THE GIRL IN THE GONDOLA

Notes on Love & Laundry

Dear Love and Laundry Readers,

Picture this: You are in a gondola, floating down an ancient canal in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. You pass beneath the Bridge of Sighs where the ghosts of condemned prisoners whisper lamentations into the night. It’s dusk, and the palaces and buildings and restaurants are lit with an amber glow.

It’s so beautiful it takes your breath away—

Or it would take your breath away—if you only looked up from your phone long enough to see it.

I’m back from a trip to Greece, Croatia and Italy, where instead of giving directions to lost tourists wandering the streets of historic Alexandria, Virginia, I became a lost tourist myself in someone else’s country. And while on vacation, I realized how much cell phones, or rather, the camera inside our ubiquitous cell phones, have changed travel for us all.

As we passed under the Bridge of Sighs, I saw a teenage girl sitting in another gondola starring down at her phone, oblivious to everything around her.

Once again demonstrating the ‘get off my lawn’ sensibility my children claim I am developing as I slide into my AARP era, I wanted to stand up in my gondola and yell, “Hey, Screenager! Do you have any idea how expensive this place is? Do you know how hard your parents had to work to bring you here? And did you know they’ll be gone some day and you’ll miss them? Pay attention to your parents! Pay attention to Venice! GET OFF YOUR PHONE!!!”

But this outburst would have embarrassed the teenage and young adult people riding in my own gondola. So I didn’t say any of these things out loud. But I thought them.

And to be fair, the teenage girl in the gondola was an extreme case. I am confident that most of my fellow tourists actually did see the beauty of Venice. But I think many of them witnessed this beauty second hand. Because they saw it through the small screen on their phone as they took pictures and recorded everything around them. Lips pursed, hands held high, Venice is the city that launched a thousand selfies.

And even though I fought hard against this impulse, I too was guilty. We all were. My husband set up a shared digital photo album for the trip and we uploaded every picture we took.

That album now has 1,067 pictures, taken by five people on a ten-day vacation. And I think this says something about the way cell phones and social media have changed the way we experience things.

Remember the olden days before smart phones? We carried a camera bag. We bought film and we took pictures. We came home, took that film to CVS and paid someone to develop those pictures. We exercised discretion when snapping a photo because we had a finite amount of film and developing that film cost money.

Then we picked those pictures up from CVS when we got home and we looked at them. The more Type A people among us went the extra mile and put those photos into albums. The rest of us “organized” these pictures by tossing them into a shoebox.

We took pictures then for the same reason we take them now. Because we don’t trust ourselves to accurately remember the places we’ve been and the things we’ve seen. Or maybe we want proof that we really did touch the acropolis, that we really did walk where Aristotle walked.

Maybe photographs are just an ineffective attempt to capture something breathtaking and carry it with us always. Or maybe we take pictures because we’re smart enough to know these are the good old days. We’re wise enough to document this joyful time when everyone is together and healthy and happy, before the kids grow up and our parents pass away and we are no longer sturdy enough to trot the globe and see the wonders of the world firsthand.

But I think the unlimited ease of digital pictures has diminished our ability to fully inhabit the moments before and after these pictures are taken, to be completely present in the places that we’ve spent so much money and gone to so much trouble to visit.

Cell phone cameras and social media have made it impossible for us to see and eat and laugh and experience without also documenting the fact that we are seeing and eating and laughing and experiencing. It’s no longer enough to go somewhere. Now we feel compelled to show everyone where we went by taking pictures and then posting these pictures on social media. It’s almost like we aren’t going on vacation to absorb art and history and culture for ourselves. It’s like we’re going on vacation to exhaustively document these things so we can show everyone what we did and absorb them later.

But we don’t, do we? We might glance at the pictures in our phone from time to time, but we aren’t developing them, bringing them home, culling the bad shots from the good, labelling them, sliding them into protective plastic sheets, snapping them into an album, then sitting down in front of the fire to look at them later.

It costs nothing to snap a digital picture. And because it has no cost, it has less value. We snap it, post it and move on to the next sight or attraction. The next meal. The next city. We consume art and culture and history and places the same way we consume cheeseburgers in the McDonalds drive-through. Fast. Convenient. Easily acquired. Easily forgotten.

I’m grateful that I’m old enough to be aware of this compulsion to document everything with my cell phone. When I felt this impulse rising, I tried to fight against it.

Because I know that even without a picture, I will remember that gondola ride for the rest of my life. It’s the only gondola ride I’ve ever taken. It might be the only one I ever take. And I want to remember the smell of the water and sound of the waves lapping against the wooden boat. I want to remember it inside my mind, not inside my phone.

My children are growing up in a world where value is increasingly measured in quantity: the number of followers, the number of dollars earned or spent, the number of countries visited, the number of minutes saved using AI.

But value can be also measured using different criteria. Good conversations during dinner. Insights generated from a plaque at a museum. Anecdotes from a tour guide. Beautiful churches discovered when wandering lost through the winding streets of an ancient city.

The most valuable parts of a trip or a life can’t be counted, captured or preserved. The sound of my children laughing together. A healthy body to take me to the top of the acropolis. A thought-provoking comment from my husband about a book he’s currently reading. Pictures painted on a clay pot by a fellow storyteller 3,000 years ago.

One of my best memories from this vacation is decidedly un-beautiful. We were sitting jet-lagged at Heathrow at the end of a five-hour layover with unkempt hair and wrinkled clothing. We looked like influencers hired by the Just Go To Florida Instead and Avoid All International Flights Association.

As we sat there bleary-eyed, drinking a strange British version of Starbucks coffee, one of those little vehicles they use to transport people around the airport rolled by. The jet-jagged people inside had glassy eyes and frozen expressions, kind of like little Fisher Price people with plastic hair and painted on smiles. But something about their blank faces and the vehicle’s silly beeping sound struck us all as hilarious and I started laughing. Once I started I couldn’t stop. I laughed until I cried. My kids did, too. My husband, the stoic Norwegian, actually smiled.

That’s the memory I’ll cherish from this trip. No picture necessary.

I leave you today with one of the 1,067 photos we did take, this one from the Doge’s Palace in Venice.

And this is a picture I took outside our hotel. So much beauty, everywhere.

Now all that beauty and wonder is swept away, replaced with practicality and logistics as we move children into dorms in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (Go, Golden Eagles!) and South Bend, Indianna (Go, Fighting Irish!) and settle our sadly neglected youngest child into her sophomore year of high school between trips to Target (Go, Cardinals!).

Once that’s done I’ll settle into the second round of edits on my third book, which releases next summer. And I’m also sifting through ideas for a fourth book. I feel like I’m enveloped by a cloud of butterflies as different ideas land on my shoulder, whisper in my ear and flutter off again. I’ll choose one and attempt to capture it for you on paper, even though the very best things can never be captured at all.

Much love,

Christine

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