Vacation Note:
Regrouping
Last night, at dinner, Kathleen asked me why I looked so sad; and when we walked back to our room on the beach, I knew for the umpteenth time how lucky I was and am to have found her.
The night before, I had selected Red Dust from the wallet of DVDs that I’d brought along for our viewing pleasure. Kathleen hadn’t seen this movie, about a Truth and Reconciliation proceeding in South Africa, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Hilary Swank. I had completely forgotten the brief flashes of gruesomeness that punctuate the film whenever Alex Mpondo (Mr Ejiofor), currently an MP, is obliged to remember his persecution under the apartheid regime. Kathleen found the movie excellent but was troubled by the blood. It woke her in the middle of the night, and she had trouble getting back to sleep.
If reports of bad dreams and sad faces sound contrary to the spirit of vacation in Paradise, don’t be daft. This is what our vacations are for: slowing down to a point that allows unpleasant things to be registered and dealt with. Unlike all previous vacations that I can think of, this one is lasting long enough, and quietly enough, for us to break past the running-away phase with which all vacations begin: we can’t believe that we’ve escaped! Now we’re beginning to think of going back, not in the do-we-have-sense (although there’s certainly that), but in the more constructive frame of asking how regular life might be made more like this.
Walking downhill after breakfast, Kathleen wondered if people who grow up in St Croix realize how beautiful it is. I answered that no reasonably healthy young person can live on beauty alone. That’s for folks our age, at least the ones who have amassed plenty of interesting stuff.
I have a friend who grew up on St. Croix, in a poor black family. She remembers her childhood as lacking in many material things, but happy. Her family’s various modest homes have been wiped out completely more than once now by various hurricanes, but no one was injured in those events. She remembers as a kid they only had a few toys to play with – some wooden blocks, and a doll or two shared among several sisters. But she says that was enough for them and their imaginations provided the rest of the fun they needed. She was born in the early 50’s so I think the island was not quite as overrun by the tourist trade as it is now. She also told me that she does miss the beauty there and enjoys it when she goes to visit (she has lived as an adult mostly in New England and also for several years in Africa). But she also feels that island life is constraining. You are out of the hustle and bustle of the rest of the world and isolated. If you don’t work in the tourist trade, there are few if any, other ways to earn a living. She wanted to do work with more of a global impact and so she left in order to accomplish that goal. She seems quite at home here now though I never understand how people from beautiful climes learn to tolerate the winters here. Many never adjust, but some do seem to manage it. Anyway, I guess all that is to say that at least one person who grew up there realizes how beautiful it is, but that you are right and she, at least, was not content to live on beauty alone.