’s just that you don’t have any frame of reference out at sea.”
“Are the two of you still going on about all that?” said Janyce.
“I think I see the first star,” I said.
“No, there’s more,” said Janyce. “Your eyes are only just now starting to adjust.”
“That’s the big dipper. And there’s the little dipper,” I said pointing.
“That’s an airplane. Or maybe that’s a satellite. I think it’s moving,” said Agni.
I open the curtains of our stateroom to let in the morning sun. The ship has slowed to an almost standstill and the land is visible on the horizon, a few lights twinkling beneath a pale blue sky dotted with pink clouds. It’s Saturday morning and we are approaching our final port stop at Grand Cayman Island for the day.
“I don’t think Columbus was a very good sailor,” says Janyce, sitting up in bed with her coffee and reading from the morning newsletter. “In 1503, Columbus was blown off course in his 4th and final visit to the new world and stumbled upon these islands.”
“Obviously, he was using the wrong frame of reference,” I say.