Here's a flock of cranes (egrets?) that we saw from the ship while in Miami's port
The title’s a quote from Kid Bailey. He was bragging. But the idea keeps coming up in my life. On the way to Miami to embark on the Norwegian Jade cruise to Barcelona, I picked up some books at the SF Airport. One was the Oxford Murders, a mystery story set in the world of higher mathematicians at Oxford. There was a lot of discussion of what we “really” know. Certainly we can’t tell the future, and the book’s argument, was that we sure can’t tell the past – which was the subtext of the mystery.
There was some interesting discussion of criminal investigations, which involve knowing the past, of course. The protagonist suggests that one fact about the past tells us nothing, but a series will suggest a story, or a picture of the past. But there are many possible pictures of the past, and only one that is true – the point of criminal defense. Our protagonist went on to criticize the police for paying too much attention to physical evidence. I agree. Physical evidence is easy to see but difficult to understand, and the police often don’t seem to understand what they’ve got in their evidence storage rooms.
But walking around the ship I began to see that while we live in the present, we welcome ways to disguise what the present is. In other words if we, as a culture, perhaps as humans, had our way we not only couldn’t tell our future, or past, but we couldn’t tell our present either. What do I mean? I mean I’m on a ship sailing to Europe. That’s the basic fact of the present. But I’m sitting in a bar on the ship decorated with paintings of cowboys, the table tops are chess or checker boards, but no one plays any games on them. Last night my sweetie and I ate onboard at Cagney’s restaurant, which as the name might indirectly suggest, has the décor theme of a gangster’s steakhouse in the Chicago 1920’s. The door handle was shaped like a gun, there were 20’s hat outlines, stuff like that. Fortunately the staff was not required to dress in costume to fit the idea of the 20’s. But here’s the point. I was not eating in a Chicago steakhouse in the 1920’s where gangsters (like Cagney played in the movies) hung out – and I wouldn’t want to. So why are we pretending, slightly, that I am? Yesterday we had a sail-away BBQ party on deck, only we didn’t sail away because the departure was delayed for several hours, and there wasn’t any BBQ. This stuff is not peculiar to the ship. It’s everywhere. We want things to be older than they are, more glamorous than they are, different than they are. “Wal-Mart, I’m loving it” or “Join the Pepsi generation.” This is a deeply ingrained impulse in us all. I recall one day when my grandson was a young child and we were cutting blackberry bushes back. “Lets be Robin Hood and Maid Marion,” he said. “Lets be you and me cutting blackberry bushes back,” I countered. He wasn’t interested in that at all.
Cruise news: We are about 300 miles east of Miami, on day 1 of 6 days of uninterrupted sea days before our first port: Ponta Delgata, in the Azores Islands. We are sailing through a high-pressure area, the sky is partly cloudy, the sea is an intense dark blue, and fairly smooth. Here’s what the room looks like.
