I’ve made so many mistakes in my life that this one seems trivial, but I wish I had taken more pictures along the way. You see, my thing always was: “I’m not bothering with cameras, I’m taking pictures in my mind.” Now I’m paying the price with no hard evidence that I ever left Mississippi.
There are lots of memories up there in my head – 66 years of wandering the earth. 22 years at sea. Ashore in over 100 countries. But you will have to take my word for it. You want a picture of an iceberg big enough to sink the Titanic, floating just south of the Arctic Circle? Got it – in my mind. How about elephants gathered around a waterhole just outside Mombasa, Kenya? Got it – in my mind. Possibly you’d like to see a picture of Mt. Fuji in Japan on a cold, clear morning? Got it – in my mind. Or maybe a bowl of cold gazpacho in a rustic café on the Targus River in Lisbon? Got it – in my mind. I read where Elon Musk’s “Neuralink” company is developing a process to implant a computer chip into the human brain. The device has already allowed the first patient to play video games, browse the internet, post on social media, and move a cursor on his laptop, simply by thinking about it. Hopefully, one day Musk will figure out a way to hook up the human mind to a dot matrix printer and I can get some pictures. When all is said and done, however, paper photographs will eventually fade, crumble, and turn to dust. Pictures in your mind, on the other hand, will be there until you lose it.
There are not many pictures of my childhood floating around, other than an elementary school picture here and there. I guess I was destined to be anonymous, and I’ve done a pretty good job of it. I always loved the graffiti on railroad cars. I generally walked to school on the railroad track. It was a mile to school on the track and two miles by road, so I was familiar with the Southern Railroad’s early morning and late afternoon schedule. The only scary part was a long trestle over Red Creek which had nothing but rails and cross ties with big gaps in between and a long drop underneath. If you got caught on the trestle when a train came along, you were a goner. As a 7-year-old, I also held the world’s record for walking the longest distance on a single rail without falling off.
This was back before so many box and tanker cars were rolling canvasses, murals of social protest in motion, but even in the early 1950’s cars began to roll through decorated with skulls, swastikas, and very often, the patron saint of Mexico, Our Lady of Guadeloupe. I loved to speculate about their meaning. Some were just illiterate scrawling, but I knew that many were very powerful statements. As I grew older, I learned how pictures often become symbols, representing much more than what I saw: a fifty-year marriage anniversary; a college graduation; the birth of a child; the aftermath of a devastating storm. It’s also very true in art: two fighters on a Grecian urn, King Arthur pulling Excalibur from the stone, Sisyphus rolling his boulder up the hill for eternity.
I also noticed such pictures when I went into the Navy. When a ship comes into port and pulls alongside a pier, you often see images painted on the side facing the water. The public can’t see them; the lettering is in many languages and often scatological in nature. As time passed and I traveled around the world, I noticed other public pictures. I have crawled around the catacombs of Rome and seen the symbols of early Christianity, the cross and the fish, painted on the rock walls. I was in Cuba before Castro, and I remember seeing posters celebrating the “revolutionary worker” on the walls separating the U.S. Navy Base from Guantanamo City proper. Although my Spanish was elementary, I could make out “Yankee go home!” and the association of the United States with the corrupt regime of Fulgencio Batista. I was later in Greece during the so-called “Revolt of the Colonels” (1967) when the elected government of Georgois Papandreou was violently overthrown. It seemed like every lamp post in downtown Thessalonica was draped with a picture of a “rising phoenix bird,” the symbol of the military junta.
I’ve often thought how usually benign pictures and symbols are sometimes co-opted for malevolent purposes: the crusader cross, carried triumphantly before “virtuous” knights destroying “infidel” cities on the way to free Jerusalem; the swastika, originally used as a Hindu symbol of good luck; the white camellia as the symbol of the Knights of the White Camellia, the most violent branch of the Klu Klux Klan; the Star of David used to label and persecute Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, etc.
I have a new book coming out before Christmas, a collection of 50 of my latest PineBeltNews columns that I’m calling “Sea Bag Stories.” I’ve selected columns with my favorite motifs of foreign travel, loneliness, life at sea, faraway places, ennui, and did I mention loneliness? As many times as I’ve carried my sea bag down a pier on my shoulder, you’d think that I’d have an applicable photograph somewhere. Not at chance. I had to ask a member of my Sunday School class, Bobby Walters, to paint my book cover picture as I imagined myself 70 years ago: showing a certain “joie de vivre” with an attitude. He’s the well-known “Henri Matisse of Hattiesburg,” who recently had a one-man exhibition at William Carey University, but he didn’t have much to work with. By the way - you want a picture of the small chapel, “Chapelle du Rosaire” (Chapel of the Rosary), that Matisse painted in the mountain town of Vence on the French Riviera? Got it – in my mind.
When I hear classical music, I think of when I rode a donkey to the top of a steep mountain on the Spanish island of Majorca to see the last piano of the famous Polish composer, Frederic Chopin. The maestro was long gone, but, in my mind, I pictured him bent over the piano as his music echoed softly throughout the ancient church.
