Travel Tripod

In the photo, it looks like I’m standing in front of a white wall. From the lousy shot the woman took of me, you wouldn’t know I’m standing in front of the Washington Monument. She cut off the top of one of our nation’s proudest symbols, rendering it unidentifiable, insignificant.

I made a vacation-altering decision on the spot: “Buy a tripod.”

Tripods are often thought as the sole domain of professional photographers. I may not publish my photos or get paid for them, but they are not of rank amateur quality either. I have studied the manual of my Nikon SLR and know how to use its settings. I’ve also read articles online and in specialty print magazines about photo composition and working with different light.

Now wherever I go, my $16 collapsible tripod goes with me.

Even if the light is bad day or I look an awful wreck, the point of my photos is not to make me out to be a model, but to tell the story of my experience at that given moment. My travel tripod helps me to tell my story through my own eyes.

Summer Internship

Summer internships were rough back in my day.

In 1987, there was no such thing as “corporate casual,” not even on a Friday. Despite 100 degree temperatures and 100% humidity, I was obliged to trudge through the sweltering streets of New York City wearing: heels, opaque pantyhose, a cream-colored silk blouse (with collared bow) and a navy blue suit made of a poly-light wool blend. 

(Today, I see college interns wearing khakis and polo shirts. And the girls wearing light bouncy skirts with open-toed shoes and get this: no pantyhose!)

But back then, I was in no position to complain about the obvious disconnect between rigid dress codes and record-setting heat waves. I was a 17-year-old English major with mediocre grades and no practical experience––yet I had somehow managed to land a highly coveted internship in the New York offices of Paramount Pictures.

Since I had been assigned to the corporate communications department, I expected writing assignments. Instead, I was instructed to serve as a precursor to “Google.” That’s right; my internship required me to be a search engine.

Each morning a messenger delivered a string-bundled stack of newspapers to my desk. All of the New York dailies were in the stack, as well as the big papers from select East Coast cities and London.

My job was to comb through each newspaper looking for any article that mentioned a current Paramount Pictures film. (One of them was “Beverly Hills Cop 2,” starring Eddie Murphy.)

I underlined the “product mention” and carefully clipped the article. After I had gone through all the papers, I arranged the clipped articles on the photocopy machine and produce stapled, collated booklets (which I then distributed to the inboxes of senior executives for their review).

For an entire summer, I did this sole function day in, day out. I arrived sopping wet in perspiration-soaked clothes, endured the chill of the hyper air conditioning system and would then go out at lunchtime just to warm myself up and dry off the clothes I was wearing.

At the copy machine, I grumbled to myself that I wasn’t “learning anything.” And on many levels, this is true. I didn’t click with any of my superiors, so I never saw the big picture of our work or was given other, more meaty assignments.

Yet, by the end of the summer, that internship had instilled a love of reading the newspaper in me.

From combing through articles, I learned that journalism was another form of storytelling and this insight gave me something to consider on my own career path as a writer. Moreover, I had acquired the awesome skill of reading quickly and efficiently while incongruously, enhancing my level of comprehension.

The second thing I learned is that it sucks working in an office and wearing a monkey suit on a hot summer day. It took me another 15 years of playing by someone else’s rules, but I eventually said “To Hell With That” and I now wear shorts, a tank top and flip flops sitting at my own desk on my own time.

So, internships do have their value after all.

Today I Taught a Teacher

Seated at a dinner party, the woman on my right wasn’t particularly chatty. That didn’t bother me one bit because the guests across from me and on my left had social skills up the wazoo. We entertained each other with hilarious stories and madcap anecdotes. It was a conversationalist’s dream come true.

But after a plate of food and a few glasses of wine, the people pleaser in me pointed out that at the very least, I should make a few polite observations and general comments about the evening to the woman on my right. So I gestured to the table’s floral centerpiece and told her that the wildflowers in the vase were plucked from the mountainside. I knew this because I had seen them on my morning hike.

“How did you get to the top?” she asked.

I thought I was a comic genius in replying, “I walked.” But she pressed me with more questions like where did I walk and how long did it take.

That was when I realized that she knew nothing about hiking.

Careful not to insult her intelligence or come across as an overbearing know-it-all, I laid out the most rudimentary tenets for any beginning hiker: bring water and stay on trail. She hung on my every word as if I was the sole mountaineer of Everest. A part of me almost wanted to offer to be her guide!

My more gregarious dinner partners called away my attention and the evening fully progressed. As I was leaving, the woman approached me and thanked me for the information. “I'm going to do this. I’m going to the hike the mountain.” I was buzzed and encouraged her adventure.

Outside someone came up to me and said, “I saw you were talking with so-and-so,” referring to the budding hiker. It turned out that the woman with the long brown hair was a relatively famous yoga teacher (famous in the yoga community, that is). They wondered if she was giving me tips, imparting wisdom unto me.

“We just talked about nature,” I said.