A Picture Perfect Vacation
It is true that a picture captures a thousand words, but I recently discovered that many of my family snapshots are lying cheats. They’re not telling just any lies, either. I am talking about the kind of tales that would make Pinocchio’s nose reach from Giapetto’s Italian puppet shop to the Golden Gate, and then claim it only went as far as the Brooklyn Bridge.
The problem, I suppose, is that we are a family of posers. It is our unspoken mantra that candid photo taking is for the paparazzi who, thank God, have no interest in the likes of us civilized civilians. This fact, coupled with the reality that we rarely remember to charge the battery on the video camera, means that our image is only captured when we want it to be—when we’re showered, shined and have a three-second warning to turn our frown upside down for the sake of future memories.
In no time during our family history has the three-second warning been more important than during last week’s summer vacation. Sure, we have endured tougher times, but never when we were supposed to be frolicking in the sun with our extended family. Frankly, the experience can best be compared to a heat index, which explains in weather-speak why hot feels even hotter than the thermostat’s reading. The fact that our misadventures happened while we were on vacation just made our 100 degrees of sucky feel 5 degrees suckier.
The trouble started at 6:40 a.m. on the first full day of our trip when my husband tapped me on the shoulder to say that my brother, sister-in-law and their two children had spent the night turning our shared beach house rental into a vomitorium. This meant, of course, that our first day would be anything but a day at the beach as we looked to the Yellow Pages for a local urgent care clinic. Though my sister-in-law and nieces seemed to have a textbook case of a nasty flu, my brother required blood tests and IV fluids to rehydrate. The rest of us lived in fear that the evil spores were contagious and did our best to support those who were green, weak and whiny from a safe distance.
Nevertheless, as I look through the pictures now that we are all healthy and back at home, I see smiling faces with nary a sign of our true concerns: “Please don’t exhale your toxic fumes on me as we pose around the dinner table and you choke down your saltine crackers while I savor my barbecued chicken.”
By day three of the trip, when most of the misery had subsided, the six healthiest of us spent the day at Disneyland. In addition to being just plain hot outside, we had the added pleasure of having our credit card declined by our bank because the ticket prices were so high for a party of six that it triggered an early fraud alert that took us 30 minutes to resolve.
Inside, the lines were long and the sun continued to blaze. As my parents and I found a shady spot to rest while my husband and the girls spent one hour in line for the Space Mountain ride, I did a quick mental survey of the people around me and started to giggle. Considering that we were in “the happiest place on earth,” why was no one smiling? After all, mine didn’t count because I was only laughing at the irony that everyone else looked so miserable.
My pictures from Disneyland do not tell this story. In fact, if I could Photoshop out all of the sweat, I could probably sell them to the theme park’s marketing department as testimony to their claims. There’s certainly no proof within the pictures that just before we said “cheese,” I performed a perfect Darth Vader voice threatening an early departure if the girls didn’t stop bickering.
By the next afternoon, believe it or not, I received a call on my cell phone from a kind neighbor at home who tracked me down to let me know that our water main had broken and water was pouring down our driveway while the meter spun around like a pinwheel on a Chicago pier.
After processing the damage and making calls to remedy it, we took the girls out for a Balboa Bar frozen treat and we crossed the ferry to Newport Beach. By now it will be no surprise that our stress-induced scowls are nowhere to be seen in the pictures from that day. Though, to be perfectly honest, it’s only because my husband did not join in our attempts at fun, spending the day, instead, pacing around between calls to the plumber and wondering how we would pay for the repair.
As I organize the pictures of our faked vacation, I’m getting a little nervous that our acting skills might be good enough for Hollywood… which means we might have to embrace those candid shots of the paparazzi after all.