An Accidental Picture

This picture was taken with a real camera, not a phone, probably twenty-five years ago. I think it was in Turkey, though possibly Croatia, where we visited three years later. It’s my husband, Paul, and I having lunch at an outside cafe while on vacation. Incidentally, visiting Croatia was also an ‘accident,’ unplanned until visiting Venice, when it occurred to us as a side trip.

Sitting at a local cafe in another country is among my most favorite things, just absorbing the ambiance. Yes, so much walking is needed to really take in local sights, that sitting for an occasional break provides one more way to truly experience a country.

So, why is this picture an accident? When we stopped here for lunch, we asked a passerby to take a picture of us with our camera. You can see him, with a white shirt and tie, in the reflection of the window behind us. As he took our picture, another person unexpectedly stepped into the frame and became part of the picture. Our impromptu photographer immediately took another one, so that we had a similar photo without the third person entering. If this had been more recent, I would have immediately deleted this picture when I reviewed the pictures that evening. However, because it was taken with a camera, back when pictures needed to be developed to be seen, it was printed, along with all of the others.

As Paul and I reviewed the pictures, this stood out as one we both especially loved, partly because it was so unplanned and partly because of Paul’s reaction to it. Paul noticed that the man about to pass us was a workman, wearing pants that were paint-splattered. However, he was also wearing a nice sports jacket and a cap resembling his own. Paul really appreciated this, that this worker had an obvious self-regard that appeared to be representative of the culture here. An enlarged copy adorns Paul’s office wall, next to another with me at the helm of a sailboat while crossing the Atlantic Ocean.

Paul is wearing a leather vest, which he enjoys to this day, that he had bought in the Grand Bazaar, the enormous open market in Istanbul. I’m wearing a denim shirt that I received when I’d recently changed departments at Price Waterhouse, to the Work Life Balance group. It was within that department that I managed the national work-from-home program, when telecommuting first became possible. (See another blog post Telecommuting.)

We spent about two weeks in Turkey, flying first to Istanbul, spending a few days, then driving down along the Aegean coast through idyllic villages and through the city of Izmir, en route to Marmaris, where we liaised with friends, Michael and Susan, with whom we’d sailed the Atlantic from Newport to the islands of the Azores. That’s another story for another day, needing more space and attention than this blog has to give.

This is only one picture, but it holds multiple memories, each wonderful.

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