When I read mythology, I picture my visit to the reputed home of the Oracle of Delphi, half a day’s ride outside of Athens, Greece. Delphi was an ancient religious sanctuary dedicated to the Greek god, Apollo. It was said to be the center of the world. According to Greek myth, Zeus, the father of the gods, sent out two eagles, one to the east and the other to the west, to find the navel of the world. The eagles met at the future site of Delphi. The Oracle, or seer, sat behind a curtain and would prophesy on both private matters and affairs of state. The priests in charge of the site became very rich and powerful, even inciting civil war among the Greeks. Although the oracle’s place of prophecy turned out to be just a hole in the ground, I did manage to have a few profound, even philosophical thoughts. On the other hand, they may have been induced by errant diesel fumes from the nearby highway. Incidentally, historians believe that the oracle, always a woman in a trance-like state, prophesied under the influence of hydrocarbon gasses escaping from the ground.
When I picture “art” in my mind, I think of the excavated ruins of Pompeii, visited while my ships were in Naples, Italy. If you go, however, I must warn you. There are two tours available when you get there – the regular one, and the X-rated one. If you take the latter and see the pictures the ancient Romans painted on the walls of their country villas, you can understand why Mount Vesuvius blew its top in A.D. 79 and buried the whole place under 20 feet of lava.
Another “art” picture comes to mind when I think of the Louvre in Paris. The first time I visited this famous museum, founded by King Francis I in 1546, I was disappointed to see that the Mona Lisa is so small. It’s only 1 foot, 9 inches by 2 feet, 6 inches. I thought something so famous would be a lot bigger – about Beverly drive-in size. As far as that goes, the docent said, confidentially, that it might not even be the real Mona Lisa that Leonardo da Vinci painted in 1503. It was famously stolen in 1911 and not returned until 1913, and some art historians say that the painting currently on display is a clever fake. In case you wonder, “Louvre” in French is thought to have originally meant “female wolves,” because wolves once lived in the area. A couple of weeks ago, I saw President Biden standing out in front of the modern but controversial glass pyramid entrance to the Louvre, and it reminded me of an important tip for tourists. The waiting lines to get into the Louvre are so long that it’s worth it to pay the 25 or 30 extra euros to hire a licensed, professional guide who can legally hustle you to the head of the line as well as give you an excellent tour.
I wish I had a paper picture of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onassis on the Isle of Capri in the Mediterranean as she and her entourage tied up the only funicular (ski lift) up the side of Mt. Solaro in 1968. I know that “money talks and everything else walks,” but that was ridiculous. You should have heard the murmurs in the crowd as we stood and waited for her “posse” to get off the lift and go back down to Onassis’ yacht which was floating in the harbor.
My wife recently had a new clasp put on the gold “baht” chain I bought her in Bangkok, Thailand, back in the mid-1980’s. A “baht” is the official Thai currency, and it also refers the amount of gold in the chain. I bought the chain in a shop just down the street from the so-called “Golden Buddha,” a statue that everyone thought was masonry until 1955 when, accidently, a corner of it was chipped off to reveal pure gold underneath. I can picture the sitting Buddha in my mind today. I didn’t pay all that much for the baht chain so long ago, but when I picked it up with the new clasp last week, I asked the jewelry store to throw it on their scale and tell me the current worth. They estimated $2,250. I thought about going home and telling my wife to lock it up and that she could only wear it on her birthday.
Finally, I wish I had a picture of my face the night I thought I was going to be arrested by the Naval Investigative Service (NIS) while one of my ships was in Tel Aviv, Israel. One of my collateral duties was that of “Tours Officer.” It was my job to find, schedule, and coordinate interesting tours ashore for the crew when we visited foreign ports. We were in Tel Aviv, the largest city in Israel, and I had arranged some very popular overnight tours to Jerusalem. I think I had also added Bethlehem, the opportunity to get baptized in the Jordan River, and some other “perks.”
I probably had at least $3,000 in cash in my stateroom safe that I was going to pay the civilian tour operator ashore at my first opportunity. One night, however, right after chow, there’s a knock on my door and there’s two American guys, looking like the Men in Black, wearing Ray- Bans, and with bulges in their coats. They were obviously “packing.” They curtly announce that they are from the NIS and that they want to audit my tour receipts. I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong, but it was a sobering moment. Come to find out, there were several American ships in port, including an aircraft carrier, and someone from the American Embassy had been taking kickbacks to steer visiting tour coordinators, like me, to this one crooked Israeli tour operator. Luckily, I was totally in the dark and could account for every penny.
When he was a kid, my brother used to say, “You don’t know how you look until you get your picture took.” Oddly enough, he was more camera shy that I was, and I only have one picture to remember him by. I guess it’s just as well that one’s “worldview” can’t be photographed and held against you. Nobody knows what you are thinking. In my case, pictures of my mind would show that, sometimes at night, when it’s quiet and dark, and I remember the past, I wish I was young and crazy again.
Light a candle for me.
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Benny Hornsby of Oak Grove is a retired U.S. Navy captain. Visit his website, bennyhornsby.com, or email him: villefranche60@yahoo.com.
